The cuisine of the American Midwest draws its culinary roots most significantly from the cuisines of Central, Northern and Eastern Europe, and Indigenous cuisine of the Americas, and is influenced by regionally and locally grown foodstuffs and cultural diversity."Michigan/Great Lakes Region." Community Based Food and Farming. Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at Michigan State University . Accessed July 2011.
Everyday Midwestern home cooking generally showcases simple and hearty dishes that make use of the abundance of locally grown foods. It has been described as "no-frills homestead and farm food, exemplifying what is called typical American cuisine". Some Midwesterners bake their own bread and pies and preserve food by canning and freezing it.
Background
Sometimes called "the breadbasket of America", the Midwest serves as a center for grain production, particularly wheat, corn, and soybeans.
Beef and pork processing have long been important Midwestern industries. Chicago and Kansas City served as stockyards and processing centers of the beef trade and Cincinnati, nicknamed "Porkopolis", was once the largest pork-producing city in the world. Iowa is the current center of pork production in the U.S.
Everyday Midwestern home cooking generally showcases simple and hearty dishes that make use of locally grown foods. The traditions of canning and freezing summer foods are still practiced in modern times. It's not unheard of for pies and bread to be baked at home.
History
Ohio was one of the first Midwestern regions settled, mostly by farmers from the Thirteen Colonies, in 1788. Maize was the staple food, eaten at every meal. Ohio was abundant in fish, game, and wild fruits. The settlers learned techniques of making venison jerky from Native Americans. They grew pumpkins, beans, potatoes, and corn, and raised hogs. Apples, wheat, and oats were introduced later.
Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns began to settle the Midwest in the late 18th century, introducing rich, butter-laden cakes and cookies.The Oxford Companion of American Food and Drink In addition to making cheese and butter, German and Swiss dairy farmers raised milk-fed veal and produced a type of white beer called weisse bier. Germans brought dishes like Hassenpfeffer, sauerbraten, Spätzle, Maultasche, Schnitzel, and pumpernickel bread. Lutefisk and other types of pickled and smoked fish were introduced by Scandinavians.
In the 19th century, as the frontier advanced westward, recipes had to be adapted based on the availability of ingredients. Danish frikadeller and aebleskivers were served with locally grown chokecherry or blueberry syrup. Custard-style puddings similar to figgy pudding were made with native wild persimmons. A typical Midwestern breakfast might have included meat, eggs, potatoes, fruit preserves, and pie or doughnuts. At harvest time, families ate mostly home-produced foods.
More settlers began to arrive in the rural Midwest after the Erie Canal was completed in the 1820s. Rural and urban foodways began to diverge as cash-strapped immigrants became dependent on packaged foods.
The expansion of railroads in the 1870s and 1880s allowed fresh citrus fruits to be shipped to the Midwest. At the turn of the century, cruise ships operating along the Great Lakes offered varied dining selections. Seasonal fruits, sirloin steak, and lamb kidney saute with mushrooms were some of the breakfast offerings available in 1913.
Beginning in the 1930s, fine dining was offered on railroad cars. Some of the dishes found on the menu were cashew chicken, baked filet of Lake Superior whitefish au gratin and the ambiguous dessert called "floating island".
Ethnic influences
Some European foodways have, by wide acceptance, become part of the local cuisine to a degree that they have shed most cultural associations with specific immigrant groups.
A Wurst mart, sometimes spelled Wurstmart or Wurst Markt, is a variation on a fish fry found predominantly in German-American communities. Wurst marts are usually held by churches as fundraising events, where people will pay for a buffet of sausages and other side dishes. Common side dishes include mashed potatoes, gravy, and sauerkraut. Wurst Mart comes from the German word , meaning . Wurst marts are found mostly in small rural German-American communities in the Midwest, particularly around St. Louis.
Urban centers
Chicago
The local cuisine of Chicago has been shaped by its Greek, Jewish, and Italian communities. Jewish immigrant communities of Eastern European origin ate oatmeal cereal called krupnik, made with milk only when it was available. Workers carried packed lunches of bagels, knish, and herring to work. Today, restaurants in Chicago's Greektown serve typical dishes like gyros and cheese saganaki.
Throughout the city there are many variations on classic sandwiches like the Chicago-style hot dog or club sandwiches served on bagels or other artisan breads like sourdough or brioche with complex spreads like aioli and piri piri sauce. The iconic Italian beef sandwich, made with slow-cooked tough cuts of beef, originated during the Great Depression.
Italian-American cuisine continued to flourish in Chicago as American forces returned from World War II with a taste for Italian foods. Pepper- and onion-topped Italian pork sausage sandwiches became widely available, and can still be found at festivals, fairs, and ballparks today. Thin-crust pizza arrived in Chicago with Italian immigrants as early as 1909; according to some, the iconic Chicago deep-dish pizza dates to 1943 when it first appeared on Pizzeria Uno menus. Italians are also known for Chicken Vesuvio, bone-in chicken sauteed with oregano and garlic in white wine sauce and finished in the oven with potatoes.
