What Is Midwestern Food, Anyway?
Plus, buttery baked potatoes
Not many people know Midwestern food—the traditions of the whole, expansive region—like the Park Rapids, Minnesota-based writer Amy Thielen.
In 2013, Thielen published “The New Midwestern Table,” a definitive survey of heartland traditions, from South Dakota chislic to Michigan pasties. She’s one of national media’s go-to food writers in the Midwest, filing stories for Saveur, Food & Wine, and the Wall Street Journal. And she has a new book out—a dinner-party guide called “Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others.”
The book is worth your time and money, but it isn’t the reason why I called Thielen last month. I called her because she’s been one of my guides to Midwestern foodways since I bought New Midwestern Table a decade ago. As I thought about bringing Midwesterner back from its long hibernation, I knew I wanted to get her perspective. Writing about Midwestern food, you get the same questions over and over again, and I wanted to hear how she answered them.
So, on a cold January morning, we stretched a “quick interview” into an hour-and-a-half-long conversation, covering “Church lady” roasters, the black walnut (“the Midwest’s durian,” Amy says), and what you absolutely can’t put in a runza if you want to be able to show your face in Omaha. Below is the edited and condensed result. Keep scrolling to get a recipe for the best and most fortifying baked potatoes you’ve ever had, inspired by the ladies of the Pierz Fun House in Pierz, Minnesota.
How’s the weather up there? Boring way to start, I know, but it’s -3 in Kansas City right now, so you must be freezing in northern Minnesota.
That’s the question people lead with up here, so, no worries. It’s like everybody’s a meteorologist. It’s predictably—classically—cold. A little bit below zero. That’s normal here. We usually get to thirty below, forty below, and I actually don’t think we’ll get there this year.
What do you cook when the temperature drops below zero?
Well, I woke up the other day craving something that may not sound good but is really delicious. Have you ever had pork and sauerkraut, with boiled pork? When you make it with really good sauerkraut, it’s great. And I just made dumplings. That’s what I make when it’s this cold. You know—floury things that are very heavy.
Getting into the interview: The Midwest isn’t always easy to define. It’s a big region. What do you think connects the cultures and cuisines of all these different states and landscapes?
Here’s an opportunity to go ahead and talk about my latest book, “Company,” because I think the answer is there. It is not a Midwestern book of Midwestern food, but in a lot of ways, everything I do is Midwestern. I’ve lived here for long enough, now.
It’s a book about serving people in a way that feels Midwestern to me—meaning, generously, and often in a less formal way. Most of the recipes in “Company” are meant for a buffet. To me, the 9-by-13 Pyrex or metal casserole dish feels like a Midwestern vessel. It implies a crowd, and it implies sharing.
In the book, I wrote about those big countertop electric roasters. I struggled with what to call that thing, and some friends from childhood and I settled on “Church Lady Roaster,” because if there’s an event at church—a funeral or anything else—the volunteers who cook are all using those roasters. (At one point, I asked people on the internet, “What do you call those?” Probably 75% of people said, “That’s a Nesco roaster,” which is a brand name, like Kleenex. We never called it that.)
People are always bringing those roasters to dinners. They’re huge, you know—giant. And if you’re true-blue rural or small-town Midwestern, you probably have two. At my book launch in Minneapolis-St. Paul, I brought that up, and I could hear people in the audience getting excited, like, “Yeah, we have two!” A friend who was there said, “You should’ve seen this one lady. She was in her sixties, and she was going crazy—like, gang-signing, ‘Two! Two!’”
Do you have two?
I do.
Did you have a hard time shopping New Midwestern Table back in the early 2010s? I’ve talked to a few writers who are still, more than a decade later, getting pushback on Midwestern food pitches from editors and publishers—not necessarily because media gatekeepers don’t recognize the value of that content, but because they aren’t convinced there’s a national audience for it.
Well, it probably helped that my approach was a little bit different. I said, “Let’s skip the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s—all the industrial food. Let’s stop talking about convenience food for a minute.” That seemed more interesting, and it made more sense for me.
Too many of the Midwestern cookbooks I was seeing at the time, especially in Minnesota, were, one, hyper-regional, and two, sort of kitschy. It was a lot of casseroles and cakes. It was the stay-at-home mom in the kitchen in a skirt, making her husband a cocktail. A lot of Midwestern food content felt retro in a way that I didn’t like—evoking the Leave it to Beaver era. I wanted to do something different.
