American Midwest Culinary and Cultural History

Swedish Pancakes for Breakfast?

Presented by B. Marcus L. Cederström
Folklorist


Why do we eat the things we eat? And how do those things change due to migration?

This talk explores what the foods we eat can tell us about immigration, identity, and Nordic-American life in the Upper Midwest, by focusing on coffee, lutefisk, and, of course, Swedish pancakes.

Marcus Cederström earned his B.A. from the University of Oregon in Sports, Business, History, and Scandinavian Studies, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It is there that he works in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic Studies as the community curator of Nordic-American folklore for the ‘Sustaining Scandinavian Folk Arts in the Upper Midwest’ project.

Recorded via Zoom on March 4, 2021

www.CulinaryHistorians.org

Chicago Foodways Roundtable - Highland Park Historical Society

Swedish Pancakes for Breakfast?

The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City

Robert Lemon PhD
Author, Geographer, Documentary Film Maker

Icons of Mexican cultural identity and America’s melting pot ideal, taco trucks have transformed cityscapes from coast to coast. The taco truck radiates Mexican culture within non-Mexican spaces with a presence—sometimes desired, sometimes resented—that turns a public street corner into a bustling business.

Drawing on interviews with taco truck workers and his own skills as a geographer, Robert Lemon illuminates new truths about foodways, community, and the unexpected places where ethnicity, class, and culture meet. Lemon focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio, to show how the arrival of taco trucks challenge preconceived ideas of urban planning even as cities use them to reinvent whole neighborhoods. As Lemon charts the relationships between food practices and city spaces, he uncovers the many ways residents and politicians alike contest, celebrate, and influence not only where your favorite truck parks, but what’s on the menu.

Robert Lemon is an urban and social researcher in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas Austin, and an urban and social researcher and documentary filmmaker. His films include Transfusión.

Recorded via Zoom on June 2, 2021

www,CulinaryHistorians.org

Chicago Foodways Roundtable

The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City

Beijing Duck and the Pandemic: The story of Chicago’s iconic Sun Wah BBQ
with Kelly Cheng, General Manager

Times certainly have been challenging for our nation’s restaurants during these pandemic times. Come join us as Kelly Cheng tells her savory story of her family’s iconic restaurant and its place in Chicago’s culinary history. Kelly will also regale us with the story of Chinese barbecue and the secret of preparing Beijing duck. And she will share how she and her family and their business have struggled through and survived the pandemic.

A bit of history: Sun Wah BBQ started its journey in New York’s Chinatown where it was crammed into a storefront hardly wider than nine lengths of roast ducks. Its founder, China-born Eric Cheng, continually refined his skills as a Hong Kong style barbecue chef. While Sun Wah did well, it was still “a crowded fish yearning for larger oceans,” Kelly Cheng said. Eric and wife Lynda took their four toddlers to Chicago and made their dream grow.

In the spring of 1987, they opened Sun Wah BBQ in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, a few doors away from the Argyle Redline Station. Over the next two decades, Sun Wah BBQ accumulated a legion of enthusiastic diners and the restaurant helped transform the neighborhood. The children became fixtures on weekends and holidays, learning the fundamentals that would help them ultimately expand their parents’ heart and soul.

In 2018, they received America’s Classics award from the James Beard Foundation.

By September 2008, three of the four children (Kelly, Michael, and Laura) grasped the baton to lead Sun Wah BBQ into its next phase.

Each had been developing skills that would feed into the continued success of the restaurant. Kelly earned her MBA from DePaul University, Michael followed his father’s teachings on mastering Chinese BBQ, and Laura completed her degree from the Kendall College of Culinary Arts.

In 2009, Sun Wah moved around the corner to 5039 N Broadway, an historic building, four times the size of their Argyle restaurant. The Chengs were now able to showcase Chinese barbecue to the max, with their star dish, Beijing Duck, winning national acclaim. Kelly will give us a look at how this delicacy is made and carved at tableside. Quite a show indeed!

(Warning: Attending this Zoom program may cause intense hunger pangs.)

Recorded via Zoom on October 20, 2021

www.CulinaryHistorians.com

Culinary Historians of Chicago

Beijing Duck and the Pandemic: The story of Chicago’s iconic Sun Wah BBQ

Turning a Bunch of Heartland Food Stories into an Anthology

Presented by Peggy Wolff
With readings by Carol Mighton Haddix and Melanie Benjamin

Peggy Wolff, editor of Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: Midwestern Writers on Food (U. of Nebraska Press), talks about the inspiration for a post-WWII regional food anthology, the genre called food/lit, some anecdotes about working with writers, and how she put together essays from notable authors who could see food beyond the printed recipe on the page. 

