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BOOK REPORT

The book

Chef Paul Fehribach is known for having a Southern restaurant, Big Jones. But the truth is he grew up near the border—Jasper, Indiana, near Evansville, officially in the midwest but located across the Ohio river from Kentucky—and thus a place where Southern and Midwestern food cultures wind around each other like the two banks of the twisting river. Of course, one of these cultures is much more commercially appealing than the other—Southern food culture has lots of cachet, Midwestern food culture is a bit of a joke, made of Jell-O salads and casseroles. Fehribach’s new book, Midwestern Food: A Chef’s Guide to the Surprising History of a Great America Cuisine, With More Than 100 Tasty Recipes, coming out September 20 from University of Chicago Press, sets out to reclaim the food heritage of a region that grows much of the nation’s food and includes a wide array of cultures—and continues to evolve with immigration (this is surely the first book to include a recipe for homemade Jibaritos). If nothing else, he hopes to encourage you to pickle and bake like Grandma did. I spoke to Fehribach at Big Jones:

FOODITOR: First, let’s dig into the cliches about the Midwest versus what you’re trying to express that it really is.

PAUL FEHRIBACH: As with a lot of cliches, there’s a grain of truth to them. The meat and potatoes, the ranch dressing, the bland casseroles. But it’s a very diverse regional cuisine, and as we find out in the book, there’s a lot going on everywhere.

The grain of truth to those things is that the cuisine evolved. Along with industrialization, the Midwest was later to settle than the south and the east coast. And so you have immigrants coming over, primarily from from Central Europe at the time, Germany and later Poland, Dutch people, later Scandinavian, and settling in the cities. And this is when factory jobs were what you had. So you’re busy, a lot of times two people working. And you have industrial food happening at the same time, they’re putting food into cans, they’re getting really efficient at freezing vegetables, and all of that. And so it’s very natural that all of this rapid change for these immigrant groups results in things like [the Minnesota specialty] hot dish where a really busy family can open a can, open a box out of the freezer, boil some pasta, brown some ground beef, put it all in a casserole and put it in the oven and forget about it for an hour. And then you’ve got dinner.

Those were the sorts of things that we did because we were busy and, you know, we’re Midwesterners. I think that it might be that German and Scandinavian blood, nose to the grindstone, just getting shit done. Where New Yorkers and the East Coast like to talk about themselves a lot.

Yeah, no, I think there’s definitely kind of in the Midwestern personality, a don’t talk yourself up too high mentality. So what about midwestern food should people rediscover?

I’d like people to rediscover a geographically diverse Midwest that has a lot of diversity in its cuisine. I think again, because of the industrialization period, we find ground beef is important in every corner of the Midwest. But what’s done with it varies, if it’s something like Cincinnati chili or or Detroit’s Coneys, for instance, and all of the sausages that we have. And depending on where you go—you know, in Minnesota butcher shops do different things than they do in Cincinnati or St. Louis. Because you have a large population of people from Scandinavia, you also have a population of people from Germany up there, but that tends to be more from the Protestant north of Germany.

So you get things like mettwurst, as opposed to bratwurst. You see things like gritzelwurst, which I think Titus Ruscitti was posting about the other day, he was in Minnesota, and it’s sort of like goetta [a Cincinatti specialty of meat and oatmeal], basically the northern German version of [Louisiana] boudin. You find things like zwieback in Kansas, influenced by the Mennonites, and the bierocks out there as well. One thing that actually didn’t make it into the book, because the fried chicken chapter just got so long, is that I didn’t even discuss Barberton, Ohio and Barberton chicken [a specialty of one town near Akron]. So it’s a very diverse and dynamic regional cuisine.

Mentioning fried chicken brings up a good point. We all take it for granted that it’s southern, but it’s everywhere in the midwest—I grew up in Kansas, and there are no famous restaurants in Kansas, but the few that do exist, like the Brookville Hotel or Stroud’s in Kansas City, are all fried chicken places. And you make a compelling case for fried chicken really coming from Germany.

Fried chicken was another Catholic thing. I couldn’t find it in any of the cookbooks from the north of Germany, from low Germany. I grew up in this town, Jasper, and it’s a really closed, insular place. It’s never been welcoming to outsiders. Everybody in that town is from the same two towns in Baden. And yet we all grew up eating fried chicken, and so everything we’d heard about sort of the established narrative of fried chicken [originating in the South] in America never really made sense to me.

