Category Archives: American Midwest Foodways Scholar’s Grant

Ignite The Conversation: A Exploration Into Chicago-style BBQ

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Podcast

We’ve all heard of the classic BBQ styles from regions like Kansas City, Memphis or Texas-style. But what about Chicago-style BBQ?

From Rib tips to Hot Links to Mild Sauce and more, Chicago Chef and Pitmaster Dominique Leach of the Black-Women-Queer-Owned and award-winning restaurant Lexington Betty’s Smokehouse, plus the 2023 winner and the current reigning “MASTER OF ‘CUE” of the Food Network’s Hit Show BBQ Brawl , is making it her mission to further define this unique style and put it on the map in 2024. And she’s calling on a few more experts to help! Continue reading →

The Impact of American Indian Boarding School Education on Great Lakes Indigenous Foodways

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A Case Study of the Lac du Flambeau Reservation

Podcast

By: Amelia V. Katanski
$3000 Recipient of an American Midwest Foodways Scholar’s Grant

The US has a clear history of limiting Indian people’s abilities to harvest, hunt, fish for, or access their traditional foods in order to assert control over Indian communities and advance national policy objectives. Indian boarding school education is one significant way federal actions attempted to subvert native foodways. Students spent half of their time in the classroom and half working on the school farm, learning mainstream agricultural practices in the context of a boarding school curriculum that devalued indigenous knowledge and supported allotment, in which tribally-owned reservation land was broken into homesteads intended to be owned by individuals and run as family farms, producing food that mirrored European-American dietary norms and supplanting endangered traditional foodways. Continue reading →

Midwestern Newspaper Food Editors: Ruth Ellen Church, Clarice Rowlands & Peggy Daum

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Presented by
Kimberly Wilmot Voss, PhD
American Midwest Foodways Scholar’s Grant recipient, 2013

This talk is the story of three significant Midwestern food editors from the 1950s and 1960s. Ruth Ellen Church joined the Chicago Tribune as cooking editor in 1936 and oversaw one of the first test kitchens at a newspaper. She published many cookbooks—several under the pen name of Mary Meade. She remained the food editor until 1974 and became the nation’s first newspaper wine editor in 1962. Clarice Rowlands joined the Milwaukee Journal as food editor in 1943 based on an interest she developed as a member of the 4-H Club in high school. She occasionally wrote under the pen name Alice Richards. Peggy Daum began working in the women’s pages in the 1950s and was the food editor at the Milwaukee Journal from 1968 to 1988. She initiated the creation of what is now known as the Association of Food Journalists and was its first president. These women documented what home cooks were making and what was served in fine restaurants. They judged cooking contests and oversaw recipe exchange programs. They also had a lot of fun. Continue reading →