ISSUE 82, SOME BOOKS, Part 1: Paul Fehribach Midwestern Food
Midwestern Foodby Paul Fehribach
The Midwest has long been the neglected region of American cookery. It is no longer. Paul Fehribach’s Midwestern Food maps the “unknown country” with a chef’s sensitivity to local and ethnic foodways, both its country cooking—the most Eurocentric in America—and its city mélange of global cultures. From German Rye Pretzels to Ojibway Manoomin, from cornbelt cornbread to Skyline Chili, the landmark dishes appear—140 in all. Yet Fehribach does more than instruct cooks—he tells the stories—the migrations, adaptations, and creations that make the Midwestern table meaningful. Doing so, he brings the story of American Food closer to completion.
Midwestern Food challenged my default procedure for understanding a region’s cookery. My usual method for constructing regional food histories is to base things on grains, vegetables, and fruits grown there. The ingredients build the story. But the Midwest thrived because it was a matrix of transit. The river systems of the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri—the railroad lines binding Kansas City to Chicago and to the rest of the continent. The commodity grains grown in the Midwest—#2 Yellow Midwestern Dent Corn, Red Turkey Wheat, Rosen Rye—were shipped everywhere. They made up everyone’s bread, corn syrup, whiskey rye. Local produce was national produce. Conversely, the same transit systems brought everything to them. Oysters in Cincinnati—you bet—also pelagic fish hauled in water storage boats from the Gulf of Mexico up the Missippi and Ohio.
I talk about the transit of food items. Fehribach talks about the transit of peoples. Even the Native inhabitants of the region were mobile—most often not by choice. Waves of immigration colored the offerings of restaurants and groceries in the cities and towns. Germans, Swedes, Poles, African-Americans of the Great Migration from the South, Latinos, and global refugees from the Middle East and South Asia. Fehribach does well with the crazy quilt character of Midwestern city cuisines. My six years’ residence in Chicago’s Southside confirms his sense of things. I never ate a deep dish pizza when I lived there from 1974-1980, but I lunched at the Berghoff, had Jamaican jerked chicken in a tavern near Wrigley Field, prized my visits to several great Italian groceries, haunted the inexpensive restaurants of West Side’s Greek Town, danced the polka at the Baby Doll Lounge, and feasted on ribs and soul food sides at Ribs-n-Bibs near my apartment in Hyde Park. On subsequent visits I spent time in the tiendas on the North Side, and had the best Vietnamese Meal I experienced in North America.
Fehribach’s prefatory meditations on dishes in his book are appretiative, respectful, and inquisitive. He has done his leg work, talking with community elders, respected cooks, and multi-generational offspring of a number of Midwestern enclaves. Chef cleaves to the classics: “Warm German Potato Salad” rather than some 2023 tarted up concoction. Read Deal Jewish Latkes. Rye Pretzels (the one item I had never sampled that has shot to the top of my MUST HAVE list). We learn which towns lay claim to which dishes: Racine is Kringle Town. Or which towns vie to be the place or origination for a regional classic. Oshkosh or Marshfield Wisconsin for Deep Fried Cheese Curds?
What does one seek in a book that survey’s a regional cuisine? Midwestern Food provides most of what one craves: stories about the connection of dishes to the lives of people, intelligibly written recipes, breadth of coverage, variety of food types, occasional audacious claims, a few mysteries and questions that enlist readers’ help. Are there things to criticize? Well—I don’t think I would have begun the book with a chapter on pickles and preserves—primarily because most if not all the entries reproduce classic pickles and preserves from other regions—Chow Chow, Sauerkraut, Watermelon Rinde Pickles, Quince Honey, Rhubarb Marmelade. What in its place? Maybe a chapter on soups? Or on meals? Midwestern Breakfasts in the country are heroic things. And the cult of mormig cereal—didn’t it begin in Battle Creek, Michigan?
Still—you will want this book if American food interests you.