Tasteless: Beef à la Mode
What we talk about when we talk about hot beef sundaes
Do you like smart, funny writing about Midwestern classics like Malört, taco pizza, and loose meat sandwiches?
Of course you do! That’s why we’re introducing you to Liz Cook—if you don’t already know her from her newsletter, Haterade, her writing for Bon Appétit, Eater, and other outlets, and/or her Midwesterner blurbs about an Iowa energy drink in a “poison-green” can and the best breakfast burrito in Kansas.
By Liz Cook
You were disgusted, or you were an Iowan. Those were the two camps.
The fight was playing out in the replies to a 2018 tweet from White House reporter Seung Min Kim. Kim had snapped a photo of the menu for the GOP’s Thursday lunch group—a decades-old entmoot of Republican senators hosted by a different lawmaker (with a homefield menu) each week.
The host that week was Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), and there were plenty of good reasons to balk at her menu—the font choice (Papyrus!), the morbid clipart of a smiling pink pig, the incongruity of serving “Mexican street corn” at a gathering of lawmakers who had just introduced a bill to fund a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But most commenters noticed only one thing:
The jokes came hot and heavy, like a bowl of roast beef. “Hot beef sundae” sounded like a sex act, a scat joke, a ska band. For some people, it represented the worst excesses of the American diet served to the worst nexus of American political power. Beef… ice cream?
I remember scrolling through the replies, sighing Midwesternly, feeling a familiar mix of irritation and fatigue. I resented the Hot Beef Sundae Discourse for many reasons, not the least of which was that it had finally put me on the same side of an issue as Sen. Ernst. I’ve eaten my share of hot beef sundaes at state fairs and community potlucks over the years, and the most unforgiving thing I can say about them is that they’re boring—a bowl of mashed potatoes topped with roast beef, brown gravy, and cheddar cheese “sprinkles.” The word “sundae” is mostly a marketing gag. Sometimes, I’d see people top the bowls with a dollop of sour cream and a cherry tomato—whipped cream and a cherry on top—but it never really seemed like the point.
Anatomy of a Hot Beef Sundae
Mashed potatoes: Unbuttered, unseasoned, ideally reconstituted from a bag and doled out of a 22-quart electric roaster with an ice cream scoop. The mash should be dense and paste-y—more fufu than fluff.
Roast beef: Sliced or shredded pot roast. The cut isn’t important here, so long as the beef isn’t ground. You can use beef tips, chuck roast, or even a good cold cut. Most hot beef sundae recipes call for “leftover” beef. You get to choose its penultimate form.
Gravy: Jarred if you can swing it. From a packet if you have to. The flavor should be a single word: either “Beef” or “Brown.”
Cheese: Ribbon shreds of bagged cheddar, chunky enough to resemble julienned carrot.
Sour cream and cherry tomato: Gilding the lily. You may as well.
Serve in: A parfait glass with an ice cream spoon or a styrofoam cup with a spork. If you need more than one utensil, the meat’s too tough.
Even the goofy dessert affectations don’t seem that odd to me. If you order a slice of pie “à la mode” in an American diner, you expect a scoop of ice cream on the side. But in its original French usage, “à la mode” (literally, “in the fashion”) meant braised beef topped with gravy. What is the hot beef sundae but French gastronomy reflected in a funhouse mirror?
I think people recoiled at the idea of the hot beef sundae because it fit neatly into a popular story about Midwestern cuisine: that it was unfashionable, unseasoned, unhealthy, unloved.
I recoiled at the reaction because it fit neatly into another popular story: that critics of the Midwest were smug and incurious, eager to deride a region that they didn’t think deserved a second look. The hot beef sundae wasn’t gross, I argued in my head. It was retro—a clear holdover from Atomic Age community cookbooks and church basement suppers. It was the kind of economical dish a farmer had probably invented for her family to help stretch one weeknight dinner into two.
The trouble is, that story wasn’t true, either.
The origins of the hot beef sundae are neither wholesome nor especially historic. The dish was invented by the Iowa Beef Industry Council in 2006 for the Iowa State Fair. It was an instant hit. That year, the Des Moines Register proclaimed the hot beef sundae Iowa’s “newest culinary tradition.”
It quickly became one of Iowa’s leading culinary exports. The sundae traveled from state fair to state fair, often in the suitcases of beef industry lobbyists. The Kentucky Beef Council debuted a version in 2007. In 2008, the sundae made it all the way to Canada for the Calgary Stampede. When the Iowa State Fair was canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic, a local meat processor and distributor started selling $55 hot beef sundae kits (“Brenda’s Hot Beef Sundae Meat Box”) so fans could make them at home
If I was disappointed by the hot beef sundae’s origin story, I can’t say I was all that surprised. To grow up in the heartland is to slowly come to terms with the fact that many of your beloved childhood traditions were invented by industry groups to prop up agricultural commodities.
But does that mean the hot beef sundae isn’t a “real” Midwestern tradition? Not necessarily. Advertisers and industry groups have driven our diets for decades. So many dishes in the American culinary canon—congealed salads, fudgy Bundt cakes, green bean casseroles—were invented by brands.
And there’s good reason to believe the hot beef sundae, like the green bean casserole, will endure. It’s portable, comforting, and cheap to make, which might explain why it’s become popular at potlucks and other community events.
I ate my last hot beef sundae on the annual Bike Ride to Rippey (BRR)—a twenty-four-mile bike ride from Perry, Iowa, (population 7,800), to Rippey, Iowa, (population 220) and back, held in the dead of winter. Volunteers at the Rippey Public Library were scooping them into styrofoam cups for grateful, half-drunk cyclists, and I took mine outside so I could walk around. It was clear, sunny, and bitterly cold, and every bite of gravy-laced pot roast I sporked from the cup sent a new trail of steam roiling into the air.
When I got tired of walking, I paused and rested a can of beer on the running board of a fire truck, where fifty other cyclists had rested fifty other beer cans. The fire department had pulled the truck out and parked it on the street so they could turn the garage into a combination cash bar and dance hall. No one seemed concerned that the town’s only emergency vehicle had been turned into the world’s largest coaster. If an emergency struck, I suppose they’d just send some half-drunk cans of Busch Light flying down the road.
There’s fun, and there’s things worth fussing about. One of the stories I tell about Midwesterners is that we’re good at separating the two.
Last October, Sen. Ernst hosted the Thursday lunch group again. Her menu was almost identical—“Fare from the Iowa State Fair.” So were the reactions to the hot beef sundae:
This time, I didn’t engage. I just kept scrolling. It’s easy to get mad at a symbol. It’s harder to sort through the layers of culture, history, and politics that we attach to it. Our beef is almost never (just) with the beef.
True stories are always a little bit complicated. It’s worth trying to tell them, though. At least, it might be worth fussing about.
Liz Cook is a Kansas City-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Pitch, Bon Appétit, Eater, and The Kansas City Star. She also writes the experimental food newsletter Haterade.