Illinois: The Key Ingredient of Modern America's Food
Bruce Kraig
Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society
Although the geographical center of the United States is 500 miles to the west, Illinois is the axis of the nation, the hub and vortex of all the wonderful and eccentric hullabaloo that comprises our sweet land of liberty --Clyde Brion Davis (1)
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, poses the following question in several of his celebrated works: how do we know who we are?
The question is not about metaphysics, religious belief, or even the modern preoccupation with "self actualization." It's about identity. And identity is powerfully formed by one's native environment, that is, culture. The characters in Pamuk's novels are embedded in specific times and places. The author describes the small details of their everyday lives, the places where they grew up and now live -- the streets and neighborhoods, cafes and work places, what they eat -- so to say that our identities are tied to where we come from. And histories at every level, from personal and family to social and political, play crucial roles: everything in life is a result of ongoing change (2). Or, as Abraham Lincoln put it: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history."
Cultures, of course, have their own identities. Otherwise how would people distinguish themselves, as they did in pre-World War II Illinois just east and south of St. Louis, as "Germans," or "Old English?" How did they know who they were? Not just by language--for German was spoken at home and especially in churches in those days--but through food.
A sociological study of the region done in 1940-42 noted that beans, potatoes, and pork were the staples of almost all groups, but the use and preparation differed in the German and English groups. Germans clung to an "Old Country" tradition with many dishes unique to them: liverwurst, cottage cheese, many soups, rye bread, pickled vegetables, headcheese, and, the symbol of their differences, blood sausage. The English found this preparation disgusting, fit only for a group from which they remained separate. Food often has this effect on people: all of us can think of some repulsive dish common in another culture that causes us to see those who dine upon it with suspicion--or vice-versa (3).
A "Key Ingredients" display label says it plainly: "Food is central to culture. Culture is central to identity." Food is one of the best ways for us to approach Orhan Pamuk's question: how do we know who we are, and the corollary, who we were, because without knowing the latter, we cannot know the former.
"Key Ingredients" helps us discover something about our identities at all levels--national to local and family--through what we eat, how we get it, how we prepare and eat it, and all the rituals that surround these everyday activities. And, by seeing all these things through time, we see how much or how little we have changed--into ourselves, as we know ourselves.
"Key Ingredients" opens with an image of America the bountiful. It is bountiful, but as the displays of farm implements in many of our local museums show, only hard work made it so. The basic ways that human beings have obtained their food remain the same: gathering, planting and harvesting, animal rearing. Each of these methods has changed over time according to available technologies. The English settlers of New England or Virginia would hardly recognize our vast industrialized farms and the technology that works them. The farmers of the Illinois prairies who lived through most of the nineteenth century and who read such farm "improving" journals as The Prairie Farmer, certainly would have appreciated the wondrous machines of today's farms.
But what 19th-century farm families might not understand is a new way of getting food: inventing it. Think about one of the greatest all-American invented foods, Jell-O. Delicious though it may be, about the only natural thing in Jell-O is sugar, and even that can be replaced by artificial sweeteners. Yet, our early 19th-century ancestors would recognize modern jelled sweets as a descendant of their own gelatinized dishes. The phrase "Better Living Through Chemistry" means just that: traditional things made "better" (if convenience is better)...and a key part of our ideas of modern life.
