Aye, the corn, the royal corn, within whose yellow heart there is of health and strength for all the nations. The corn triumphant! That with the aid of man hath made victorious procession across the tufted plain and laid foundations for the social excellence that is and is to be.
—from a speech delivered by Governor Richard J.
Oglesby during the Harvest Home Festival,
September 9, 1892, Chicago
In the early 1900s, students in Illinois would have memorized those lines from Governor Oglesby’s speech.1 People understood what had built the region, shaped society, and created the world in which they lived. It was corn, and they were connected to and dependent on the corn. All midwesterners were. The Midwest had shaken off its frontier origins and become civilized, a juxtaposing of city and country that benefited both. And yet it hadn’t been that many decades prior to Oglesby’s speech that the development of this new region had begun.
The settlement of the Midwest came in fits and spurts, dribbles alternating with torrents. Generalities can be made, but there will always be exceptions. Therefore, the division between this chapter and the next is somewhat inexact. The earliest settlers clearly belong in this chapter, but some later groups arrived in steadily increasing numbers beginning in the 1800s and continuing into the 1900s. So there is not a clear break at a specific date between groups in this chapter and those in the next. Hence, African Americans, who began to migrate north and west in large numbers in 1865, following the Civil War, are covered in this chapter, though the period known as the Great Migration occurred in the early 1900s. Mexican immigrants, however, are discussed in Chapter 13, because although a few had reached Chicago by 1893, they did not appear in significant numbers in the Midwest until the 1900s.
Many aspects of the region opening up and being settled have already been addressed, but this chapter will consider some of the people and groups that headed to the Midwest, why they went, and when. It will also look at how new arrivals and new ingredients combined to create the region’s foodways—because the foodways of a region are anchored in two things: what’s available and who’s there. Both of these elements changed frequently on the swiftly civilizing frontier.
It has been said that foodways bind people together.2 In the Midwest, when speaking of food, the things that bound people together were corn and, in time, abundance. But first, it was corn. Initially, the local cuisine was corn plus whatever one could catch—from fish along rivers or the Great Lakes to game, both large and small. Then it was corn plus whatever was being raised, especially pork (though game remained important through the 1800s—particularly game that raided cornfields). Fortunately, corn was versatile.3
The first corn, other than that being grown by the indigenous people, arrived in backpacks, saddlebags, and sacks in the backs of wagons. Settlers planned their arrivals for spring planting time, which meant many had to leave the East before winter was over. The first order of business upon reaching the frontier was to prepare the land and get the seed corn in the ground. Corn was the best bet for survival because settlers knew it would grow, they’d get almost a half pound of grain for every seed planted, and they could start eating it at an early stage.
The first settlers to arrive in the region that would become the Midwest were from the southern and then eastern states, regions that had relied on corn for a couple of centuries. They brought their foodways with them, including their reliance on corn. Grits from the South, corn chowder from New England, cornbread, cornmeal mush, corn soup, corn pudding, roasted green corn, and a range of rough corn cakes, from pone to corndodgers, spread across the Midwest as the region rapidly converted to corn culture.
Special symbols of a region become important among people who do not have a long history in a place. They help people identify with a region and think of it as home. These symbols need to be something that people can point at, take pride in, and get involved with.4 For the Midwest, that symbol would be corn. It soon dominated the region’s landscape.
Once the fields were plowed and planted, after the first season or two, abundance became a defining characteristic of the Midwest’s foodways, as well. There was a lot of corn, but, thanks to all the corn, there was also more pork and milk than most people had ever dreamed of. Life may have been hard, but generally people had plenty to eat, at least for most of the year (during the month or so between the end of winter stores and the sprouting of the spring crops, food could be sparse).
However, corn did not come on its own. Its story is wrapped up in the lives of the people who carried it on the long trails to and across the Midwest at the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s.
