Nobody eats horseshoes outside of Springfield, Illinois, where they are as much a passion as the locally loved chilli (yes, with two l’s). Conceived at the Leland Hotel in 1928 as an open-face ham sandwich that resembled a horseshoe on an anvil, with French fries scattered around like shoeing nails, the term has come to mean a giant plate of food that goes far beyond any reasonable definition of sandwich or any resemblance to equine footwear. Local taverns and diners pile ’shoes with hamburgers, pork tenderloins, fried chicken, whitefish, or even just vegetables, along with about a kilo of French fries and a flood of cheese sauce. It’s the sauce that can make a horseshoe sing. Canned cheese sauce, which some Springfield shoe makers use, is easy and bright, but it cannot match the silky orange emulsion that starts with a roux in the city’s top hash houses, where beer frequently is added to the recipe, giving the sauce a hopsy verve that balances its heft.
A Springfield, Illinois, breakfast horseshoe with cheese sauce and sausage gravy underneath the hash browns.
Shoes have become immensely popular for breakfast. Made with bacon or sausage and hash browns, and with cream gravy as a substitute or supplement for the cheese sauce, morning horseshoes are frequently available in downsized versions known as pony shoes. As is true of the Rochester garbage plate, variations are nearly infinite . . . as is the number of calories in a full-size one.