An American national dish, Jell-O is an ingredient of what some might consider an American cuisine. Whether there is or isn't such a thing as an American cuisine is a matter of opinion, but there is no doubt that American food and identities have been traditionally regional and local. "Key Ingredients" gives us a snapshot of some of these regions and localities. Of all the regions, the Midwest is probably the most difficult to define in terms of foodways. As one authority suggests:
Despite the agricultural opulence of Midwestern agriculture, much of the region is industrial, which contributed to its early prosperity and to its growth by the many immigrants who supplied the labor for production. However you define the region, it's an area of good, hearty eating. Meat and potatoes. Meals of all-white food. More plain than fancy, given to substantial meat dishes, dumplings, home-baked breads, and pies. The land of casseroles and Jell-O salads. Much of this picture is stereotype, of course, especially in this time of global franchising [and considering significant ethnic communities]. In terms of traditional eating, however, there's enough truth to legitimate the image. In any case, regional foodways are not just a collection of recipes but also ideas about food, erroneous or not.(4)
Does this sound like so many of Illinois' communities? Consider the people who settled this large and diverse state. In the north and center, many settlers hailed from the east and were mainly of English, Scottish, Irish, Scotch-Irish descent, with a sprinkling from western Germany and Holland. The southern part of the state attracted settlers from the Carolinas and Virginia who came down the Ohio via Kentucky and through southern Indiana. Abraham Lincoln's family was among them. And, of course, people whose origins lay in various parts of Africa settled in smaller numbers. Later in the 19th century immigrants came in strength, straight from northern and western Europe, from England, Ireland, Scandinavia, and many from various parts of Germany. Much of Illinois' traditional food came from such groups. Germans, particularly, had a powerful influence.
Pork, for instance, was everywhere and prepared in many ways. Pigs came with Germans--pork and blood sausage were integral parts of their eating patterns. They also came with the southern migrants, the old Irish and Scotch-Irish folk who had long traditions of pork eating, if not a well-developed sausage culture. Milk and cheese were staples for Scandinavians, Germans, and the Dutch, and Illinois, like its neighbor to the north, has long been a producer of milk products. Joseph Kraft is one famous example. Sour, pickled foods were strongly Germanic, but cornbreads, corn dodgers, corn pones and many others came from the south. Of course, over time the traditions merged as families intermarried and changed old recipes.
This was only the beginning. America is surely the world's greatest immigrant society, and Illinois, its towns and cities, has always been a destination for settlers...and their foodways. In the late 19th and throughout the 20th century immigrants poured into the state bringing their foods with them. Italians, Poles, Russians, Greeks, Ashkenazi Jews, and Chinese arrived; much later Southeast Asians, Middle Easterners, and especially Mexicans and Central Americans appeared. All came, settled, and ate as they always had, or at least tried to maintain traditional preparations.
Ask citizens of Illinois towns and cities where they're from and they'll name a place--which for them has special meaning--and then their ethnic roots. The most wonderful things about the answers are the sense of place and heritage that people have and, second, how mixed people's ancestries are. The British Isles are often represented, with plenty of German, and then perhaps some French, Polish, Czech, Italian, African, Mexican, and many others. When the question is memory of family dishes, the answers are often traditional dishes eaten at home, at holiday times, at festivals, and they are often ethnic. Pasties in the northwestern part of the state, fish fries, homemade sausage, maybe enchiladas--the list is long. Marjel Roosevelt Beard, of Sparta, now 103 years old, says that he loves fish, catfish, preferably crispy-fried, because that's what he ate as a young boy fishing with his father. Food is memory and memory is culture.
Illinois is a grand stew of ethnicities, not confined to the state's cities. And the mixture has changed foodways over time. Festivals and public dining places provide the signs. The most apparent might be West Chicago, whose population was once Irish and German but is now about fifty-percent Hispanic, mainly Mexican. Shops and restaurants in town bear Spanish names. The dishes served in dining places, coming from one of the world's greatest cuisines, Mexican, have changed food traditions in West Chicago and the surrounding region. Immigrant groups that arrived earlier merged their cuisines with the ones already in place. Herrin, near Carbondale, was home to Italian immigrants, mainly from Lombardy in the north. Every year the town has an Italian Fest, though the food served there is really a new and now familiar cuisine, Italian-American. Sesser, not far from Herrin, is another example from small-town Illinois. Eastern Orthodox Russians and Bulgarians came to work the coal mines. At holiday time, Orthodox women congregants create special foods "from the old country" for holidays, not for everyday dining. Many Illinois towns have "German" festivals, often Oktober Fests, but though visitors from Munich might recognize the sausage and beer, not much else in these celebrations would seem familiar.
