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Midwestern Food

Midwestern Food

$27.50

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$27.50

SKU: 9780226819495 Category:
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Description

An acclaimed chef offers a historically informed cookbook that will change how you think about Midwestern cuisine. Celebrated chef Paul Fehribach has made his name serving up some of the most thoughtful and authentic regional southern cooking—not in the South, but in Chicago at Big Jones. But over the last several years, he has been looking to his Indiana roots in the kitchen, while digging deep into the archives to document and record the history and changing foodways of the Midwest.
Fehribach is as painstaking with his historical research as he is with his culinary execution. In Midwestern Food, he focuses not only on the past and present of Midwestern foodways but on the diverse cultural migrations from the Ohio River Valley north- and westward that have informed them. Drawing on a range of little-explored sources, he traces the influence of several heritages, especially German, and debunks many culinary myths along the way.
The book is also full of Fehribach’s delicious recipes informed by history and family alike, such as his grandfather's favorite watermelon rind pickles; sorghum-pecan sticky rolls; Detroit-style coney sauce; Duck and manoomin hotdish;  pawpaw chiffon pie; strawberry pretzel gelatin salad (!); and he breaks the code to the most famous Midwestern pizza and BBQ styles you can easily reproduce at home. But it is more than just a cookbook, weaving together historical analysis and personal memoir with profiles of the chefs, purveyors, and farmers who make up the food networks of the greater Chicago region.
The result is a mouth-watering and surprising Midwestern feast from farm to plate. Flyover this!
  Paul Fehribach is a seven-time James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Great Lakes; and owner of the critically acclaimed Chicago restaurant, Big Jones. He is the author of The Big Jones Cookbook: Recipes for Savoring the Heritage of Regional Southern Cooking, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Introduction
Chapter 1: On Relishes, Sweets, and Sours: Pickles and Preserves
Meet the Locals: Justin Dean
Chapter 2: A Country Well Lit: Cocktails
Meet the Locals: Andy Hazzard
Chapter 3: Baker’s Delight: Breads
Meet the Locals: Titus Ruscitti
Chapter 4: Of State Fairs, Tailgates, and Main Street Cafés: Sandwiches and Handheld Food
Chapter 5: Please Pass the Corn: Vegetables and Sides
Meet the Locals: Rob Connoley
Chapter 6: Pull Up a Chair: Meat and Potatoes
Meet the Locals: Marty and Will Travis
Chapter 7: Burgerlandia
Chapter 8: Midwestern Barbecue
Chapter 9: A Pizza Tour
Meet the Locals: Stephanie Hart
Chapter 10: Sweets: Pies, Cakes, Cookies, and Confections
Meet the Locals: Erika Allen
Chapter 11: What Next, Heartland?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 

"There are many good chefs, fewer great chefs, and then there's Paul
Fehribach: Not just a fabulous chef, but a scholar, storyteller, and exemplary ambassador for the foodways of the American Midwest. Midwestern Food will be studied, referenced, cooked out of, and flat-out enjoyed for decades to come."
 
"The Midwest has long been the neglected region of American cookery. It is no longer. 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 rich story of American Food closer to completion."
 
“What a wonderful book. This is a dish-by-dish story of what makes the region America’s true heartland cuisine. Part memoir, a very well-researched history of classic Midwestern foods, and a first-rate cookery book, Midwestern Food is and will be the go-to Midwestern cookbook for years to come."
 
"Chef Paul Fehribach captures our region with his newest publication, essentially a love letter entitled, Midwestern Food, which shares wonderful stories and delicious recipes, all the while folding in snippets from local chefs, farmers, bakers, and more. The book is more than a good read it’s a quintessential handbook to the heartland!"
 
“What I love about this book is that here in the Midwest many of us grew up with a connection to the land, the farmers, and our grandmothers. I know I grew up cooking with my Grandma Dorothy and like so many incredible people in what is usually considered fly-over land, there is a deep and rich connection to what makes this part of the United States so comforting. In this book, you will find recipes from Chef Fehribach that give you history as well as precise execution to help make your table more like the homes we grew up in. Enjoy!”
“What the great Edna Lewis did for Southern cooking, Fehribach has surely done here for his beloved Midwest. As a child of Minnesota, who studied in Wisconsin, and lived and worked in Iowa, Michigan, and Illinois, I thought I knew all there was about our regional delicacies. Fehribach goes deeper—like a gumshoe detective with a laser focus on culinary tradition—uncovering and sharing his research like a proud blue ribbon winner at the county fair. Not only does he introduce you to forgotten dishes like Persimmon Pudding and the Horseshoe, but he also leads you by the hand, helping you recreate the dishes originally created by the German, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Polish settlers who planted roots here and made the region their home. I’ve eaten hot dish and Delta tamales and chili dozens of times, but now I want to go make them in my own kitchen, so I can teach others the lost art of the Midwestern table.”

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Dimensions 1 × 7 × 10 in