Fried Walleye contributors include New York Times best-selling authors, Guggenheim fellows, TV comedy writers, National Book Award finalists, top food journalists, restaurateurs and chefs. With readings by Carol Mighton Haddix, author and journalist and former Chicago Tribune food editor, and Melanie Benjamin, New York Times best-selling author of historical fiction.

There will be tastes of some foods from the book.

Peggy Wolff is a Chicago-based writer, a frequent contributor to the food section of the Chicago Tribune and the food editor of the online Realize magazine. See http://www.peggywolffwriter.com.

Recorded on November 2, 2013 at Kendall College School for Culinary Arts.

www.CulinaryHistorians of Chicago

Culinary Memoir & Personal Essays

Illinois Has a Lot to Wine About: A Toast and Tasting to Our State’s Great History

Presented by
Clara Orban, PhD, author and sommelier


Illinois has a thriving wine industry although this may come as a surprise to many residents of Illinois and beyond. Clara Orban, author of Illinois Wines and Wineries: the Essential Guide (SIU Press, 2014) will present the history of Illinois wines, with some little-known facts about an industry that dates back more than 150 years. She will also compare Illinois to other Midwest States and then see how the Illinois wine industry compares to that of the West Coast powerhouses. She will give an overview of the different wine regions of Illinois, the current status of grape varieties, and look into the future of Illinois wine. After the presentation, attendees will have the chance to sample some Illinois wines and purchase a copy of the book which Dr. Orban will be glad to sign.

Clara Orban, PhD, is Professor of French and Italian at DePaul and chair of the Department of Modern Languages. Her publications range from seventeenth-century linguistics to the pedagogy of upper-division Italian conversation courses. She has written several books including: Wine Lessons: Ten Questions to Guide Your Appreciation of Wine (second edition 2012) and Illinois Wine and Wineries: the Essential Guide (2014). Part of her teaching load includes Geography 350: the World of Wine. Dr. Orban became a certified sommelier in 2007.

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Recorded live at Kendall College School of Culinary Arts on December 13, 2014

Illinois Has A Lot To Wine About

Chicago began as a frontier town on the edge of white settlement and as the product of removal of culturally rich and diverse indigenous populations. The town grew into a place of speculation with the planned building of the Illinois and Michigan canal, a boomtown, and finally a mature city of immigrants from both overseas and elsewhere in the US. In this environment, cultures mixed, first at the taverns around Wolf Point, where the forks of the Chicago River join, and later at the jazz and other clubs along the “Stroll” in the black belt, and in the storefront ethnic restaurants of today.

Chicago was the place where the transcontinental railroads from the West and the “trunk” roads from the East met. Many downtown restaurants catered specifically to passengers transferring from train to train between one of the five major downtown railroad stations. This also led to “destination” restaurants, where Hollywood stars and their onlookers would dine during overnight layovers between trains.  At the same time, Chicago became the candy capital of the US and a leading city for national conventions, catering to the many participants looking for a great steak and atmosphere. Beyond hosting conventions and commerce, Chicagoans also simply needed to eat—safely and relatively cheaply.

Chicago grew amazingly fast, becoming the second largest city in the US in 1890. Chicago itself and its immediate surrounding area was also the site of agriculture, both producing food for the city and for shipment elsewhere. Within the city, industrial food manufacturers prospered, highlighted by the meat processors at the Chicago stockyards, but also including candy makers such as Brach’s and Curtiss, and companies such as Kraft Foods. At the same time, large markets for local consumption emerged.

The food biography of Chicago is a story of not just culture, economics, and innovation, but also a history of regulation and regulators, as they protected Chicago’s food supply and built Chicago into a city where people not only come to eat, but where locals rely on the availability of safe food and water. With vivid details and stories of local restaurants and food, Block and Rosing reveal Chicago to be one of the foremost eating destinations in the country.

Recorded live at Kendall College on January 23, 2016.

This program is hosted by the Chicago Foodways Roundtable. 

http://culinaryhistorians.org/chicago-food-biography/

Chicago: A Food Biography

Presented by Bruce Kraig, PhD
Author, President Emeritus, Culinary Historians of Chicago
CELEBRATING OUR 25TH YEAR—

On New Year’s Day 1836, President Andrew Jackson received a momentous culinary gift, a humongous cheese, 2 feet thick, 11 feet in circumference, and weighing 1400 pounds. It was created in the summer of 1835 by Col. Thomas S. Meacham, a prosperous dairy farmer with lands near Lake Ontario north of Syracuse New York. The mammoth cheese was sent by boat along the Erie Canal on to Washington. It was a public sensation. James Fenimore Cooper wrote of the same area of New York only two generations before as a wilderness that only gradually was being transformed.