After the American Revolution, many of those who had fought in the war moved into Ohio to take up the land grants they had received in lieu of pay. In Ohio’s first capital, Marietta, the Mound Cemetery became the final resting place of more Revolutionary War officers than any other acre of land in the country. A territory needed a population of sixty thousand to become a state, and by 1803, Ohio qualified. While a third of the state was still unsettled, the parts that had been claimed were already growing stands of corn taller than any back east.5
The adventurous souls who became known as backwoodsmen pushed farther into the wilderness. “Corn title” gave a man ownership of whatever land he planted. Generations of backwoodsmen pushed back the frontier, planting corn. Daniel Boone led settlers into Kentucky, but other trailblazers continued on into Indiana and Illinois, including Tom Lincoln, who would teach his son Abraham how to raise corn.6
Everyone who moved to the area contributed something to the shaping of the region. Prior to the land rush that began in 1833, immigration to the Midwest was largely from the Upland South. People flooded in from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia.7 The southerners brought their farming systems, along with their dependence on corn. (Even when cotton was king in the South, corn production exceeded cotton production by three to one.)8 Other settlers came from Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England states.9 The New Englanders, too, brought experience with corn, but experience that had been hard won in the harsh, rocky New England landscape. In New England, it had been the strong Yankee women who raised the corn, while the men were at sea, fishing, whaling, or sailing around the world. They brought their thriftiness with them, as well as their reverence for education, their sense of community, and a belief in the right of individual conscience.10
Strong women were welcome on the frontier. The nature of growing corn made women the equal of men in the field. Planting, cultivation, and harvesting were a lot of work, but not work that required huge strength. Every available hand was needed, and a woman was often half of the available labor force—and this, too, contributed to making corn dominant on farms.11
The next group that came, starting in the 1820s, was from the mid-Atlantic region. These settlers used southern agricultural practices in conjunction with German feeding systems. Their contribution was the organization of hog and cattle markets. This generated another boost to interest in migrating west.12
As cities swelled along the Atlantic Coast, housing became more costly and more difficult to find, and the price of land outside the cities spiked sharply upward. This, combined with improved transportation, sent new waves of immigrants from New England and the mid-Atlantic states westward. The 1830s and 1840s saw a surge in land buying in the Midwest, but not just of farms. Farmers often bought the properties they’d long dreamed of, but there were also speculators from the East Coast (or representatives of those speculators who did not wish to make the arduous trip themselves), who were buying land with the hope of reselling it at a profit. Fortunes were made and lost, as the region’s economy swung between boom and bust. Earlier settlers to the region developed considerable distrust of New York capitalists and others who tried to take control of the region the settlers had opened up. There was something of a clash of cultures, as well, as New Englanders moved into regions primarily inhabited by southerners.13
People came as individuals, as families, and sometimes as entire transplanted communities. For example, fifty families pooled their funds to buy twenty square miles of land in Illinois. These families, all members of the same Presbyterian church in a town in upstate New York, would create an entire settlement in the wilderness. Their minister, George Washington Gale, designed the community, and the whole group headed west in 1836. Gale founded Knox College that same year, to encourage learning and culture. While many settlements similarly formed by groups utilized the name of their points of origin, often with “New” added on, this town was named for the hardworking minister: Galesburg.14
These settlers were focused: they wanted farms. They wanted to grow corn. When settlers reached new land, the first thing they had to do was get a crop in the ground. Crops were more necessary to survival than comfort. Even when houses were built, they were generally small and rough for the first years, until the farm was established.15
As travel became less difficult, and as news of seemingly limitless farmland began to span the globe, people started to arrive from across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. These were people who had not grown up with corn, and while most of them had little choice but to grow at least some corn, if only for their animals, they did not have the love for it that settlers from the South and East had. They learned to cook it and enjoy it, but they did not have the passion for continuing a culinary reliance on corn.
