The Bon Appétit of Milwaukee

On "Taste of Home," heartland cooks, and what we lose when we think we have nothing to learn from them

Sometime Wednesday night, after I’d watched the last vestiges of the American Experiment crumble in front of me like an old pencil eraser, I decided to make a grapefruit meringue pie.

I had no reason to suspect it would be good—I’d never heard of a grapefruit meringue pie or seen one on a dessert menu, presumably for a reason—but I figured if a bunch of based cowboys could Leroy Jenkins a federal building with almost no repercussions, I could choke down some bad grapefruit custard.

I’ll cop here to a nugget of delusional hope that I was the first person to think of grapefruit meringue. A small part of me believed I was on the verge of a minor discovery—not on the level of penicillin, mind you, but maybe the conveyor belt. A larger, more rational part of me thought, surely, some jagweed at Bon Appétit has done this.

Instead, the first hit when I typed “GRAPEFRUIT MERINGUE PIE” into Google was a recipe from Taste of Home. Barbara Soliday from Winter Haven, Florida, had beaten me to the punch…in 2009.

The fact that I was surprised is a reminder of how much I’ve been duped into believing that the only worthwhile food media is produced in New York by beautiful people in monogrammed Hedley & Bennet aprons.

Stay with me. I promise this is going somewhere.

Taste of Home is an unfussy, unfashionable magazine for home cooks headquartered in Milwaukee and a snapshot of heartland cooking in any given year. It’s been around since the early ‘90s, and the format hasn’t changed much. Readers submit most of the recipes, which a test kitchen tests and tweaks; the winners are published in text-dense columns with no-nonsense names like “FEED YOUR FAMILY FOR 99 CENTS A PLATE.” It has the highest circulation of any food magazine in the country.

Taste of Home was also my first exposure to food media. My mom was a subscriber all through my childhood. I would pore over every glossy issue as soon as it arrived, flipping past recipes for hamburger stew and “salsa corn” to hunt for a little hidden drawing of a toothpick. If you found the toothpick, you could write in with the location and be entered to win a set of Le Creuset enameled cookware. It might as well have been the Holy Grail. I wanted that cookware—or I knew that my mom wanted it, which to me was the same thing.

(n.b. We never did win. I’m a grown-up now and can afford to buy my own Le Creuset, but that feels like an act of class betrayal. I’m still using the same $30 Dutch oven I have for the past 10 years.)

The recipes in Taste of Home have changed along with the times and contributors, but they’ve always been practical, geared toward working parents who love food and cooking but aren’t going to make a whole production of it, thank you very much. They’re also not as unfashionable as you might expect. I grabbed a recent issue from my bookshelf and found recipes for mughlai chicken, marzipan stollen, beef short ribs with tomato fig chutney (a chef named Todd is serving some version of that in a “gastropub” in every city right now).

In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised me that Barbara from Winter Haven had the top Google hit for grapefruit meringue pie. Home cooks have been experimenting and inventing new recipes since long before Escoffier boiled his first oeuf, and they didn’t stop just because someone invented culinary school.

Nor have they needed prestige food media to give them permission. Barbara, bless her heart, didn’t wait for a fancy racist millionaire to decide that grapefruit meringue was winter’s cold new trend. I imagine she just looked at the box of overripe grapefruits she’d bought from the high school band boosters (on, Blue Devils!) and thought, “well, why not?”

I refrigerated this overnight before slicing, and the meringue pulled away from the crust a bit—pastry people, please advise.

I want to be clear here that I’m not trying to be a “bad things are good, actually” contrarian or imply that magazines like Taste of Home are “better” than high-status pubs like Food & Wine or Bon Appétit. I read those magazines with the zeal of someone hunting for a drawing of a toothpick. Hell, I’ve written for one of them.

But I’ve been thinking more and more lately about who we anoint as tastemakers and who they’re taste-making for. With few exceptions, the people with the most cultural capital and influence in the food world are coastal chefs and magazine writers. We look to them as experts—as people who have taken in the most information and can therefore build on it for us, synthesize it for us. We look at them as people who have seen it all before and who can tell us what’s worth seeing again.

But our anointed experts don’t often look closely or curiously at home cooks in general and the Midwest in particular, and so they miss out on a source of information that might make them better guides. When they do consider “flyover country,” it’s often through a narrow, theme-park Americana lens that flattens present-day communities into nostalgic relics.

Take, for example, this early-aughts NYT column that cooed about Taste of Home’s “folksy copy” and capped a description of a football-themed snack spread with “no editor could make this stuff up.” A visit to the magazine’s former Greendale, WI, campus might as well have been to Martian Mayberry. At one point, the writer expressed surprise at seeing people drinking wine at the on-campus restaurant. Wine!

(The shock is understandable. Wisconsinites are famous for their sobriety.)

I’m pretty confident the editors at Taste of Home subscribe to NYT Cooking and read Bon Appétit. I’ll eat my shoe a la Werner Herzog if the reverse is true.

This is my point, I think: not all of the kvetching about “coastal elites” stems from economic or racial resentment. Some of it’s earned frustration at being told over and over again—implicitly, but loudly—You’re not the kind of person who has anything to teach me. You’re not the kind of person I’m willing to learn from.

There are benefits, of course, to being ignored. Sometimes, the Midwest feels like one of the last parts of the country that hasn’t been air-chilled and commodity-packaged into a ~trend~ for a national audience, and there’s something about that I find infuriating and freeing in equal measure. Midwest cuisine is so much more than Snickers salad and cream-cheese pickle roll-ups and lunchroom Scotcheroos. But it’s also those things—and I don’t want to have to disavow them to be taken seriously.

I should also own up to the fact that I’m partly talking about myself, here. Sometimes, I still get Jealous Countess energy—seething self-absorption about how I’m not someone the Cool National Food Media kids pay attention to. A few weeks ago, sitting around a fire, I said to some friends, “I thought if I was good enough, it would have happened to me by now”—some immutable, obvious “it” I didn’t feel the need to qualify.

But I’m not, of course—not “good enough.” On my best day, I might be Taste of Home. I’m only now starting to realize what an honor and a pleasure that would be.

What a pleasure, and what a fucking relief.

POSTSCRIPT

Barbara was right—the grapefruit meringue pie worked. I don’t think it would work all the time, though, and I understand why it’s not more popular. I made it with super sweet, Ruby Red grapefruits in January, and it was round and bitter and bright—but I can see how the more vomit-y, astringent notes of off-season grapefruit would dominate and make for a less soft and sunny pie.

POSTSCRIPT II / SUPER COOL EVENT ALERT:

For the KC Library, I’m leading some panel discussions with restaurateurs and industry workers this week about the past, present, and future of the dining scene in KC. What have we lost, how have we changed, and where are we going? You can RSVP at the links below if you want to listen to me talk and chat with Important People Who Know Things. All three are virtual events that run from 12–1 PM CST on the day, with time built in for audience questions.

If no one chimes in with “More of a comment than a question, but…” I’m going to be super disappointed in you all.

Monday event
Wednesday event
Friday event