I thought, well, you know, maybe I’ll just figure out how to read some of these old German texts, figure out how to acquire them first, and it turns out that the Library of Congress is actually a really good resource, a lot of the books are literally online. The hardest part was learning what they called chickens. Because in German there’s at least a dozen different names for chicken depending on where and when you were. But so wherever the Germans went, is where you find fried chicken, and you don’t really find fried chicken anywhere in the United States before you find German people.

The interesting thing to me about Barberton chicken is that they put this kind of sweet and sour—relish? Dressing? Whatever you’d call it—on the chicken. And it struck me as being very like Jewish cooking. So is German cooking more Jewish than we know, or is Jewish cooking more German?

I think it resembles Amish cooking to a large extent too, the seven sweets and sours that they put on the table, but that’s actually a really good point. And I always thought that the fried chicken part of it at least, you know, Serbia [the ancestry of many of the Barberton chicken restaurants], that’s the old Austro-Hungarian empire. And you know, we have fried chicken going back at least to the 13th century in Vienna.

Well, let’s talk relishes for a minute. You start the book with a chapter urging people to get back to making their own relishes, which is the answer to “it’s all bland food”—well, it isn’t if you put a relish with some kick on it. And it’s a natural thing in a farming part of the world, to divert some of the growing season into things preserved with salt or vinegar.

That’s a really good point about the cuisine. When we started here at Big Jones, well, you cook Cajun food, and everybody comes in thinking that it’s going to be really spicy and punchy. And that’s what hot sauce is for. You go into a cafe in rural Louisiana, and get gumbo, it’s not spicy. You have your relishes, and you cook on the less-seasoned side, it gives everyone an opportunity to finish their own plate.

So what relishes do you think people should make?

People should make chili sauce—

Which is what?

It’s basically ketchup, but it has a little more of a spice profile to it. It might taste somewhere between ketchup and barbecue sauce. I think the only thing I ever knew it for was in some cocktail sauce recipes. But 100 years ago, it was ubiquitous. You’d see the supermarket advertisements for it, it’d be ketchup, chili sauce, mayonnaise, mustard. You eat it with meat. I mean the flavor profile again, it’s like ketchup, maybe a little bit more vinegary. And it might have horseradish in it but typically is like, a little bit of clove, a little bit of allspice maybe, maybe not some cinnamon, but definitely some ginger. So it’s just a little more interesting but even just for French fries, it’s more interesting than ketchup. I love ketchup but you know, change it up sometimes.

People need to be making piccalilli, they need to be making chow chow. Those are the big ones, I would say. Our whole pickling and preserving culture sort of devolved into just cucumbers on the shelf at the grocery store.

Another thing that you talk about, and this certainly matches up with how I grew up, is how much people in the midwest bake. My mother-in-law was not a great cook, but she had one coffee cake that was very good, out of a Junior League cookbook of course, and my wife makes it too. So tell me about baking culture in the midwest.

I think the midwest is easily the most fascinating and delicious baking region in the country. And it comes from that foundation of of both German and Scandinavian traditions, even from the Hungarian things and Serbian things that you can find in Ohio, and particularly Cleveland. But the Germans left the strong coffee cake traditions and St. Louis, you can go to the Missouri Baking Company and still find stuff that looks like it’s 1890 and all made by hand. Really, really good stuff. And then, you know, the kringles in Racine, and things like a Mexican wedding cookie—when it shows up in the southeast, it’s called Russian Tea Cake, because that’s what Betty Crocker calls it in “big blue” [cookbook].

There’s strong evidence, I might delve into this at some point, that the midwest was influencing southern baking culture, certainly more than southern baking culture was influencing the midwest. The south’s prodigious talent with cakes, it really begins with the Iglehart brothers in Evansville, Indiana with Swans Down cake flour. Because really cakes didn’t become a thing until you had baking powder and stoves with reliable heat. The midwest was already sending flour all over the country at that point.

No mention of pfeffernüsse? In my mom’s family that is the old family Christmas tradition, and everybody has their own way of making it—with milk, without…

I’m constantly becoming aware of things that I was cognizant of, that I was leaving out. When we got over the 90,000 words that I was contracted for, they didn’t really get push back, but once we got to 120 they’re like, Stop. So that’s why pfeffernüsse didn’t get in there. It’s why roast beef commercial [a Minnesota hot sandwich] didn’t get in there. I have a list of things that are likely if I do another, bigger book.

I think your fate is going to be people like me saying “I can’t believe you left out…”

I’m kind of looking forward to that. Maybe eventually I’ll start dreading it. I think the publisher was worried about having a package that was affordable for people. And sure, that’s good guidance from them. Because I’m a nerd, I would have made it 400 pages and cost 50 bucks, and we’d sell 500 copies.