The world of food sure started changing fast in America.
The small ears of corn grown on the land by Native Americans have become row upon row of cornflakes on supermarket shelves. The immense seas of grass and the animals that they supported are now colossal farms with enormous yields of soybeans, corn and wheat that feed the world.
But how did this happen and why? From the first Native Americans to modern industrial farmers, people have shaped the North American continent and its climate based on the foods they wanted and the crops and animals they raised.

Please join as one of America’s most distinguished culinary historians, Dr. Bruce Kraig, looks at the food people have dished up from their kitchens or eaten in public dining places throughout American history. Dr. Kraig will also give us some savory insight on the creation of modern American food systems. Copies of Dr. Kraig’s latest book, A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America, will be offered at the discounted price of $30, including tax. (Full retail is $39.)

Biography: Bruce Kraig, PhD, was an original founder in 1993, and president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago for more than 20 years. He is professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University, Chicago. Trained in history and archaeology, his specialty is the history of food in America and around the world. He has published hundreds of articles in journals and newspapers, has spoken and appeared in media internationally, and has written and hosted a series of award-winning PBS television shows about food and culture globally. Among his books are: The Cuisines of Hidden Mexico; Hot Dog: A Global Histor; Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America; Street Food Around the World (with Colleen Sen); The Chicago Food Encyclopedia (with Colleen Sen and Carol Haddix); and his latest,  A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America. He also edits the “Heartland Foodways” series for the University of Illinois Press.

http://culinaryhistorians.org/american-food-history-wouldnt-believe/

American Food has a History You Wouldn't Believe!

Presented by Coeditors Carol Haddix and Colleen Sen,
and contributors Judy Hevrdejs and Scott Warner

Everyone knows that Chicago is the world’s greatest food city – and we now have a book that tells you why: The Chicago Food Encyclopedia. Edited by Carol Mighton Haddix, Bruce Kraig and Colleen Taylor Sen, this 300- page volume is a free-ranging portrait of a culinary paradise, with nearly 300 entries written by 70 of the city’s leading academics, journalists, and industry experts. 

Coeditors Carol Haddix and Colleen Sen will describe the genesis of this project, and some of the pitfalls and surprises they encountered along the way. To give a flavor of its contents, three of the contributors will talk about their entries: John Carruthers on Lunch Counters, Judy Hevrdejs on Czechs and Bohemians, and Scott Warner on Chef Louis Szathmary and his famed restaurant, The Bakery.

Copies of the Encyclopedia will be available for purchase and signing by the editors, with proceeds used to fund the Culinary Historians of Chicago. And, there will be a tasting of some iconic Chicago foods.

Bios:

Carol Mighton Haddix is the former food editor of the Chicago Tribune. She is the editor of many Chicago Tribune Cookbooks as well as Chicago Cooks: 25 Years of Food History with Menus, Recipes, and Tips from Les Dames d’Escoffier.

Judy Hevrdejs retired as a food and features writer at the Chicago Tribune.

Colleen Taylor Sen’s books include Curry: A Global History; Feasts and Fasts: The History of Food in India; Turmeric: the Wonder Spice; and (with Bruce Kraig) Street Food: Everything You Need to Know About Open-Air Stands, Cars, and Food Trucks Across the Globe.

Scott J. Warner, a freelance food writer, is president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago and a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
……..
Bruce Kraig, PhD, coeditor (not present), is President Emeritus of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, and is Professor Emeritus of history and the humanities at Roosevelt University. His books include Mexican-American Plain Cooking, The Cuisines of Hidden Mexico, Hot Dog: A Global History, Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America, and A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America.

Recorded at Kendall College on October 28, 2017.

http://www.culinaryhistorians.org/chicago-food-encyclopedia-debuts

Chicago Food Encyclopedia

By Russell Lewis
Executive Vice President and Chief Historian, Chicago History Museum
Founding Member, Culinary Historians of Chicago

Do join us as the Chicago History Museum’s Russell Lewis gives us a slaughtering presentation on Chicago’s legendary Union Stockyards and its impact on the city and the nation. (Think: “Hog butcher to the world.”) And how did the stockyards help put the sizzle in Chicago’s steakhouse reputation?

