Chow Down Chicago: Good Eats from the Windy City

The Chicago area is located on the ancestral lands of indigenous tribes such as the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois Nations. The name  Chicago  comes from  shikaakwa,  a word for “wild onion” used by the Miami and Illinois peoples. Indigenous people in the Chicago region faced many hardships after Europeans arrived in the area. By the early 1800s, the number of Native Americans in the region was severely diminished due to disease and warfare brought by the Europeans. A series of treaties forced the tribes to cede their land to the American government. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 proposed the relocation of indigenous tribes west of the Mississippi River, and several more relocation efforts would happen in the following years. Through the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Indian children were taken from their homes and sent to boarding schools with the mission to assimilate them into white society.  During th...

  Giardiniera is a vital piece of Chicago culinary history. Giardiniera means “female gardener” or “mixed pickles” in Italian, and it refers to a mixture of vegetables marinated in oil, vinegar, or both.  According to the Chicago Tribune , giardiniera originated in Italy as a way to preserve vegetables during the winter months. The Italian version of giardiniera usually consists of onion, celery, zucchini, carrots, and cauliflower pickled in vinegar. It is not spicy and is eaten as an antipasto or with salads.  Giardiniera came to Chicago along with the wave of Italian immigrants in the late 1800s. Chicagoans put their own spin on the condiment by adding spicy peppers to the vegetable mix and marinating it in oil. Chicago-style giardiniera is usually made with serrano, or sport, peppers and some combination of celery, bell peppers, olives, pimentos, carrots, and cauliflower marinated in vegetable, soybean, or olive oil. Some recipes also use crushed red pepper flakes....

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...