Chicago's cuisine has also seen notable contributions from its Latin American communities. Steamed tamales made from cornmeal filled with seasoned ground beef have been available in Chicago since the 19th century. Puerto Ricans introduced the skirt steak sandwich jibarito. Now also available with chicken, roast pork, ham, shrimp, and even the vegetarian option tofu, the is distinguished from other sandwiches by substituting green plantains for bread.
Chicago's food processing industry is historically significant. Following the Civil War, Chicago made use of railway networks to establish distribution networks, making fresh beef widely available. For the first time American consumers without access to local livestock could purchase fresh beef. In 1903, James L. Kraft founded a wholesale cheese distribution business in Chicago which became Kraft Foods. Miracle Whip was introduced in 1933 at an industry event. The American Licorice Company founded in Chicago in 1914 makes Red Vines and Super Ropes. Brach's company in Chicago started making candy corn in the 1920s. The Dove Bar was invented in Chicago. Cracker Jack was founded by a German immigrant who in 1871 started selling molasses-coated, steam-popped corn out of a candy shop in Chicago's South Side. Chicago meat packer Gustavus F. Swift is credited with commercializing shipping fresh meat in refrigerated railroad cars. By 1892 the number of refrigerated railroad cars in use exceeded 100,000. Vienna Beef became a major producer of hot dogs and by the early 2000s was one of the major suppliers for hot dog carts. Some other Chicago meatpackers are Armour, Oscar Mayer, Hygrade and Swift.
Cincinnati
The Queen City is known for its namesake Cincinnati chili, a Greek-inspired meat sauce (ground beef seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, bay leaf, cumin, and ground chilis), served over spaghetti or hot dogs. Unlike chili con carne, Cincinnati-style chili is almost never eaten by itself and is instead consumed in "ways" or on cheese coneys, which are a regional variation on a chili dog.
The city has a strong German heritage and a variety of German-oriented restaurants and menu items can be found in the area. Goetta, a meat-and-grain sausage or mush made from pork and oats, is unique to the Greater Cincinnati area and "every bit as much a Queen City icon" as Cincinnati chili. It is similar to the traditional porridge-like German peasant food stippgrutze but incorporates a higher proportion of meat-to-grain and is thicker, forming a sliceable loaf. Slices are typically fried like sausage patties and served for breakfast. More than a million pounds of goetta are served in the Cincinnati area per year.
In addition, Cincinnati's Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, an annual food and music celebration held each September, is the second-largest in the world. Taste of Cincinnati, the longest running culinary arts festival in the United States, is held each year on Memorial Day weekend. In 2014, local chefs and food writers organized the inaugural Cincinnati Food & Wine Classic, which drew chefs and artisan food producers from the region.
The area was once a national center for pork processing and is often nicknamed Porkopolis, with many references to that heritage in menu-item names and food-event names; pigs are a "well-loved symbol of the city."
Columbus
The Columbus, Ohio area is the home and birthplace of many well-known fast-food chains, especially those known for hamburgers. Wendy's opened its first store in Columbus in 1969, and is now headquartered in nearby Dublin. America's oldest hamburger chain, White Castle, is based there.
Besides burgers, Columbus is noted for the German Village, a neighborhood south of downtown where German cuisine such as sausages and kuchen are served.
In recent years, local restaurants focused on organic, seasonal, and locally or regionally sourced food have become more prevalent, especially in the Short North area, between downtown and the Ohio State University campus. Numerous Somali restaurants are also found in the city, particularly around Cleveland Avenue.
Columbus is also the birthplace of the Marzetti Italian Restaurant, opened in 1896. Owner Teresa Marzetti is credited with creation of the beef-and-pasta casserole named after her brother-in-law, Johnny Marzetti. The restaurant's popular salad dressings became the foundation for the T. Marzetti Company, an international specialty foods manufacturer and distributor, headquartered in Columbus.
Cleveland Cleveland's many immigrant groups and heavily blue-collar demographic have long played an important role in defining the area's cuisine. Ethnically, Italian foods as well as several Eastern European cuisines, particularly those of Poland and Hungary, have become gastronomical staples in the Greater Cleveland area.
Prominent examples of these include cavatelli, rigatoni, pizza, Chicken paprikash, stuffed cabbage, pierogi, and kielbasa all of which are widely popular in and around the city.
Local specialties, such as the pork-based dish City Chicken and the Polish Boy (a loaded sausage sandwich native to Cleveland), are dishes definitive of a cuisine that is based on hearty, inexpensive fare. Commercially, Hector Boiardi (aka Chef Boyardee) started his business in Cleveland's Little Italy.
In Italian bakeries around the Cleveland area, a variation of the cassata cake is widely popular. This local version, commonly called the "Cleveland-style cassata", differs from the cassata siciliana in that it is made with layers of sponge cake, custard, and strawberries, then frosted with whipped cream. The cake is sold at bakeries throughout the Midwest region, including the Cleveland-area Corbo's, Presti's, and LaPuma Bakery (credited with creating the cake back in the 1920s).
Detroit
Detroit specialties include Coney Island hot dogs, found at hundreds of unaffiliated "Coney Island" restaurants. Not to be confused with a chili dog, a coney is served with a ground beef sauce, chopped onions, and mustard.