Here’s what Russell has to say:

“To watch an animal from the pen to the tin is an extraordinary experience. You see it killed; it falls; a conveyor carries it away. It is flayed while you wait…. Death is so swift, the evidence of tragedy so soon gone, that one feels no shock that flesh loses its character. Cattle are being handled like brass, so swiftly that life becomes merely a raw material. That is Chicago.” British journalist Walter Lionel George’s description of Chicago’s Union Stockyards, written in 1920, captures the essence of the city’s meatpacking industry—it was highly organized and brutally efficient, and it was synonymous with Chicago’s identity. Indeed, more than any other business, meatpacking reflected how industrialization became rooted in Chicago in the nineteenth century and transformed the city and the nation.

Situated at the center of the United States and linked to every corner of the continent by a vast rail and water network, Chicago was an ideal place for industry to grow. But location alone does not fully explain the formation of America’s quintessential industrial city. Three additional factors spurred Chicago industries, particularly meatpacking: innovation, scale, and new markets. Meatpackers developed a disassembly line that altered traditional labor and made the processing of meat a highly efficient operation. The Union Stockyards was itself a powerful innovation (competing companies sharing holding pens and rail facilities was unprecedented), and it also allowed operations to take place on an enormous scale never imagined. And lastly, meatpackers, particularly Gustavus Swift, realized it was not enough for industrialists to modernize their business ventures, they also had to create new markets for their products.

The fame of the Union Stockyards as a massive modern industrial enterprise spread, attracting tourist from around the world who yearned to see this harbinger of the future. Families carrying picnic lunches, convention delegates, school children, and honeymooners all came to see what was billed as one of the wonders of the world. Amid pig squeals and bellowing cattle, animal pens as far as one could see, buildings awash in blood, and a distinct smell of life and death, tourist were not disappointed, and the Union Stock Yards became etched into their memory. 
* * *
Biography: As Executive Vice President and Chief Historian of the Chicago History Museum, Russell Lewis is responsible for the day-to-day implementation of the museum’s mission to creatively explore and showcase Chicago’s history and culture, and to preserve, manage, build, and make accessible to the public, the Chicago History Museum’s collection of more than 22 million documents and objects. He has been a member of the Chicago History Museum’s staff since 1982. He is also a founding member of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, and for many years graciously hosted our programs at his museum.

Mr. Lewis has a BA in historical archeology from the University of Florida and an MA in American culture from the University of Michigan.

Recorded at Weiss Memorial Hospital on September 15, 2018.

Chicago's Meaty History: From Our Stockyards to Our Steakhouses

Pigs were the first food animals to be domesticated, so they have a history with humans that goes back more than 12,000 years. Antiquity is only one of the reasons, however, that pork is the most commonly eaten meat in the world. This odd, contradictory animal offers a great range of advantages when it comes to feeding large populations, especially urban populations, though historically, it has also offered several disadvantages. Pork was virtually the only meat available to most of Europe during the Middle Ages, and if you ask for meat in China, you will get pork. From the invention of blood sausage by the Assyrians to creation of such American icons as barbecue and hot dogs, pig has remained on the menu for all but a few notable people groups. Celebrated at fairs and looked to for medical research, pigs offer culinary delight and potential promise but also create some challenges. So the topic of pigs is as far-ranging as the pigs themselves.

Cynthia Clampitt is a writer, speaker, and food historian. She has pursued her love of culture, history, and food in thirty-seven countries on six continents (so far) but has in recent years increasingly focused her studies on the American Midwest. Clampitt has been writing and talking about food history for more than twenty years. She is the author of Pigs, Pork, and Heartland Hogs: From Wild Boar to Baconfest (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland (University of Illinois Press, 2015). In addition, she contributed major articles to the Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia and Street Food Around the World: An Encyclopedia of Food and Culture and shorter articles to the Encyclopedia of Chicago Food and Drink. Clampitt is a member of the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance, Culinary Historians of Chicago, the Society of Women Geographers, the Agricultural History Society, the Association of Food Journalists, the Midwestern History Association, and the history section of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. 

This program is hosted by the Greater Midwest Foodways. 

The Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance is dedicated to celebrating, exploring and preserving the American Midwest’s unique food traditions and their cultural contexts.

