Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.
—Charles Baxter, A Feast of Love
IN THE MIDWEST, OUR LOVE OF BAKING IS REAL AND IT’S DEEP. As “America’s Bread Basket,” we believe in No Carb Left Behind. We love our local bakeries where we’re treated like family as much as we love to bake at home. Firing up our ovens gets us through long, cold winters, while our kitschy-but-irresistible icebox desserts delight at every summer picnic and potluck.
Midwestern recipes tend to be handed down through generations, most with dynamic immigrant influences. While the big cities of the Midwest have become culinary hotspots, in many of the rural communities, your neighbors are far more likely to be farmers. The bounty of native grains, top-quality dairy, and vibrant seasonal fruits here are legendary. From the Dakotas to Ohio, from Minnesota to Missouri, the Midwest is a veritable quilt of twelve states full of history, values, recipes, people, and places that make up the baking culture of the Heartland.
But up until a few years ago, I thought about all this as much as I wondered about the differences between kolacky and kolaches. I was thousands of miles away from my own culinary history, and I felt great about the whole thing. When I’d left the Midwest for California at the age of twenty-five, a newly minted bride with my Ohio-born husband, I had no curiosity about the place where we grew up, especially not the food. I was all about heading west and discovering a life that was, to me, “actually interesting.” I was all about the glitter.
With my journalism degree in hand, I managed to work fairly often as a “generalist” television host and reporter, talking about everything from pop culture and red carpets to sports, cars, or technology. After several years, even with some of the world’s most gorgeous movie stars inches from my face and all that glittering, it started to feel stale. Glittering is exhausting.
As a counterpoint, to keep a record of my baking hobby and exercise my atrophying writing muscles, I set up a blog. During a textbook quarter-life crisis, it allowed me to consider what I actually loved doing. Landing a part-time job as a recipe writer for a Michelin-starred chef taught me volumes about great food and pastry, and the craft of writing recipes.
In late 2007, we left Los Angeles for San Francisco. Moving to one of the world’s great food cities accelerated all the second thoughts I was having about my already-shaky career path. And as a capper to all of that, within weeks of moving to the Bay Area, I was expecting our first baby. Sometimes the universe whispers to you to get your attention, and sometimes it lobs a few grenades at your head.
Once our daughter, Caroline, was born in August 2008, the blog became a place for me to not lose my mind as a new mother, and help overcome my postpartum depression. (I would throw myself back into work much sooner after our son, Andrew, was born in 2013 to avoid slipping back into the depths, which was exhausting, but relatively effective.) As the blog grew with intention, it was inspired by what was happening in California’s vibrant food scene and trend-focused bakeries. Through a series of fortuitous events, I was introduced to a marvelous editor who would open the door for me to write my first cookbook in 2012. I wrote two more cookbooks after that, and got back to doing television, but this time the food-focused kind, loving the work and feeling that any glittering that was required by the job was an honest, low-key sort that I could get behind.
In California, I never really thought much about the food from the Midwest, and especially not the baking. Why would I? Other parts of the country have much more definitive food personalities—we all know what to expect from sweets in the South, the edgy bakeries of Brooklyn, or even dessert in California (and yes, they do occasionally eat dessert out there). And I wasn’t alone in this thinking; not much light has been shone on the baking culture of the enormous swath of land in between those hotspots.
But with all the inventiveness encouraged in California, I still always craved tradition. I’d revisit it time and again, through family recipes, feeling almost rebellious for making my mom’s cherry shortcake squares with their lollipop red canned pie filling in my San Francisco kitchen, when loads of fresh cherries awaited at my neighborhood farmers’ market.
Over our five years in LA, and eight more in San Francisco, Scott and I started to wonder whether we were really meant to raise California kids. We’d talk about all the what-ifs, here and there, as most big transitions tend to begin. There weren’t really any serious plans in place to leave. But you know what happens when you start to put ideas out into the universe like that. Just as a tube pan of benign batter emerges from the oven as an airy, showstopping angel food cake, things were rising.
In October 2015, after thirteen years of California living, Scott got a job offer that would really change up his commute. With just a couple days’ consideration, we headed back to Chicago to be close to family and friends, increase our hot dog intake, and give our two young kids more seasons and less exposure to kale.
With a one-way flight, I left my flip-flops-in-January days behind, and moved back to my home state of Illinois. I didn’t know what I’d do next personally or professionally, or what motherhood would look like in the suburbs of Chicago, a place I had only known as a child-free person. But halfway through the flight, I had my answer. Barely off the tarmac, I planned to reexamine my midwestern roots and show them to my kids the best way I knew how—by firing up my oven. Even before my baking pans were unpacked, I was digging for recipes, newspaper clippings, and old community cookbooks. People I barely knew lent me their favorite church recipe collections, tabbed with Post-its to indicate their favorites. Exchanging recipes with a midwesterner is a bit like playing therapist—deeply buried memories are revealed, and everyone takes home extra reading material.