For Europeans, white bread was the domain of the wealthy and aristocratic. In fact, the English word lord comes from the Old English hlafweard, which meant “one who guards the loaves” (hlaf morphing eventually into our word loaf). To eat white bread was to be rich, and so the newcomers began to plant wheat—because soft white bread is not possible without gluten. Many of those who came were from cultures that relied heavily on potatoes, such as the Irish, Poles, and Germans who began to arrive in large numbers in the mid-1800s. For those who grew up with nothing more than potatoes (or who, like the Irish, had died by the hundreds of thousands when the potato crop failed), a land where one could have potatoes and meat was a previously unimagined luxury. Of course, until the 1900s, corn still won out over potatoes in most of the Heartland, with meat and cornbread being the most common meal.
Though adopting many corn traditions, the overseas arrivals introduced a tremendous range of new foods and recipes into the Midwest. The history of foodways around the world has always consisted of absorbing other influences and ingredients and making them one’s own, and the same thing happened in the Midwest. New influences blended with old standbys to create a cuisine marked by diversity. Interestingly, as they settled down and adopted the traditions of their nearest neighbors, groups began to identify their foodways as American. The classic example is The Settlement Cook Book, published in Milwaukee in 1903 and never out of print since then. It was created as part of the Settlement Movement, which helped immigrants adapt to their new home in the United States. The goal of The Settlement Cook Book was to teach people how to cook like Americans. There are a lot of corn recipes, of course, but the majority of the cookbook is German and Jewish recipes. In Milwaukee, that was who the Americans were.16 But cookbooks compiled across the Midwest starting in the mid-1800s through the 1900s almost all included recipes that are identifiably associated with whoever settled each region. As a result, cookbooks reflected microcosms of the frontier—corn plus home cooking from the East, the South, and across Europe. Once trains enabled the shipping of more delicacies from both coasts (with curry, oysters, ginger, coconut, lemon, bananas, and pineapple becoming almost as common as cornmeal in cookbooks), cooking became even more interesting and diverse.
Some immigrants who arrived were so poor that they could not participate in this rural splendor. They clung to towns, small and large, where there was the possibility of work or aid from nearby neighbors. There was a tremendous amount of charity in the Midwest during the 1800s, through churches, local governments, and individuals, with small towns offering the most direct contact between the poor and those who helped them. The abundance that would characterize the Midwest on the whole made it possible for a large part of the population to aid those who arrived destitute.17
Chinese immigrants added to the diversity, but their only serious new involvement with corn was adopting cornstarch to replace the lotus root and tapioca starches they would have used back home.18 (They had applications for corn prior to coming to the United States, as corn had been introduced into China in the 1500s. However, cornstarch did not exist before the mid-1800s, so that was not available to them until they arrived in the United States.)19 Chinese food quickly became popular, especially in the cities, where the Chinese were more likely to settle.
Scholars have noted that African Americans gained a greater appreciation for the foodways with which they had long been familiar once they migrated north.20 After the Civil War, when they were free to move wherever they wished, many settled in the Midwest. They, too, introduced new foods while reinforcing the importance of corn.
All these would become dependent on corn and what corn made available.
Following hard on the heels of the first settlers from the East were newcomers from across the Atlantic. Beginning in the 1840s and increasing well into the twentieth century, Europeans began to flood into the country in the wake of political turmoil, famine, and poverty in their homelands. Revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy, the Potato Famine in Ireland, high unemployment across Scandinavia, and crop failure across much of Western Europe propelled huge numbers of people toward America, with dreams of cheap land in the Midwest. More often even than those from the East Coast, these immigrants came in groups and settled together—and then wrote home, encouraging more people to join them.21
German-speaking immigrants (Austro-Hungarians, as well as Germans) settled across the Midwest, but especially in Illinois and Wisconsin. They brought continental manners with them, plus a large repertoire of dishes that made good use of all the pork being raised in the region.22 A decade before the Potato Famine, the offer of work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and then on the Illinois Central Railroad, drew thousands of Irish poor to the Midwest.23 Then, when the Potato Famine did strike (1845–1849), the numbers of Irish immigrants topped a million.
