Food from the Heartland: The Cooking of America's Midwest

by Glenn Andrews

Book Overview

Now the wonderful foods and flavors of the American Midwest are compiled in an irrestible cookbook featuring more than 250 recipes for soul-satisfying soups, main courses, breads, and not-to-be missed desserts. Like Jane and Michael Stein's Square Meals, this is a warm and enticing invitation to come home. Black-and-white photographs and illustrations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0133232549
• ISBN13: 9780133232547
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.7" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Superb Traditional Midwestern Recipes

Once again, Publisher's Weekly is off the mark with their nitpicky and rather negative review of this book. Who cares if the author calls it "vanilla" in one recipe and "pure vanilla" in the other, most of us are smart enough to figure out it's the same thing, particularly since she tells you to "always use pure vanilla extract" in the text. As a lifelong midwesterner who has also travelled extensively, and owns over 100 cookbooks, I believe this (along with Marcia Adams' Cooking from Quilt Country) is the best traditional midwestern cookbook available. The author wisely avoids including recipes for the characterless, gloppy casseroles made with canned cream of mushroom soup, jello, and other "convenience foods" which originated in the 1950's and are so prevalent in the Midwest today. Instead, she concentrates on the traditional "made from scratch" recipes which have been enjoyed on farms and in small towns throughout the Midwest for many generations. Midwestern cooking had its origins in the food traditions of the German, Dutch, Belgian, and Scandinavian immigrants who moved to the region, primarily to establish farms, during the 19th century. The recipes in this book are not difficult or fancy, but they are delicious. Favorites include the homemade chicken pot pie, crispy roast pork, German potato pancakes, Maytag blue cheese soup, and the absolutely delicious Cincinnati Chili. If you are interested in eating traditional midwestern food the way it should taste, buy this book.

Simple and fabulously tasty!

You know how you remember the food of your childhood and think, it couldn't possibly taste that good today? This book is proof that it can. I have to admit, after 20 years on the East Coast, I'd forgotten there even was such a thing as Midwestern cuisine. Then I started flipped the pages, and was hit with a wave of nostaglia. I got images of pancake suppers at the Kiwanas, picking wild grapes for jam, real coffee cakes with brown sugar bubbling hot from the oven, mac and cheese recipes that unabashedly call for one pound of cheese for every pound of noodles.Midwestern cooking isn't boring, I realized, but simple. Most recipes have only five or six ingredients -- it's the skill of the cooking and the freshness of the ingredients that counts. If you get the book, try the recipe for Dutch letters from Yaarsma's Bakery in Pella Iowa. I thought I just remembered it as good because of happy childhood memories of walking with my cousins through that leafy, lovely old town, our shorts pockets full of change to spend at the two rival bakeries. But no, it really is that good. Nothing I had in in the Netherlands recently (and I sampled religiously) even comes close.