I should say, though, we do have to recognize the Midwest’s role in creating that midcentury way of eating. In Minnesota, we had—and still have—General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill... Betty Crocker came from the Midwest. The Midwest has had real power in shaping the way America eats, and we have shipped out a lot of processed food. Midwestern companies have stripped some of the character and spice out of the American diet.
You mentioned Pillsbury. A couple of weeks ago, we ran a recipe for a runza-inspired steamed bun from one of the best sushi chefs in America, who’s based in Omaha. He suggested rolling out Pillsbury biscuits to make the “bao.” That feels Midwestern to me—a chef who really knows what he’s doing, and knows good food and quality ingredients, suggesting a hack like that.
I think that in the Midwest, there’s a real nostalgia and affection for processed foods, so they don’t necessarily have the down-market association they would in New York City, for example. If the same chef were making bao with Pillsbury biscuits in New York, you might think he was trying to be provocative—intentionally slumming it. In the Midwest, I think that comes from a more practical place, which is not to be confused with a lack of sophistication.
Frozen bread dough is a huge thing in the Midwest. When I was working in magazines in Manhattan, I remember looking at a recipe and saying, “We can use frozen bread dough for that!” and my coworkers were like, “What?” I was sent off to take a survey of our local Manhattan groceries, to see if they had frozen bread dough, and at the time, they did not—just frozen pizza dough. My grandmother used frozen bread dough. She’d call it “her” bread, but if you asked about it, she’d say, “Oh, I use Rhodes frozen dough.” It was fabulous, actually. I think there’s a place for that.
Do you think Midwestern food gets the respect it deserves? That’s really a two-part question—one, what kind of respect does it deserve, and two, is it getting that?
When I first moved back to the Midwest, I wrote an essay. At one point, it was called “Pretty Good.” It was about this Midwestern attitude of, “How’s the food?” “Oh, pretty good.” After I moved back to Minnesota, I started using that phrase, and Aaron said, “You’ve got to stop that.” I was like, “I’m just trying it out! It’s fun! Pretty good. It’s all pretty good.” In “Company,” I write about going out to restaurants for special occasions knowing that the food is not going to be very good, and not expecting it to be very good. You know you could buy a steak and cook it better yourself. Now, I’m in a phase in life where I’m looking for more—for higher quality. It’s out there.
In my part of the Midwest, there are interesting things happening with Native American food. From my Minnesota perspective, that’s the Midwestern food culture that’s getting the most attention and respect right now, and rightfully so. I’m seeing indigenous foodways celebrated in a new way, and a lot more scholarship, and a lot more events… That’s coming from people in Native American communities—chefs, writers, activists, and artists who grew up with those traditions. Sean Sherman, who’s in Minneapolis, is probably the biggest name in Native American food.
I was thinking about Sean Sherman when I was prepping for this interview. I was going to ask you if you thought the Midwest would ever get its moment in the food media spotlight, with its own superstar chefs celebrating local ingredients and traditions. Then I thought, is it already happening, with Sean Sherman and his team at Owamni? I know he’s looking beyond the Midwest, and I don’t know whether he’d call himself a Midwestern chef, but he’s serving ingredients and flavors that are from here—bison, maple, wild rice…
I think it might be. And Sean Sherman has built all this infrastructure around his restaurant. It looks to me like a different model—with a non-profit attached. There is a service component and a community engagement component to his work that I think is amazing. He’s getting the kind of press he deserves.
In the decade since New Midwestern Table came out, do you feel like perceptions of Midwestern food have changed—in the region and outside it?
Oh, I think so. When I wrote and published that book, I felt like what I was saying was new to some people—that the Midwest is not a monolith, that it’s had these sub-regions and pocket cuisines since forever, and that it’s always changing.
In the time since, there’s been a lot more interest in the Midwest. In my experience, editors and readers are always looking for something new. Food media is voracious, and it all gets chewed up eventually. So, of course we’ve gotten some attention.
I think that people are more aware of all the new—or newer—immigrants in this region, like the Hmong people in St. Paul. The Hmong have such a presence culturally, and in food and agriculture, especially. Because of them, what you see in Minnesota farmers’ markets is different than it was decades ago. At this point, many of the Hmong farms are at least two generations old, so the influence is not brand new. That’s been cool to watch.
I see national media recognizing the Hmong influence in St. Paul, the Somalian influence in Columbus, and the contributions of other more recent immigrant groups, and I get excited about that. At the same time, I get annoyed by the way some writers cover it. Sometimes, I feel like the message is, “Look, the Midwest is finally getting some interesting food! Finally, they have flavor!”
Yeah, I hear that, and I definitely don’t want to say that. You want to talk about strong flavors? Walk into an apartment building where someone is boiling lutefisk. That stuff is very strong, and an acquired taste—which I have acquired!