Scandinavian immigrants escaping poverty and overpopulation settled all across the Midwest, beginning in 1825 and running through the end of the century. Norwegians chose to settle primarily in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. Danes put down roots (literally and figuratively) in the farming regions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas. Swedes swept across the entire upper Midwest. Finns, too, fancied the upper Midwest, with Michigan becoming the heartland of Finnish America. German and Irish immigrants were still more numerous than Scandinavians, but Scandinavians arrived in large enough numbers to truly transform the culture of the American Midwest.24 However, Swedes and Finns had long contributed to American culture. One can hardly imagine anything more symbolic of pioneer America than the log cabin, but this was, in fact, introduced by earlier Scandinavian immigrants.25 (The first Swedes and Finns arrived on the continent in the early 1600s, settling the short-lived colony of New Sweden along the Delaware River. So this new burst of immigration was a continuation of Scandinavian influence.)
One of the midwestern towns settled by Swedes was Bishop Hill, Illinois. In 1846, a group of Swedish Lutherans, led by Erik Jansson, hoped to build the perfect community, free from the temptations and evils of the outside world. Their story reads like that of Jamestown or Plymouth: they endured hardship and cramped quarters, 96 of the original 400 died from starvation, and when success finally came, it was based on agriculture. While the town no longer dreams of being free from the world, Bishop Hill does retain much of its Swedish heritage.26
Add to all of these a healthy dose of Russians, Hungarians, and other Eastern Europeans, plus the many Canadians who were crossing the border into the United States during this era, and the origin of the complexity of midwestern culture begins to make itself evident. It is this complexity that makes the Midwest harder to define than other regions. New England took much of its regional “feel” from the Puritans and from its seafarers. The Southwest has a strong Spanish influence. The South, even though there is some diversity in areas such as Louisiana, which changed hands from French to Spanish to French to American, has a common rural culture that unites them. The Midwest got everyone, and while there is a strong rural element, the cities and manufacturing are so strong that, again, a definition remains elusive.27 That said, the hardiness of the pioneers, the friendliness of the rural areas, and the vigor of the cities might be viewed as an apt description. And, of course, in city or country, midwesterners are united by corn.
In 1862, at the beginning of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln passed the Homestead Act. This made land in the Midwest almost free for settlers. It offered 160 acres to anyone who wished to farm, with only a small registration fee and a promise to improve the land for five years. Back then, “improve” meant “farm.” If, after six months, the settler decided he wanted to purchase the land, it was only $1.25 per acre. But this was a more far-reaching act than cheap land might suggest. The only rules for obtaining land were that the potential homesteader be twenty-one years old and the head of a household. This could be a woman. It could be an African American. Anyone who met the criteria could buy a homestead.28
The other benefit of the Homestead Act was creating a political and economic climate that was good for small farmers. Along with the Morrill Land-Grant Act, designed to create agricultural colleges, also signed in 1862, the government had clearly acknowledged the importance of farming to the success of the country.29
As the century continued, people kept on coming. Poles began arriving on the Great Plains in the 1870s, with major settlements in central Nebraska and eastern North Dakota, and smaller farming communities in Kansas and South Dakota.30 Italians escaping poverty in Italy in the 1880s originally worked as laborers, but those who stayed on the Great Plains, mostly in Nebraska and Kansas, worked and saved and eventually owned farms or businesses.31 Czechs were among the largest European groups to make their homes on the Great Plains, starting in 1865 (when the Civil War ended) and continuing through 1914. Most Czechs left their homeland because there was too little land to farm. Average farms were ten to fifty acres, and that wasn’t nearly enough to support their families. Those who didn’t have enough money even for the relatively low costs of homesteading often headed for big cities to find work, while those who had the resources settled on the Great Plains, where they lived on farms or in small farming communities.32
