Chow Down Chicago: Good Eats from the Windy City

The Smashing Pumpkins became a vital part of Chicago’s alternative-rock scene in the early 1990s. Their albums Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness met with great commercial success. Their combination of dreamy guitar melodies, angstful introspective lyrics, and lead singer Billy Corgan’s unique love-it-or-hate-it voice that vacillated wildly between gentle and fierce made them a grunge mainstay. The band has been through many lineup changes over the years, with Corgan being the constant driving force. The current lineup consists of Corgan, original guitarist James Iha, original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and guitarist Jeff Schroeder. The Smashing Pumpkins released Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts in 2022 and this year. The band pays homage to their hometown in the song “Tonight, Tonight”  which features the lyrics “The embers never fade in your city by the lake.” Their song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”   is featured on many a Halloween playlist with its...

The Chicago-style hot dog and the Maxwell Street Polish are two delicious staples of Chicago cuisine that trace their roots to the Maxwell Street Market. I’ll take you through the history of both dishes . But first, here’s a little background on Chicago’s most famous street market. The Maxwell Street Market, located near Halsted Street and Roosevelt Road, was originally established as an open-air street market by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s. The market was officially recognized by the City of Chicago in 1912. Eventually, other European immigrants and African Americans started to come to the market. It was known as a place where you could buy everything from shoelaces to expensive clothes to ethnic food. It was also known as much for its outdoor musical performances as its goods for sale. When blues musicians plugged in their amplifiers on Maxwell Street so that they could be heard above the din of the market, Chicago-style blues, a forerunner of rock n’ roll,...

The pink high-rise Edgewater Beach Apartments on Sheridan Road near Bryn Mawr stand as a reminder of the similar-looking yellow Edgewater Beach Hotel structures that once stood nearby. During its heyday in the 1920s through the 1940s, the hotel was a popular spot with honeymooners and celebrities alike. The hotel featured a large private beach and seaplane service to downtown. You could also eat one heck of a salad there. Chef Arnold Shircliffe worked as the catering manager at the hotel. An extensive collection of his salad recipes, A Book of Salads: The Edgewater Beach Hotel Salad Book , was first published in 1926. It was known as “the bible of salad,” according to the Chicago Tribune archives. In this book, Shircliffe elevates salads into works of art. Presentation is key, as many of the recipes describe how to artfully arrange the ingredients on the plate. Many of the salads are topped with decorative rosettes of cream cheese and other garnishes. Many also include unexpected ...

The full moon in June is known to some Native American peoples as the Strawberry Moon. This year’s Strawberry Moon falls on Saturday, June 3rd. Native Americans name the full moons as a way to track the seasons. For example, the full moon in September is known to many as the Harvest Moon, and the February full moon is the Snow Moon. The Algonquian, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota people use the name Strawberry Moon to refer to the sweet, red berries that ripen in the month of June. The Haida people similarly refer to the June full moon as the Berries Ripen Moon. This strawberry-rhubarb cobbler recipe is less labor-intensive than strawberry-rhubarb pie and just as delicious, making it an easy way to celebrate the Strawberry Moon. Strawberry and rhubarb are often paired together in desserts for several reasons. For practical purposes, rhubarb and strawberries are both late spring-early summer crops, and both peak at around the same time. Also, the tangy sourness of rhubarb balances the ...

Chicago has many ties to the chocolate industry. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 featured a chocolate pavilion, a cocoa mill, a 38-ft. chocolate statue, and German chocolate-processing machines on display. Milton Hershey bought one of these machines and took it back to his home state of Pennsylvania to start a successful business you may have heard about. Chicago is also home to Fannie May chocolates, Frango Mints (sold at Macy’s State Street store), and the Blommer Chocolate Company, a chocolate wholesaler that operates a chocolate processing plant in the West Loop. You can read more about Chicago’s ties to the chocolate industry here . An enterprising mother also found success as a candy maker in Chicago in the early twentieth century.  Ora Snyder began selling candy in 1909 to make ends meet after her husband became ill and had to leave his job. According to the Newberry Library's Source Material  blog, Snyder had learned to make chocolate confections as a child. Her own...

  Since today is Easter Sunday, you may find yourself with an oversupply of decorated hard-boiled eggs. What to do with them? I suggest making deviled eggs and then burying the eggshells in the garden to help your plants grow. Dyeing and decorating eggs has traditionally been done at Easter time to celebrate new life. Ukrainians are known for their particularly intricate style of decorating Easter eggs, which are called pysanky . To make pysanky, the artist dips the egg in progressively darker colors of dye and uses a stylus tool to draw designs on the egg with melted beeswax before dipping the egg in each new color. At the end of the process, the beeswax is melted off, revealing a multicolored design. The directions that came in Luba’s Ukrainian Easter Egg Decorating Kit, a very old kit that I inherited from my parents, state that “These eggs are used for decorative purposes and are not to be eaten.” Granted, if you have just spent hours decorating an egg, you probably would wan...

Music would not be what it is today without Chicago blues legend Muddy Waters. He was the first blues musician to use an electric guitar and amplifier, which served as the inspiration for rock n' roll and heavy metal.     Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Clarksdale, Mississippi on April 4 of 1913 or 1915. After World War II, Muddy Waters moved to Chicago at a time when other Black performers from Mississippi including Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf were doing the same. Muddy recorded his first hit, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” in 1948 in Chicago. More hits would follow. The Rolling Stones took their name from the Waters song “Rollin’ Stone.”   Waters first lived in a house on Lake Park Avenue in Kenwood and then moved to suburban Westmont. Musicians like Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and members of The Rolling Stones were known to spend time at both of the Waters homes. Waters passed away in 1983; he is buried in Restvale Cemetery ...