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It took me a few days to make my way through Mike Baruch’s sprawling, self-published Street Food Chicago, a 406-page cookbook/love letter to the city’s blue-collar cuisine. “Street food” is a bit of misnomer, since the overwhelming majority of items can’t be bought on any city thoroughfare (or have I managed to overlook an Uncle Tony’s Jumbo Canoli cart?). Tavern snacks, corner bakery goods, lunch counter plates, family recipes, and the canon of Chicago fast food–dogs, pizza, Italian beef–dominate, and the emphasis is on Italian and Polish food, though a goodly number of other ethnicities, from Greek to Korean, are represented.
And there are tons of workable classic recipes–some nine just for giardiniera and other pickled vegetables. Many, like the one for the Maxwell Street pork chop sandwich, are so iconic it wouldn’t occur to me to try them in my own kitchen. But the depth of Baruch’s experience is really on display in his inclusion of less noted indigenous foods such as the jibarito, the Big Baby, and the mother-in-law, a tamale on a bun with chili whose profile in the national food media, I warn you, will rise a great deal in the coming year.