The Chinese came to the United States during the Gold Rush in the 1840s and then in even larger numbers to work on the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. When attitudes toward the Chinese turned ugly on the West Coast in the 1870s, the Chinese migrated to the Midwest, which was more welcoming. Chicago and St. Louis were the first midwestern cities with Chinese populations. In time, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, and Ohio all had significant Chinese populations.33 Like many other immigrants, they generally chose to live near other Chinese. The most common businesses they started were laundries and restaurants, and by 1900, Chicago was home to 430 Chinese laundries and 167 Chinese restaurants.34 Most of these early arrivals in the Midwest were Cantonese, and their culinary specialties soon became American favorites.35 In 1910, the Chinese community in Chicago relocated to the current site of Chinatown, where the handsome Chinese architecture and numerous restaurants soon made it a popular tourist destination.36
Following the Civil War, many African Americans took advantage of the Homestead Act to create all–African American farming communities. Their experience growing corn in the South was an asset, and a dozen “colonies” were built, primarily in Kansas. The farms found ready markets for crops in the towns that grew up in their midst. Businesses were created to serve the communities and surrounding farms. African Americans could succeed and prosper while avoiding the prejudice and violence of mixed communities in the Midwest or South.37 Sadly, the Great Depression, which hit all U.S. agriculture so ferociously, devastated these small farming communities. The only one of these African American towns that remains today is Nicodemus, Kansas. Once home to two newspapers, three general stores, several hotels, three churches, a school, a literary society, a bank, and many private homes, Nicodemus dwindled when the railroad passed it by. The now-small town has been designated a National Historic Site.38
Most African Americans did not settle in these towns, however. Donna Pierce, food journalist and founder of Black America Cooks, relates that, while African Americans spread across the Midwest to farms and small towns, cities were a particularly big draw, especially Chicago:
The Union Stock Yards offered employment to thousands, but the biggest employer of African Americans was the railroads, and pretty much all trains led to Chicago. Everyone was traveling, so there were a lot of jobs with the railroads. African Americans were often porters or brakemen. Then, in 1868, George Pullman created the dining car and started serving food on trains (as opposed to stopping in towns along the route and expecting people to bolt down whatever food was on offer). Soon, the trains were serving a quarter of a million meals per day—and almost all the cooks and waiters were African Americans. Before long, the Pullman Company was the largest employer of African Americans in the region.
Pierce notes that culinary traditions were among the few traditions that African Americans were able to maintain—and because African Americans traveled and ate in different cars than white customers, there was demand for familiar foods, from fried chicken to corn cakes. Pierce says, “Interviewing African Americans in Chicago, I find that many of them still have connections, or at least a deeper knowledge, of the southern towns from which their ancestors migrated. They brought a lot of corn traditions with them. They still value cornbread and creamed corn, corn on the cob and grits. Chicago’s African Americans tend to add a little sugar to their cornbread. Many southerners don’t add sugar, but here, the sugar makes up for the differences in the sweetness of the corn. Cornbread and corn muffins are still an important part of family gatherings.”
Chicago-based culinary correspondent Jocelyn Delk Adams confirms this connection with her heritage:
Both of my parents were born in Mississippi to families that farmed corn. My mother’s side of the family lived in Winona, Mississippi, where my big daddy (grandfather) had a farm overflowing with a harvest of corn, peas, and other vegetables. My big mama (grandmother) believed in preserving the corn that my mom, aunts, and uncles picked. She’d shuck the corn, cut the kernels off the cobs, lightly sauté the kernels, and then freeze them in bags for convenience. She loved adventurous corn recipes ranging from fried corn and seasonal corn stews to a corn relish that everyone called “cha cha.”
My father’s side of the family, from Meridian, Mississippi, practiced more traditional corn preparations. Once the harvest of corn was picked, my father’s grandmother would hand grind the corn to create fresh cornmeal for homemade cornbread.