One thing you do have is Amish Friendship Bread, which you include while admitting that it’s basically “fakelore,” that is, something that sounds like folklore or an old traditional recipe, but actually is a fairly recent invention, or for tourists, or whatever.

Back home [in Indiana] you see that all of the Amish restaurants are serving fried chicken. But Amish people don’t eat fried chicken. You see this in Pennsylvania also, where these restaurants that sort of started popping up in the 1900s would serve fried catfish for the the tourists coming up from New York, and they were selling what the city folk perceived as country cooking.

So Friendship Bread [a sweet sourdough loaf that comes with mythology about passing along the starter as a gift] has nothing to do with Amish culture, with daily life. It’s actually a fairly recent thing—I couldn’t find evidence of it before the mid-80s. So people just call something Amish when they want to pass it off as legitimately country. I don’t know how the Amish feel about that, but I imagine if they can make good money selling fried chicken to the plebes…

To the English, yeah. I like that you talk about how Mexican and Asian influences are going to be the next thing in midwestern food culture. I mean, they already kind of are in a world where salsa is our number two condiment.

Yeah, I had a long debate about whether to include salsa recipes or discussion about salsa in the book, and it’s like, it doesn’t really meet my arbitrary three-generation threshold. But yeah, I think those are going to be the next ones. I think African cuisine would be interesting. Obviously here in Chicago, you see a lot of Somali, Minnesota, you see a lot of Somali stuff coming up. If you go to Dearborn [Michigan], I ate at the Iraqi Kabob House and yeah, damn. But the danger is of course, that those things will live and die within their immigrant communities. I think Mexicans and Asians,  they get out and work in the restaurants, so maybe they’re more successful realizing their cuisines into the mainstream.

Let’s talk side dishes. You have a great line about “the french fries and austere side salads that cast a monotone over all our nation’s cooking.” I was thinking about that when I read about Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark opening their Ukrainian restaurant, we think of side dishes in Eastern European food as being stuff out of jars, but they’re really like any farming culture—they’re making meals out of the fresh stuff they grow. Italy gets all the credit for cooking like that, but they’re all doing it, or at least they were until industrialization reached them.

If you look in the old community cookbooks, we talked about how much midwesterners bake, and the pride they take in that. But those cookbooks also had a ton of vegetable recipes, until you get to the 1960s when it starts to dwindle. Even just with potatoes, there’s so many more things you can do with potatoes, but you know, there’s vegetables like rutabagas, roots, turnips, beets, all of these things. We start to lose a lot of our identity when we don’t have these things—like in my hometown, every restaurant has German fries, and you just don’t see them anywhere else. And they’re basically a certain treatment of home fries. But you see them in Dubois county, a little bit in Daviess County. And it’s a major touchstone of identity there. I mean, people talk about restaurant versus restaurant based on their German fries, it’s a major point in discussing the virtues of different restaurants.

Part of what I want people to take away from this book, is what Titus Ruscitti says—to eat like the locals eat. Find what’s unique in the place that you are. Go the couple of extra miles to to find that locally owned a cafe or that locally owned tavern that’s been there forever. Or you can find the chef-owned places that are trying to do the farm to table thing and put up a new spin on midwestern cuisine. But definitely patronize your local businesses and try to find out what’s unique where you are, rather than just giving up and hitting the Panera Bread right on the interchange. I can assure you there’s a much much better sandwich if you go just another mile or two.

As I studied Southern cuisine, and would go to these cities in the south for different events, I’d often wind up in a small town, looking for a good place to eat. And I started sort of envying this about the South, that it seemed like every town had like this cool little old cafe that had been doing the same thing for 60 years. That definitely had local flavor and a real local identity to whatever town it was in.

And then I started coming home, as my parents started getting older, and I was like, we actually have all these same things, I just took all of this stuff for granted. When I was growing up, I never thought Snaps Cafe was special or worthy of note, I never thought The Chicken Place in Ireland, there was anything remarkable about it. And when I started traveling back there, I’m like, holy shit. And so I wanted to start documenting that stuff. What I really wanted to do was dispel a lot of the myths about, say, sugar cream pie. Or fried chicken for that matter. I wanted to start a serious conversation about Midwestern cuisine. Establish it as a legitimate and beautiful regional cuisine as much as Southern cuisine, and California cuisine, and Mexican cuisine and Chinese cuisine.