Barbecue is one of the best examples of ethnic mixing and change now incorporated into the hometown American diet. As you will see in "Key Ingredients", barbecue originated in the Caribbean, was brought to the continent by Spaniards, transformed by African-American cooks -- women, of course -- and then spread across to the west, where beef became the meat of choice. Barbecue, especially ribs, traveled north with African American immigrants from the South. Reportedly, the best barbecue places in southern Illinois are still operated by long-established African-American families, many of whom have ties to Tennessee, Memphis being the barbecued ribs capital of the world. Now barbecue has become a national ritual prepared on weekends in backyards by men regardless of ethnic origins. Though often toothsome, it's not much like the original.
Whatever the ethnic origin, and despite the demands of an ever-quickening pace of life, our ideas of a meal usually have to do with family. The tradition of sitting down to a large, heavy supper with one's family in the early evening remains in our collective memory. The holiday meal, especially Thanksgiving, home cooked and served forth to the family gathered around the dining room table, is the nostalgic symbol of a probably fading tradition.
If food is memory and is part of our identity, what are the lines of transmission? Ask home cooks where they learned their craft and many will say, "from my mother or grandmother." Here's an example: Maria Pettibone Spooner, who lived on Greenwood Avenue in Chicago at the turn of the Twentieth Century, kept a book of home recipes. The manuscript is in the Chicago Historical Society. The notebook is composed of handwritten recipes, some sent by friends and family members, and newspaper clippings containing recipes, and advice columns for women. In the book's center, amid the recipes, are two pages of doodles, small pictures, and alphabet letters. The legend reads, "Carrie Spooner, aged 11 6/3/04 daughter of F.E. Spooner." You can picture it now: Carrie, long hair down her back, wearing a frock with sash and bow on back, sitting in her mother's kitchen, in their good middle class home. Maybe she is helping, certainly learning. But her mind drifts to daydreaming on a warm day early in June of 1904. Would she have remembered that scene many years later, when her mother and that old life had passed? She might well have remembered the way her mother cooked and, who knows, might have even used some of the recipes.
Food memories are conveyed both orally and in writing, through the culture of family as well as that of community. Yet not all transmission occurred solely within these forums, as "Key Ingredients" shows. Cooking techniques and recipes can be taught in school--there was a time when elementary school girls learned something about cooking in home economics classes, while boys learned how not to cut off their digits in shop classes. Nowadays, there are television channels devoted to cooking, though rarely home-style. Package recipes, newspapers, magazines and word of mouth from friends and neighbors have been sources for home cooks since the Nineteenth century. They still are, though modern recipes differ greatly from their forebears: what women's magazine would dare print a recipe calling for lard these days? That would be akin to summoning up Satan.
Written materials are literally grist for the historian's research mill, and it is to varieties of printed and manuscript sources, among many others, that we look to reconstruct the past. In traditional families women cooked at home. Like Mrs. Spooner, they kept recipes. Some were written out in notebooks, some in card files, or they could be notes and comments made in the margins of printed cookbooks. Even if the recipes were printed, the changes and notations tell us about what each cook made, how, and perhaps why they personalized it, and thus something about what the family liked and what the cook liked to make. The same ideas translate to community or organizational cookbooks. There are thousands of them, and of the recipes in them perhaps 20 percent, more or less, are original. Many of these recipes come from printed cookbooks or newspaper articles, and a good number come from the back of the package, that is recipes developed by food manufacturers. Ever make Toll House cookies from the back of the chocolate chip package? Good recipe. It's not the provenance that matters, but why the contributor chose that recipe--they are usually among their favorites--and how they might have modified it. By carefully looking at these recipes, we catch a glimpse of women's thoughts and everyday livesÉ and more.
Each recipe in a book or manuscript is a piece of a larger historical story. That gets us to the second quote given at the top: Illinois as the axis (not of evil, we hope) and hub of the nation. Modern food -- by that I mean food production, processing, and transportation -- centers on Illinois. These are major reasons for Chicago's existence, and the source of growth for many of Illinois' towns and cities. The early Nineteenth century American settlers who arrived in the state did not come to be only subsistence farmers. Most knew what the marketplace was and intended to be entrepreneurs. Some would turn to business and trade, but most were farmers whose surpluses were destined for sale in local, regional, and urban markets.