Recorded at Bethany Retirement Community on November 10, 2018.

http://www.GreaterMidwestFoodways.com

Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance

From Wild Boar to Baconfest: Pigs in History and Popular Culture

Presented by Catherine Lambrecht
Vice-President, Culinary Historians of Chicago

Come join us as the Culinary Historians’ own Catherine Lambrecht dishes on her upcoming book, Family Heirloom Recipes, an Illinois Bicentennial Project..
The book is based on Cathy’s work through the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance, and was also inspired by her own family’s heirloom recipes.

Since 2009, Greater Midwest Foodways has sponsored and judged Family Heirloom Recipes contests in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Cathy has compiled many of the winning recipes from 1950 or earlier, along with their histories, in what many are already considering a landmark book.

“If nothing else, should this book inspire you to document a family favorite recipe to share with loved ones, then we have accomplished our mission,” Cathy says.

Catherine Lambrecht, vice president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, is the very definition of over-the-top busy. Cathy runs our sister organization, Chicago Foodways Roundtable, and also heads the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance on the Food and Culture of the American Midwest. In addition, she is a program director with the Highland Park Historical Society and Illinois Mycological Association.

Recorded at Weiss Memorial Hospital on December 8, 2018.

https://culinaryhistorians.org/family-heirloom-recipes-illinois-state-fair-illinois-bicentennial-project/

Family Heirloom Recipes from the Illinois State Fair, An Illinois Bicentennial Project

Community Cookbooks: Inspiring Twain Restaurant's Midwestern Menu

Join husband and wife team Chef Tim Graham and Sommelier Rebekah Graham’s of Twain (2445 N. Milwaukee Ave.). Logan Square’s new Midwestern-inspired restaurant, as they discuss community cookbooks with Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance. Influenced by the couple’s extensive collection of spiral-bound women’s club cookbooks from the 1940s through the present as well as Tim’s central Missouri upbringing, Twain marks passage from the past to the present with family recipes passed down through generations focusing on delicious, approachable dishes with modern twists and fun presentations. Named after prolific author Samuel Clemens’ famous pen name, Mark Twain.

Married in 2010, Tim and Rebekah Graham are industry veterans. Tim’s eyes were first opened to his passion for the restaurant industry at Les Bourgouis, a small French istro attached to a winery located on the bluffs of the Missouri River near his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. He worked at Tru, where in five years he climbed the ranks to executive chef, earning a 2008 StarChefs Rising Stars Award. He then left Tru to work with renowned Chef J. Joho at Brasserie Jo and Paris Club before moving on to open Travelle in The Langham Chicago.

Rebekah, originally from Salt Lake City, moved to New York in her twenties where she took her first mesmerizing sip of wine. Relocating to Chicago in 1999, she continued her journey through the beverage landscape, focusing on beer, before travelling to wine country in the United States and Europe and working at a winery in Tuscany, Italy. She also became interested in spirits as well, working in Taos, New Mexico where she designed her first cocktail program. Upon returning to Chicago in 2006 she worked at the legendary Pump Room before joining One Off Hospitality and opening Publican in 2008. Eventually going on to manage the highly lauded beer and wine program at the restaurant, she left in 2016 to open Twain with Tim, which is their first restaurant that they are operating together.

This program is hosted by the Greater Midwest Foodways. 

The Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance is dedicated to celebrating, exploring and preserving the American Midwest’s unique food traditions and their cultural contexts.

Recorded at Bethany Retirement Community on January 12, 2019.

Image by Michael Gebert of Fooditor.

https://culinaryhistorians.org/community-cookbooks-inspiring-twain-restaurants-midwestern-menu/

Community Cookbooks: Inspiring Twain Restaurant's Midwestern Menu

Currying Interest in Indian Cuisine From its Arrival in America to its Rise in Chicago

Presented by Colleen Sen, PhD
Author, Culinary Historian

“The history of Indian food in America has been largely neglected, even though it is much older than Chinese American cuisine,” says Colleen Sen, PhD, one of our nation’s foremost authorities on South Asian food.

Please join us as Colleen regales us with a buffet of flavorful facts about one of the world’s greatest cuisines, and its long-simmering impact on our nation and our city.

A few tidbits:
· The first Indian cooks arrived a decade after the founding of the Jamestown Colony in 1607 as servants to British “Nawabs” who came to America after making their fortunes.
· Curry recipes were featured in most 19th century cookbooks.
· America’s very first ‘bad boy’ celebrity chef was an Indian, Ranjit Smile, who hit the New York culinary scene in 1899 and made front page headlines with his exotic dishes and his frequent run-ins with the law.
· Faced with tightening immigration laws in the early 1900s, Indian farm workers in the Sacramento Valley married Mexican women and created a hybrid Indian-Mexican cuisine, including “Hindu pizza.”
· In Chicago, the first Indian restaurant was the House of India (1963), followed by Bengal Lancers (1969) –15 years before the first restaurant on Devon Avenue..
· For a finale, Colleen will dish on Chicago’s current South Asian food scene.