My current recipe experimentation with corn really evolved from both of their preparation customs. I love cornbread, and today, I take traditional cornbread recipes, similar to those created by my father’s side of the family, and add my own twist, like my big mama did. This enables me to truly identify with the heritage and traditions of both sides of my family.
Pierce notes that her own family was “five generations from Mobile. They were Creole cooks, from ‘south of the South.’ I was writing a recipe for my mother’s corn cakes, and I realized it really was mother’s recipe, not my grandmother’s. My mom had adopted corn cakes when she moved to the Midwest, to Columbia, Missouri. We had corn cakes and red beans at least once a week.”
By the 1920s, there were restaurants on Chicago’s South Side that specialized in foods that were part of the African American heritage, and these places became increasingly important as African Americans continued to move north. Cornbread, corn cakes, or creamed corn appeared at every meal. It would not be until the 1960s that these African American culinary traditions would come to be known as “Soul Food,” but the connection to southern foodways was always there. What started out merely as comfort food in time became an element of identity and anchor to the past for many urban African Americans.39
It might seem logical that a section on tamales would belong with Mexican immigration in the next chapter. Tamales are definitely a big part of Mexican culture (though they are far more widespread in Latin America than just Mexico) and are especially important among the communities of migrant workers who come north each year to work on the farms of the Midwest.40 However, the tamales that became popular in the Midwest in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and positively iconic on Chicago’s South Side, generally had only a distant connection with Mexicans. Of course, if one orders tamales in a Mexican restaurant today, that is a different matter. However, the history of the tamale in the Midwest is complex, with a blend of cultures and influences and a dash of West Coast marketing.
The timing of the introduction of tamales is not precisely known, and the exact mix of influences is also a bit vague, but at least some of the tamales that ended up in the Midwest moved north with African Americans. Donna Pierce relates, “The Mississippi Delta had big Chinese and Mexican populations, as well as African American. The Chinese fed the sharecroppers and the Mexicans who worked with them. While there are many explanations of how the hot tamale became an iconic food of the Delta, it seems likely that the region’s African Americans adopted the idea of the tamale from the Mexicans, but made it their own. Those Delta tamales moved north as African Americans moved north. I can remember all my friends from St. Louis eating those Delta tamales when I was growing up.”
Tamales of both Mexican and Mississippi Delta origins began to appear around the same time, though the Delta version likely came a bit later. Armour Packing Co. was marketing canned, Mexican-style chicken tamales, produced in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1898. However, Delta-style tamales, introduced and sold by African Americans, were becoming an addiction in Chicago by the turn of the century. The African American sellers became known as “Molly Men.” Their selling was celebrated in songs such as Herbert Ingraham’s “The Hot Tamale Man,” published in 1909; “Here Comes the Hot Tamale Man,” by Fred Rose and Charlie Harrison, published in 1926; “Molly Man” by Red Hot Ole Mose, recorded in Chicago in 1928; and bluesman Robert Johnson’s composition “They’re Red Hot” from 1936.41
As African Americans from the Mississippi Delta carried their tamale traditions northward, those traditions were often adopted by other African Americans. In the early 1900s, African American street food vendors in Chicago were selling Delta-style tamales—or at least tamales strongly influenced by the Mississippi Delta tamale tradition. However, Chicago being Chicago, the tamale story quickly became complicated, with multiple influences and often blurred edges as to which tamales were from which source.
Microbiologist and food historian Peter Engler believes that Chicago tamale history differs from tamale history elsewhere in the Midwest. He says the available evidence indicates that the early 1890s were when the first Mexican tamales appeared in Chicago, though there were very few Mexicans in Chicago at that time. Engler relates,
José María Velasco, one of Mexico’s most famous painters in the late 1800s, visited Chicago in 1893, to help set up the Mexican pavilion at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. Velasco wrote home that he had encountered a man on the street who had a tin box with a white cloth hanging from it that said Mexican Tamales. He was selling the tamales for one cent a piece. Velasco asked the seller if he were Mexican, and the man said yes—so Velasco bought ten tamales. Velasco’s letter is the first evidence we have that Mexicans probably introduced tamales in northern cities, but the tamales sold in the North didn’t remain purely Mexican for long.
