Like with any culinary trend, there are some limiting stereotypes that emerged, especially in the hands of chefs who hadn't previously cooked Southern food - it's not all fried chicken and moonshine served in Mason jars - but by and large, there was a greater national recognition of what exactly the region's foodways had to offer.Īnd according to Katy Spratte Joyce, a Minnesota-born and Omaha-based food writer, the Midwestern region is ready to break with being considered a bread basket monolith. The magazine described 'New Southern' as a 'nationwide hankering for ingredients like artisanal grits and real country ham.' I think of it more as an acceptance, and perhaps overdue adulation, of a cuisine that had previously been dismissed as unsuitable for fine dining. Just because we use cornmeal and pecans doesn't mean our cooking isn't a high art.' 'You can cook Southern food with the same passion and integrity. 'You don't need to go to New York or Chicago or Paris to be a great chef,' Hopkins said. At the time Bon Appetit spoke to Atlanta-based chef Linton Hopkins about the trend. I had just moved to Louisville, Ky., when the 'New Southern' food movement took hold in a big way about a decade ago. Velveeta, Jell-O desserts, Miracle Whip dressings, and ground beef casseroles aren't unique to the Midwest, Cook says, but they seem to have stuck to the region while the coasts and South are more likely to be seen as having differentiated, regional cuisines. 'Go to a funeral lunch in a heartland church basement and you'll definitely see macaroni salads and those pickle roll-ups, but I also think a lot of stereotypes of Midwestern cuisine are holdovers from the - regionless, nationwide- post-war convenience food boom,' Cook said. 'I think when a lot of people hear 'Midwestern food,' they picture bland, hyper-processed, vaguely German- or Scandinavian-inflected fare - ham-and-cream-cheese pickle roll-ups, baked potatoes, boiled meats,' says Liz Cook, the restaurant critic for The Pitch, a Kansas City alt weekly.Īccording to Cook, these stereotypes aren't entirely unfounded. But there's a new generation of Midwestern food professionals - cookbook authors, chefs, critics - who are pushing back on this narrative of flyover food from flyover country. Some recognized it as ' the carb bomb that brings us all together,' but many of the responses I saw indicated that the dish tidily fit into a narrow national view of what Midwestern cuisine is: bland, unnecessarily calorie-laden and unworth traveling for.

The Facebook invitations to her events read, 'Hot dish is a great unifier - just like Amy.' But when photos of Klobuchar's hot dish hit social media, crisp tater tots covered in bubbling cheese, the reaction was mixed. When Klobuchar held her Hot Dish House Party campaign events, there was a sense that she was trying to communicate that she possessed the same traits inherent to the clean-out-the-pantry dish: hearty, resourceful, unpretentious. (Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who was living in Texas at the time, has said he believes it was 'that gaffe with the tamale that cost him the state of Texas.') I'm thinking of Gerald Ford when, as he was campaigning for re-election against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he bit into a still-husked tamale and nearly choked.

This is done with varying levels of success. There's a lot to be said for how politicians conscript various regional dishes in an effort to connect with constituents. Some may call it a casserole, some may call it a goulash - but having grown up outside of Chicago, I recognized the general form as a Midwestern staple. It's typically comprised of four components: meat vegetables a starch of some sort such as the always popular tater tots and a binding agent, typically a can of cream of whatever soup. Amy Klobuchar re-introduced the nation at large to the hot dish in her now-abandoned bid for the Democratic nomination.

Klobuchar tater tot hotdish recipe