BIOGRAPHY: Colleen Taylor Sen is a Chicago-based author and culinary historian focusing on the food of the Indian Subcontinent. She has written many articles and seven books, including Food Culture in India; Curry: A Global History; Menus; Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (named one of the best food books of the year by Vogue and The Smithsonian Magazine); and, most recently, The Chicago Food Encyclopedia (with Carol Haddix and Bruce Kraig).

Currying Interest in Indian Cuisine From its Arrival in America to its Rise in Chicago

Culinary Historians of Chicago presents:

Midwestern Food—What is it?

Presented by Abra Berens, chef, farmer, author

It is true that we are a region known for steak houses, pizzas and pot roast, but what exactly is Midwestern food? Could it also be a dinner at Alinea? Is it the German chocolate cake made by Stephanie Hart’s Brown Sugar Bakery on 75th St? Is it the melting pot that gives us Cornish pasties from Michigan’s upper peninsula, as well as the roast duck from Chef Kelly Cheng Sun Wah?

Abra Berens, author of Ruffage: a practical guide to vegetables, believes Midwestern food is more than meat and potatoes. As a former farmer and current chef at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, MI, she knows that the Midwest has deep and diverse food traditions.

Join Abra as she argues that the Midwest has deep-rooted food traditions while simultaneously being open to an ever growing and evolving food scene. Copies of her just-published book, Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables will be available for purchase and signing. 

BIOGRAPHY: Abra Berens started cooking at the storied Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, MI. She then went on to train in the garden-focused kitchen at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Ireland. In 2009 she co-founded Bare Knuckle Farm in Northport, MI, where she farmed and cooked for 8 years. She then left for Chicago to open the café at Local Foods. In 2017, she returned to Michigan to join the team at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, where she combines her love of farms and restaurants to create one-of-a-kind dinners celebrating the best of Southwest Michigan’s diverse agriculture. 

Recorded on June 8, 2019 at Weiss Memorial Hospital.

http://www.culinaryHistorians.org

Midwestern Food - What is it?

Well of the Sea

Presented by Margaret Carney, PhD

Margaret Carney, director and curator of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design will present Well of the Sea, all about the acclaimed seafood restaurant located in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman between 1948-1972. Why was dining there so memorable? Culinary historians may be captivated by the menu — bouillabaisse, rijstafel of seafood, cafe disable, and flaming rum punch.; Mid-Century Modern art connoisseurs have fixated on the abstract undersea murals designed by Richard Koppe; while dinnerware collectors cannot own too many place settings of the sturdy Shenango China restaurant quality dishes with abstract fish motifs. Cuisine, recipes, restaurant reviews, menus, distinct dinnerware, architecture and interior design will all be presented. Why did Bogey and Bacall attend the funeral of the hotelier and restaurateur who made his idea of the Well of the Sea a reality? Were the ultraviolet lights, which enhanced the sensation of dining under water, really beneficial to one’s health? It’s your best opportunity to get the true flavor of the Well of the Sea and then wish you could go back in time and dine there.

Margaret Carney is a ceramic historian with Ph.D. and Master’s Degree in Asian art history, and a B.A. in anthropology/archaeology. Dr. Carney is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Switzerland. Grants received include Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art and the Renwick Gallery, as well as from the Tile Heritage Foundation and the Cumming Ceramic Research Foundation.

She served as the founding director of the Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred, in Alfred, New York. She has curated 50 exhibitions, presented over 100 public lectures, and authored 80 books, catalogues, and journal articles. She has taught ceramic world history, as well as other courses, at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, the Ohio State University, and elsewhere. She was director and curator of the Blair Museum of Lithophanes in Toledo, Ohio, for nine years, writing the first book on the topic in 180 years. She currently serves as founding director and curator of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design (IMoDD), Ann Arbor, Michicago, which was established in 2012.

Recorded on June 9, 2019 at Bethany Retirement Community.

www.GreaterMidwestFoodways.com

Well of the Sea

Apples in the Midwestern Imagination

Presented Lucy Long, PhD

Like many Americans, Midwesterners have fond memories of apples: family apple orchards are commonplace; cider mills used to be and are returning; apple butter is a traditional way of preserving the fruit; apple pies and pastries frequent many homemade and commercial tables; Johnny Appleseed is embraced as a hometown hero; and festivals frequently celebrate the fruit. These memories make the fruit a significant part of personal histories and local food cultures.

