I piled into a car last weekend with three old friends to go see another old friend perform in a band at a bar in Indiana. It was the first time in a long time we’d done such a thing together, and the in-transit conversation quickly turned to a familiar topic: pizza.
We all said thin-crust, tavern cut pie was the way to go, but that’s where the agreement ended. A couple of the guys were big fans of the now-shuttered Sanfratello’s in Glenwood, and another has long loved Chicago Dough Co. in Richton Park.
I grew up in Homewood, and my parents ordered pizza or sandwiches from Aurelio’s for dinner every Friday night. In high school, I got a job cooking pizza there, and it remains my favorite decades later.
Aurelio’s pizza is one of the first foods I thought of when trying to figure out what would be the signature food of the region. Perhaps indicative of my not-so-healthy diet, other menu items that came to mind included Italian beef sandwiches with hot giardinera from Enzo’s in Chicago Heights or Twisted Q in Homewood, and gyros from Perros Bros. in Matteson or Ariston in Hazel Crest.
We live in a sodium-encrusted cornucopia of deliciousness, and everyone has their own go-to spots. My colleague Donna Vickroy often mentions her love for Palermo’s Pizza in Oak Lawn, and another colleague turned me on a few years back to another South Side classic — Vito and Nick’s pizza in Chicago.
The number of “best” foods around here probably isn’t far removed from population figures. It’s something nearly everyone has a strong opinion about.
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But what makes a food or dish a regional item, or associated with a place?
Kate Donley, a programming librarian at the Oak Lawn Public Library, recently took a deep dive into six decades worth of local dishes in advance of a program this week about heirloom family recipes.
She pulled books from the library’s collection of local recipe books. Some dated back to the 1930s, but most were from the 1950s through ’80s, and all were issued by Oak Lawn organizations.
“Some things stuck out,” Donley said, noting more than a few recipes might have been best left in the library’s backroom. “They fell into a category of let’s not bring these back.”
But some ended up in a booklet the library created for the program at 2 p.m. Thursday.
Among the recipes that stood out during Donley’s afternoon of research is one for a three-ingredient Christmas cookie that calls for chocolate chips, peanuts and “a can of Chinese noodles,” she said.
“On one hand, I thought this belongs with the recipes that can stay back in time,” Donley said. “But when I think about it, my mother-in-law makes delicious peanut clusters without Chinese noodles, so they can’t be that different.”
Another historic recipe involves apple pie baked in a paper bag.
“Why is it baked in a paper bag? I don’t know. We’d have to ask the Faith Ladies Aid Society of the Faith Lutheran Church in 1978,” she said.
Another recipe, originally printed in a 1976 book by the St. Gerald’s Mother’s Club, might fall into the Best Left to History category, though it also could be fun to make, in a retro sort of way.
“It’s a Waldorf ‘salad’ mold,” Donley said, “and it’s got lemon Jello, salad dressing, celery, red apples, nuts and heavy cream.”
Nearly all the recipe books from the second half of the 20th century celebrated the modern conveniences that made food preparation easier for cooks of that era than it had been for their parents. Ingredients such as instant pudding (in the “Next Best Thing to Robert Redford” cake from the Green Oak Reformed Church, 1977) and cans of beef gravy (“Thousand Dollar Tangy Pot Roast”) are rampant.
As she paged through the old recipe books, one ingredient kept popping up — a sort of casserole cheat code, as the kids say these days. It was enough to exasperate Donley.
“Enough with the mushroom soup already!” she said.
The oldest recipe she excerpted was from the Oak Lawn PTA cookbook from 1939 and reads more like a postmodern preparation from the current farm-to-table era. The gingerbread tray bake “uses molasses, sugar, flour, egg, half a cup of butter and a little ginger,” Donley said. “It’s pretty simple, but I bet it’s delicious.”
Donley’s research wasn’t comprehensive, and she didn’t discover a commonality that would lead her to declare a signature dish of Oak Lawn, or even of suburbia.
The recipe that spoke to her most, though, was for a “Hot German Potato Salad” from a book issued in 1974 by the Women’s Guild of the United Church of Christ.
“It’s similar to hot potato salad my father baked,” Donley said. “It has a cultural flavor that I think is still in households today. My father is of German descent, and it seemed to connect to me, and with the immigrant history of Oak Lawn in the 1970s.”
Thursday’s program at the Oak Lawn Library will be presented by Catherine Lambrecht, of the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance. She helped start a Family Heirloom Recipe contest in 2009 at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield that’s become an annual part of the event.
Contestants have to submit stories behind the recipes and how they relate to their families, adding “interesting textures and backgrounds” that enrich the foods, she said.
One, for a pork dish, involved a child who lived on a farm, took the runt of a pig litter under his arm and regularly hand fed it, becoming emotionally attached. No matter, the pig eventually was “harvested,” Lambrecht said, and the child was miserable. But that’s life on the farm.
Many of the recipe stories Lambrecht collects from Downstate entrants include their involvement in some way with the production of ingredients. Entries from urban and suburban areas tend to focus more on family traditions and quirks surrounding their meals.
In one, siblings in Berwyn created a contest surrounding a traditional Czech fruit dumpling where they had to guess which ones contained fruit from the sour cherry tree out back. Whoever collected the most cherry pits on their plate at the end of the meal was the winner.
One quirk involved the same pasta salad recipe submitted four years apart by two women from the same community, with a minor difference of a half teaspoon of prepared mustard.
“Maybe they copied each other? I don’t get that feeling though,” Lambrecht said. “It made me realize these were important recipes to families, but they were also hot recipes on the potluck circuit.”
As with the historic recipe books, there’s been no real trend in the Heirloom Family Recipe Contest that would indicate what our collective signature dish is. But Lambrecht nominated her candidate for statewide recognition.
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While the official state pie is pumpkin pie, and Illinois produced the vast majority of canned pumpkin filling for pies nationwide, she said pecan pie is more suited to the role.
“People think I’m nuts, because they think it’s more of a Southern thing,” Lambrecht said. “But the Latin name for pecan has Illinois in it. Around midstate, they have natural pecan groves. It was an introduced crop to Georgia after the Civil War.”
Like Donley at the library, Lambrecht said the area’s main signature dish probably varies widely, and nearly every family has its own. With the diversity of the Chicago area always increasing, the number of mainstay foods is on the rise, too.
Still, there are some regional food commonalities that would answer the signature food question for nearly everyone.
“The Oak Lawn food that comes to mind is absolutely pizza,” Donley said, including a shoutout to Palermo’s. “We have kolaches and churros and chocolate chip cookies and baklava all mingling as the kinds of sweets we like around here, but the foods people really want to talk about are pizza and hot dogs.”
Lambrecht agreed, and added another Chicago staple.
“My family are hot dog people,” she said. “I didn’t know Italian beef was a Chicago thing until 20 years ago.
“Italian beef varies so much from place to place that I would say it’s a signature dish, depending on who’s making it. Chicago has a wide range of food, but there’s so much interest and variability in Italian beefs.”
Another historic item Donley included in her Oak Lawn booklet doesn’t involve food at all, but might be a recipe we all could use more of.
The recipe “How to Preserve Children” came from “Favorite Recipes Submitted by Ladies from Trinity Evangelical Covenant Church,” printed in 1974.
It reads: “Take one large, grassy field, a half dozen children, two or three small dogs, a pinch of brook and some small pebbles. Mix the children and dogs together and put them in a field, stirring constantly. Pour the brook over the pebbles, sprinkle the field with flowers, spread over all a deep blue sky and bake in the hot sun.”
That one will have to wait until spring, but it’s something to chew on until then.
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].