Eight different sausages were served for lunch at the inaugural symposium of the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance last month. There were Chicago Polishes, Wisconsin brats, Illinois smoked bratwurst, Toledo-bred Hungarian sausages, and Springfield-style corn dogs. A Michigan hot dog got the Coney Island treatment (which originated in southeast Michigan), and a Vienna Beef wiener got the classic Chicago fixings. And then there was the south-side specialty known as the mother-in-law, where the so-called sausage is a meat-stuffed tamale covered with chili and served on a bun.
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After presentations on the science of sausage by Iowa State professor Robert Rust and small-scale sausage production by meat-market owner Randy Ream, Vienna Beef VP Bob Schwartz must have sensed the audience slipping into a collective postprandial coma. “I want everybody to stand up,” he said. “Put your hands in the air, count to three, and shout hot dog. One, two, three!” Academics, chefs, journalists, and regular food enthusiasts complied without argument.
The idea of creating an organization “dedicated to celebrating, exploring, and preserving unique food traditions and their cultural contexts in the American Midwest,” as the Foodways Web site puts it, has been around for a while. Back in 2000, scholars at Michigan State hit up the National Endowment for the Humanities for the funding to get one started, inspired by the Southern Foodways Alliance, which sponsors everything from oral histories to documentaries to conferences.
At last month’s sausage symposium food historian Andy Smith put forth the controversial idea that a hamburger is a type of sausage. During researcher Peter Engler’s presentation on the mother-in-law, he ventured that “a lot of Greeks were involved in the early tamale trade.” Bob Schwartz offered that Vienna Beef hot dogs are made from 75 percent bull meat because it has good color and binds well. Trudy Paradis, the grandmotherly author of Milwaukee Germans: Their History, Their Food, brought along a giant plush brat, explaining that such items were popular at tailgate parties outside Miller Park. “Do you do that?” she asked the audience.