Are apples special in the Midwest? They are thought of as a national, even patriotic, though somewhat unexciting, fruit, and other regions are actually better known as producers of the fruit. This talk looks at how apples have contributed to a sense of place in the Midwest and to a collective memory that characterizes this region.

Lucy M. Long directs the non-profit Center for Food and Culture (www.foodandculture.org) and teaches adjunct in American studies, ethnic studies, folklore, nutrition, and tourism at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. With a PhD in Folklore and Folklife (University of Pennsylvania), she has been involved in humanities-based research on food as a medium for creating meaning, identity, and community since the 1980s. She has published extensively on food topics, including Culinary Tourism (2004), Regional American Food Culture (2009), The Food and Folklore Reader  ( 2015), Ethnic American Food Today: A Cultural Encyclopedia (2015, 2016), Honey: A Global History (2017) and Comfort Food Meals and Meanings (2017) and has produced numerous documentaries and community programs on a variety of food-related subjects and issues.

Recorded at Bethany Retirement Community on April 6, 2019.

www.GreaterMidwestFoodways.com

Greater Midwest Foodways Allianse

Apples in the Midwestern Imagination

During World War II, some farmers in Marengo, Illinois negotiated with a large food corporation and federal agencies to make local farm fields into restricted, prison-like spaces. When the Curtiss Candy Company brought Japanese-Americans from the Tule Lake Internment Camp in California to cultivate and pick potatoes in 1943, the Marengo community struggled with the federal government and the candy company to eliminate the outsiders’ presence.

Weighing civic commitments, religious principles, and environmental necessities against racial fears, Marengo ultimately allowed Japanese-Americans to remain and work under surveillance and restriction. Later in 1943, they were joined by German prisoners of war who were formally incarcerated under military guard at nearby Camp Grant. Marengo’s wartime food system remained carceral, or prison-like, for the war’s duration.

Prison farms in a war for freedom may seem ironic, but agricultural communities across the country shared Marengo’s experience. In the Midwest, fields, packing sheds, and canneries received and used several unfree labor groups, including Japanese-Americans, German and Italian prisoners of war. While using federal programs, each receiving community negotiated their own forms of unfreedom on the land. Local and national newspapers, federal archives and published oral history interviews provided the basis for this presentation.

Samuel Klee is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Saint Louis University. His dissertation, “Caging Cultivators: Carceral Labor Landscapes in American Agriculture during World War II,” examines farms that functioned like prisons for Japanese-Americans and European prisoners of war in the American Midwest. His teaching and research interests range from environmental world history and carceral state studies to education policy.

Presented on April 5, 2020 via Zoom

www.CulinaryHistorians.org

Chicago Foodways Roundtable and Highland Park Historical Society

When Potato Fields were Prisons

Sweet Greeks: First Generation Immigrant Confectioners in the Heartland
Presented by Ann Flesor Beck

Gus Flesor came to the United States from Greece in 1901. His journey led him to Tuscola, Illinois, where he learned the confectioner's trade and opened a business that still stands on Main Street. Sweet Greeks sets the story of Gus Flesor's life as an immigrant in a small town within the larger history of Greek migration to the Midwest.

Ann re-creates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business.

Ann Flesor Beck is a third-generation Greek confectioner and independent scholar. With her sister, she co-owns and operates Flesor's Candy Kitchen in Tuscola, Illinois.

https://www.flesorskitchen.com/index.html

CulinaryHistorians.com

Recorded on November 10, 2020 via Zoom.

Sweet Greeks: First Generation Immigrant Confectioners in the Heartland

Gordon Sinclair, Live!

An interview with the Chicago culinary icon
conducted by award-winning food writer and publisher
Michael Gebert

The following information appeared in The Chicago Food Encyclopedia, University of Illinois Press, 2017, and was authored by Barbara Revsine.

Gordon Sinclair was working in public relations when a psychic predicted he would become a famous restaurateur. After working part-time as a maître d’ to see whether he liked it, he opened his flagship restaurant Gordon in 1976. While Sinclair’s forte was the front of the house, he was a keen judge of culinary talent. Every chef who ever worked for him, beginning with Norman Van Aken and including Michael Kornick, Michael Foley, Carrie Nahabedian, and Charlie Trotter, turned in a bravura performance. His restaurant raised the standard for Chicago dining and became a showcase of contemporary American cuisine.

