What is a Chicago food experience? People everywhere think they know the answer: deep dish pizza and hot dogs (without ketchup). Maybe if you grew up in the area you go a little deeper and think of the Chicago food experience as having lunch with your grandmother in the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s. If you’re a gourmet, the Chicago food experience may be buying a ticket for a chance to eat at Alinea, or a late-night meal at Girl and the Goat.
But the Chicago food experience is about more than what or where you eat or what you don’t put on a hot dog. People define themselves, their ethnicities and their neighborhoods by what they eat and the food, or lack of food, that surrounds their communities. The history of food in Chicago isn’t just about how foods, trends, and restaurants developed. It is about how we define ourselves as a city.
The regulations that cities like Chicago make about food carts, for example, as well as rules protecting the food supply, impact human health and the urban landscape. The essential nature of food production in the U.S., and its decline and transformation, is also linked to Chicago’s history, mainly through the Chicago Stock Yards and factories such as the Austin neighborhood’s now gone Brach’s Candy plant.
This link between a city and its food is why Evanston resident Howard Rosing, an administrator and professor at DePaul, and I, originally from Evanston, now an Oak Parker, and a professor at Chicago State, wrote Chicago: A Food Biography (Rowman and Littlefield).
The book stretches from the pre-European foods of the region to Chicago as a frontier town with a quickly growing population through the industrialization of food and the migrant and immigrant communities that made the city a food capital of the U.S.
Writing — and especially researching — the book was a blast. I drove around Chicago eating jibaritos and pork chop sandwiches (purely for research purposes, obviously). I sat in the library of the Chicago History Museum reading about the lives of people such as Emily Frankenstein, a young women from the upper-middle class in Hyde Park, who in her diary entry on July 4, 1918 described visiting the Edgewater Beach Hotel with her family and her sweetheart: “We were given a table in the beautiful dining-room. … We could look and see Lake Michigan shimmering and rippling before us only a few yards away. … I had soft shelled crabs, combination salad and chocolate ice cream.”
Chicago’s food history is also a history of ethnic groups, neighborhoods and markets. Restaurants and signature foods were at the core of neighborhoods such as Bronzeville and Little Village, as well as the old German neighborhoods of the North Side, Little Italy and others.
Throughout the book, we balance how food reveals both the joy of eating in Chicago with the social challenges embedded within Chicago’s food history. Differences in access to grocery stores did not begin with the popularization of the “food desert” term in the last decade. Communities have advocated for better stores, as well as better treatment in the stores they have, almost since Chicago’s beginning.
Food has often been used as an organizational and political tool — the promise of a grocery store or a Starbucks in a neighborhood has helped many a Chicago alderman. For years, community groups have put out community cookbooks. One of the most interesting cookbooks is a typewritten book from 1970 published by the Uptown-based American Indian Center to support the establishment of a library and museum.
By contrast, the well-produced 1988 Chicago Junior League book, One Magnificent Cookbook, lists meals and dishes to accompany what they see as typical “Chicago events,” such as the opening night of the Lyric and a meal before a Blackhawks game.
Chicagoans are intensely proud of our events and teams, but back in the neighborhoods, we cook and eat in distinct ways that bring our communities together.
“Chicago a Food Biography” is available locally at the Book Table in Oak Park and Centuries & Sleuths in Forest Park. Block and co-author Howard Rosing will be speaking and signing books at the Maze Branch Library on Nov. 15 from 2-4 p.m. and at Centuries & Sleuths on Dec. 18 at 7 p.m.