Some of the Midwest’s most iconic dishes, including lutefisk, are basically imports from Europe, and as we were just saying, some of the most exciting new additions to the Midwestern table are coming from other countries. Combine that with convenience food traditions that feel more generically American, and you have to ask, Is there a distinctive Midwestern cuisine? Is the definition of Midwestern food just “food that’s made in the Midwest”?
That’s a hard question. I’m not trying to be the one who has that answer anymore. It’s all obviously subjective. I think of our cuisine not so much geographically, but on a timeline. Things that are passed from generation to generation live on, but they also change, and that’s what creates a cuisine.
It does seem like there is a resistance in the Midwest to defining our traditions. I liked the Jim Harrison line that you quoted in New Midwestern Table: "It is humorous to note that since we have no consistent tradition we are doomed to freedom.” It’s like we don’t want to limit ourselves by imposing too many rules. Put a pimento cheese recipe in a Southern lifestyle magazine and a dozen people will write in to tell you, “You’re doing it wrong,” but ask an Iowan about an equivalent dish, and you’re more likely to hear, “Oh, is that a thing? I guess so. I’m not sure it’s anything worth celebrating.” Even if it’s important and beloved.
Yes, and you want people to fight for it!
I’ll tell you, though, I put a recipe for Nebraskan runzas in New Midwestern Table, and, wow, I felt like I had the whole state of Nebraska after me.
In the headnote, I wrote about visiting my husband Aaron’s grandparents in Grand Island, Nebraska, which I thought gave me some credibility. But I put spinach in the runzas instead of cabbage, and, holy cow, they care about that. They care a lot. I want to apologize to the state of Nebraska: I should not have put spinach in there. You’re right. I put cabbage in my runzas now. I was surprised by the intensity of that reaction, though. Some of the response felt jokey, but some of it felt pretty serious.
Maybe I’m not giving Midwesterners enough credit!
No, I think the lesson is that you have to really hit a nerve to get that kind of response from Midwesterners. You have to do something really wrong, like putting spinach in a runza.
Fun House Baked Potatoes
From “Company,” by Amy Thielen
Serves 6-8
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour
Total time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
My mom, Karen, tells me that this recipe was inspired by watching the ladies in her hometown cook at the Pierz Fun House, a social club used for weddings and other public functions. They would make these potatoes by the hundreds: halved russet potatoes, sandwiched with butter and onions and bay leaves, smashed back together, and baked in foil. When you unwrapped your potato, the onion would lie pallid in the middle, and the butter would pool in the foil.
Smartly, my mom pivoted to baking each potato half open-face, so that the onions crisped into dark toupees on top. She also scored the potato flesh deeply before baking, so that the butter knew where it was supposed to go: down the cracks to the bottom skin. After an hour or so in the oven, the skin bakes to a dark brown callus. When I was a kid, I’d capsize my potato boat so that the soft cubes of potato fell out and I could fold the shatteringly crisp bottom around a piece of meat, like a taco.
Yellow or red (or even purple) potatoes, not russets, are best for this recipe.
Ingredients
1½ pounds yellow potatoes (about 5 large), scrubbed and halved
¼ tsp. fine sea salt, plus more to taste
Freshly ground black pepper
8 tbsp. (1 stick) butter, softened
1 clove garlic, grated
½ tsp. paprika
¼ tsp. smoked paprika, plus more for garnish
1 small sweet onion
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
Hold each potato half in your palm and crosshatch the flesh deeply with a sharp knife, cutting about halfway through the potato, then set cut side up in a 9×13-inch baking dish. If the potatoes wobble, shear a thin layer from their bottoms so they sit upright. Season the potatoes with the salt and pepper to taste, rubbing it into the cuts.
Mash the butter with the garlic, paprika, and smoked paprika in a small bowl and divide it in half. Divide half of the compound butter evenly among the potatoes, smashing it into the potatoes. Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and bake until the potatoes are just tender when poked with a knife, 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the size of the potatoes.
Uncover the baking dish and raise the temperature to 450°F. Slice the onion lengthwise into thin arcs, and season with salt. Divide the remaining compound butter among the potatoes and top each with fantailed slices of onion. Roast the potatoes, uncovered, until the edges darken and crisp and the onions toast at their thinnest points, about 25 minutes.
Garnish with a sprinkle of smoked paprika shot across the surface of the potatoes and serve hot or warm, right from the dish.
Excerpted from “Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others,” by Amy Thielen. Copyright © 2023 by Amy Thielen. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.