Sinclair also was an urban pioneer. Choosing to open his first restaurant on the 500 block of North Clark Street when the area was littered with derelicts and seedy bars helped to jump-start the trend-setting neighborhood’s gentrification.

Gordon’s clientele was a worldly as they were food savvy. They smiled at the salacious artwork in the restrooms, appreciated the avant-garde option of ordering half portions of select dishes, cheered the groundbreaking ban on cell phones, and displayed an endless appetite for the restaurant’s flourless chocolate cake and artichoke fritters. He closed the restaurant and retired in 1999.

* * * *

Michael Gebert is one of Chicago’s leading food writers and food media professionals. He is editor and publisher of Fooditor, which won a Peter Lisagor Award for Best Independent Blog in 2019, and has written for the Chicago Reader, Chicago magazine, Plate, First We Feast, and other publications. As video producer for the Reader’s Key Ingredient chef challenge series, he won a James Beard Award in 2011 and has been nominated two other times for his video work. He is currently working on an oral history of Chicago restaurants for Agate Publishing.

Recorded via Zoom on January 13, 2021

www.CulinaryHistorians.org

Gordon Sinclair, Live!

Thoughts on the Origins of Pizzerias in America and Chicago

with Peter Regas
PizzaHistoryBook.com


In the past, the historical consensus was the first licensed pizzeria in America was opened in 1905 at 53 Spring St. in New York City by a young Italian immigrant named Gennaro Lombardi. However, in 2019 at the U.S. Pizza Museum in Chicago, Peter Regas challenged that consensus with a talk titled “Filippo Milone and the Forgotten Pizza Makers of New York City.”

Based on more than ten years of archival research, Regas makes the following claims. There’s no primary source evidence a then eighteen-year-old Gennaro Lombardi owned a pizzeria in 1905. Instead, sources show Lombardi briefly owned the 53 Spring St. pizzeria in 1908, re-purchased it from a relative in 1918, and continued to own it until his death in 1958. More significantly, when Lombardi bought the pizzeria in 1908 it had already been a pizzeria for several years. The now-famous pizzeria was probably established in 1898 by a previously forgotten but extremely significant pizza maker named Filippo Milone. It turns out, the Spring Street pizzeria was probably just one of at least six different New York City pizzerias established by Milone between the years 1894-1922. Born in Piano di Sorrento in 1862, Milone is one of several previously unknown New York City pizza makers of an earlier generation who decided to emigrate around the turn of the century from Italy’s Campania region. Which pizza maker of that earlier generation opened up the first pizzeria in America? Regas discovered Giovanni Albano, a former pizzeria owner from Naples, established the first currently verified pizzeria in 1894 at 59 ½ Mulberry St. in New York City. While there is evidence of earlier pizzerias the farther back in time one searches the more circumstantial the evidence becomes and the more one is forced to confront the distinction between a peddler, a bakery, and a dedicated pizzeria.

In the upcoming presentation, Regas will also be presenting evidence of the first known pizzerias in Chicago. Tom Granato’s Pizzeria Napolitana established in 1924 at 907 W. Taylor St will be discussed along with many never-before-published Granato pizzeria photos. Long forgotten Chicago pizzerias in the 1930s and early 1940s will also be presented. Questions naturally flow when the historical record is revealed. Was there anyone before Granato? When did pizza become popular in Chicago? How and why was Chicago’s pizza history different than New York’s? Why were the taverns so dominant in Chicago’s pizza history? And finally what’s the deal with the tavern cut?

Note, Regas will not be presenting his discoveries on the origins of Pizzeria Uno and Chicago deep-dish pizza in this talk. That subject is complicated enough to need a presentation dedicated exclusively to deep-dish pizza which is currently scheduled with the Chicago Foodways Roundtable for Thursday, May 13, 2021.

Recorded on February 11, 2021 via ZOOM.

CulinaryHistorians.com

Thoughts on the Origins of Pizzerias in America and Chicago

Culinary Historians of Chicago studies the history of food and drink in human cultures. Why we procure, prepare and serve the food we do has cultural, sociological, geographical, financial and political influences. We encourage participation from all walks of life: from academics to home cooks, chefs to grill masters, farmers to heirloom gardeners, food scientists to students. Our programs, and those of our sister organization Chicago Foodways Roundtable, are supported by research, fieldwork and scholarship, though geared to an informed popular audience. We welcome everyone to gather at our table to share food, drink and their life’s culinary experiences.

If you would like to contact us, please e-mail us at CulinaryHistorians@gmail.com

American Midwest Culinary and Cultural History

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