The real deluge began when bands of tamale vendors spread eastward out of San Francisco. Robert H. Putnam, founder of the California Chicken Tamale Co., wanted to introduce San Francisco tamales to the entire nation. His employees, dressed in white uniforms, spanned the country in the late 1800s, bringing tamales to big cities and small rural towns. However, Chicago was their first target.42 “The first photo of a tamale vendor was published in 1896,” Engler states. “The tin canister of hot tamales in that photo advertised California Chicken Tamales.” Engler continues,
San Francisco tamales were definitely Mexican-influenced, though the ethnicity of the vendors was variable. The popularity of tamales exploded. By 1905, there were hundreds of tamale sellers on the streets, often late at night. They’d go bar to bar, which is actually how many vendors still sell tamales today. There was a real tamale craze. It was an easy way to make a living. There was no capital needed to start a business, and large numbers of recent arrivals of all ethnicities—almost none of them Mexican—got into selling tamales. With the exception of the small groups coming from San Francisco, these were single vendors or families producing and selling the tamales.
By this time, we begin to see mention that African Americans were selling tamales, as well. However, their tamales appeared to be influenced by the tamales indigenous to the Mississippi Delta. The difference between the two types of tamales is that Mexican tamales are made with masa (lime-treated corn-flour dough) and wrapped in cornhusks, while Delta tamales are made with cornmeal and, at least in Chicago, are usually wrapped in foil or parchment. Also, Mexican tamales are steamed, while Delta tamales are boiled in spicy liquid, so the Delta tamales are spicy and wet.
The date of the creation of the first Mississippi Delta tamales remains uncertain, but by the end of the 1800s, they were definitely part of life on the Delta. Today, it is said there are as many versions of Delta tamales as there are people making them. On the Delta, simmering is the one universal element of preparation.43 With so many versions in the place of their origin, is it any surprise that they would continue to change when they reached the North? (And with so much travel between regions and sharing of influences, Engler says he sometimes wonders if the Chicago tamale might not have influenced the Delta tamale.)
“By the 1930s, Chicago-based commercial tamale businesses that are still around today were started,” Engler observes.
By this time, the tamales being made in Chicago were pretty much their own type of tamale, made with cornmeal, but not always simmered in spicy liquid. Both Delta-style and Mexican tamales continued to exist, but the large-scale manufacturers were all making Chicago tamales. By this time, tamales belonged to everyone, not just the African Americans or Mexicans who had brought them to the Midwest. Two of the top tamale companies, Tom Tom and Supreme, are owned by Greek and Armenian families, respectively. Tamales manufactured in Chicagoland are extruded, rather than handmade. They are easy to carry and stay hot for a remarkably long time. Virtually all the old Chicago hot-dog stands were carrying Chicago-style tamales by the 1930s—and still carry them. Tamales are big business in Chicago. Altering the tamales further, a few vendors on Chicago’s South Side created the mother-in-law, which is a tamale covered in chili, or the mother-in-law sandwich, with the tamale placed in a hotdog bun and covered in chili. So tamales in Chicago have definitely become their own category.
Engler concludes, “Mexicans began arriving in large numbers around the beginning of the 1900s. With them, tamale-making was smaller-scale, with families focusing on other dishes. The first Mexican restaurants began opening in the 1930s, though the first restaurant I’ve found documented, El Puerto de Veracruz, probably opened in the ’20s. And they had tamales on their menu.”
However, the rest of the story of Mexicans in the Midwest will be saved for the next chapter.