Taking a closer look at recipes I’d always considered pedestrian, I started connecting the dots. Visiting local bakeries and asking questions about things I’d eaten since childhood without a second thought was like peeling a big, juicy September apple. I began to see that within the simplest or most kitschy recipes lay a whole lot of intention and character. Here are my Five Baking Tenets of the Great Midwest.
BAKE BIG. Every cozy, big-batch recipe is a chance to slow down, gather, share, and connect. The 9 × 13 and the Bundt reign supreme.
BAKE EASY. Whether the recipe is old school or new, simple is beautiful. Be practical and resourceful with your time, effort, and ingredients. No fuss or fancy pants, please. And if there’s an extra push required, the results need to be worth it.
BAKE WITH PURPOSE. The through line of midwestern baking is context. Be it a birthday or a Wednesday, let the distinct seasons, local traditions, seasonal produce, stellar grains and dairy, or just the fickle weather outside your kitchen window inspire you to bake with intention. Working with local and seasonal ingredients might be buzzwords to some, but it’s a way of life in the Midwest. When Janice from up the block drops 11 pounds of backyard rhubarb on your front porch, you’ll find purpose real quick.
BAKE IN THE PRESENT. The midwestern recipe box tends to sit happily at the intersection of tradition and modernity. You might find just as many handwritten, 1960s-motif notecards and recipe labels torn off bags and boxes as you do printouts from Epicurious. In this book, I’ve opted to tent-pole the recipe list with the beloved midwestern pillars of Pie, Bars, and casual Counter Cakes, and fill out the story with recipes inspired by seasons and occasions, sprinkling them with techniques and tricks I’ve discovered from years of developing fresher, smarter recipes that are low on prepackaged and processed ingredients.
BAKE FROM THE PAST. Perhaps the most important tenet of all. Bake what your mama (and grandmama, and her mama) gave you. Heirloom recipes and family traditions are the backbone of midwestern baking.
But if there can be only one, all-encompassing way to explain what makes the baking story of the Midwest so captivating, it’s this: Without immigrants, this book you’re holding, its author, and the region’s unique culinary landscape at large, simply wouldn’t exist.
As it happens, I’m an optimal cross-section of the various cultures that make up this region. From German to Swedish, Irish to Greek and Italian, I’m a true Midwestern Mutt, with a sweet tooth that was raised on everything from Sicilian butter cookies to baklava. One glance at a midwesterner’s holiday cookie tin tells all you need to know about the impressive range of international influences in our baking traditions.
The second I defined these tenets of midwestern baking, I was all in. The fancy food world of the West Coast had nothing on this rediscovery. I had no problem telling whoever would listen that at Christmastime, I’d much rather pop open one of my family’s old Hostess fruitcake tins with the certainty of finding Gramma’s completely perfect sugar cookies, decorated only with a smattering of coarse rainbow sugar, than see the latest Pinterest hero on the dessert buffet. I was over the glittering. Give me that dull shine any day. It feels so good.
When I turned out the first batch of Gramma’s sugar cookies in our new house and brought them along to Christmas dinner at my auntie Amy’s, I became so much more emotional than any sane person should be over a cookie. When my kids grabbed two at a time from the tin, thinking no one saw them, just as I had at their ages, it sent me straight to the Kleenex zone. I was home, with my people, our food, our traditions, and so much more to learn with new eyes as a baker, writer, mother, and human.
As I unpacked the last of our boxes that December, leaving the sandals and skirts in storage, and clipping tags off my kids’ first-ever pairs of snow pants, I thought about how much our lives would change beyond the weather. I thought about what I want my kids’ midwestern upbringing to become, as they will now experience their childhood here, just as I did. I want my children to have detailed, active food memories tied to this place, to treasure the dull shine, and not have to run away from it to appreciate it, as I did.
I first wanted to create this book for them, a snapshot of the comfort baking from home—a new heirloom cookbook. But it’s for you, too—I’m hoping that everyone can find a little bit of themselves in these pages. If you are indeed from the Midwest, I’m betting you’ll find some things that are sweetly familiar. I’m so glad you’re here.
There’s a shocking amount of ground, heritage, and recipes to cover in a place so many people consider “fly-over country.” But that’s part of the beauty of the great Midwest. We like to lie low, and then out of nowhere, blow minds and take names with our hidden stories and talents. And then sort of play off the compliments. Dull shine at its very best.