Illinois' rich agricultural potential attracted settlers, but the transportation systems developed to carry the huge food surpluses, actually built the state. Early towns were set near the rivers, great and small (900 streams run though the state, not to mention the adjacent sea-sized lake). Produce flowed down the rivers, and with the introduction of steamboats, up them, too. Farms spread out from these small centers, some forming smaller local and regional centers of government and commerce. In early years, horse and cattle-drawn wagons lumbering along rough prairie roads carried produce to the centers. Cattle plodded along the same routes, early versions of the storied western cattle drive. It is said that in the 1830s the enterprising people of Rice, a small hamlet near Pinckneyville, drove flocks of turkeys by claw and foot seventy miles to the St. Louis market.
Canals were built and then came railroads. All the towns hosting "Key Ingredients" benefited and grew by rail. In 1900 Morrison was a station along the Central and Northwestern line; Macomb had the Chicago and Burlington and Quincy lines; three trunk lines passed through Mt. Vernon; Danville, a growing city, had five; and West Chicago was named so because of it's important rail link to the city to the east. Because each was a small-scale center and Illinois coal was abundant, raw materials for manufacturing could be brought in, processed, and sent out. Morrison produced refrigerators and stoves; Mt. Vernon also made stoves as well as railcars. At the turn of the 20th century, Danville hosted many factories and had six newspapers, three of them dailies. Macomb even had an interurban electric car line.
Food production, however, was the core of non-urban Illinois' prosperity. Cash crops superseded all others: corn, beans--eventually soybeans--and wheat. Hogs and cattle raised on the abundant corn were shipped off to the "Hog Butcher of the World." They still are. There, in the great processing centers, food was turned to into commodities and finished products for national distribution. That is to say, food was industrialized, manipulated, packaged, and marketed. It was the beginning of our modern foodways and Illinois stands at the center of it all.
Think about canned foods. Canning--in glass jars--was mainly a home task in the early Nineteenth century. By the Civil War a number of foods, meats especially, were packed in tin containers. As so often happens, war accelerated the growth of industry, canning one of them. With the invention of an automatic can soldering machine in 1891, the industry boomed. Though there were many smaller outfits, national brands produced by corporations such as Armour and Co., Campbell's, Heinz, Libby and others came to dominate the market. New self-serve supermarket chains -- Piggly Wiggly in 1919 Memphis the first--strengthened the national brands. Along with them came many a recipe. For instance, World War I era recipes from Armour told home cooks to make their casseroles with a can of cream of mushroom soup. Sound familiar?
Our modern foodways descend from these pioneers. And Illinois was the central place where these changes took place. Today most of what we buy is produced by a handful of multinational corporations--Phillip Morris, R.J. Reynolds among them--and sold through supermarkets. Many of our everyday foods are highly processed--faster and more convenient for busy homemakers. I need not say more. As our food became centralized, so did manufacturing. Where are the wonderful Vernois gas stoves of Mt. Vernon? Or those from Morrison? Gone to large plants, and increasingly offshore.
Nevertheless, Illinois agriculture is strong and the towns, which grew upon it, remain. So do their traditions. Even in the age of fast food outlets and mass-produced foods, the old ways are there. We see them in the community cookbooks, in community events--church and organizational suppers, at country fairs, at home, and even in the few really local restaurants that remain and flourish. If there is one symbol of the old and good ways, from homegrown products to women's work and art, it has to be that glory of American cookery, the pie. Time and space clamp iron hands upon a further encomium to the glories of American pie, so I'll end with Joe Hill's working man's vision: "Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die."
Endnotes
2. Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book. Trans. Güneli Gün. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1994.
3. Bennett, John. "Food and Culture in Southern Illinois." American Sociological Review 7 (1942): 645-660.
4. Lockwood, Yvonne and William. "Midwest Food." Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
5. Lockwood, Yvonne R. and Anne R. Kaplan. "Upper Great Lakes Foodways." Smithsonian Folklife Cookbook. Ed by Katherine and Thomas Kirlin. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 172-211.
A book by this contributor:
1. Davis, Clyde Brion. "Illinois." American Panorama: East of the Mississippi. Books for Libraries Press, 1960.
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