click to enlarge PHOTO BY TOM UHLENBROCK/TNS
Jim Davison enjoys corn dogs at the Cozy Dog Drive In in Springfield.
Jim Davison enjoys corn dogs at the Cozy Dog Drive In in Springfield.
PHOTO BY TOM UHLENBROCK/TNS
Writing about diners and diner food lately (see “Off the menu” and “Breakfast of a champion”) has left me hungry to know what other contributions to the nation’s waistline can be traced to this part of the world. Popular history has it that downstate Illinois was a culinary alchemist’s lair, but was it?
The first question you ask about food stories is one of the first you should ask about food itself: Is it local? I was aware that the company formerly known as Archer Daniels Midland Co. had invented textured vegetable protein, which they market as Total Soy Protein. Alas, apparently, this staple of the nation’s school and prison cafeterias was invented in that firm’s labs in Minnesota, not in Decatur.
Was the corn dog invented in Springfield in 1946, as it is widely believed in Springfield? Cooking wieners in a batter coating was pioneered in Texas in the 1920s. These versions were baked in sufficient numbers that at least one company marketed a machine for the purpose. Ed Waldmire Jr. was served just such a dog at a diner in Muskogee during the war. He and his friend, Don Strand, devised an improved version he called “crusty curs” while later stationed in Amarillo, where they served them at the USO club and at the base PX. In the end, the difference between the corn dog that Waldmire ate in Oklahoma and the corn-battered Cozy Dogs on sticks he served to his customers in Springfield is the difference between the Friedrich Hayek that Rauner read in college and the Turnaround Agenda he’s been trying to sell to Illinoisans – the basic ideas were not his, but he assembled them into what he thought would be a tastier package.
You’d think that being the birthplace of William Jennings Bryan and IT publisher/editor Fletcher Farrar would be enough distinction for a town in Marion County, but no. Salem insists that it also is the birthplace of Kraft Miracle Whip, the bottled dressing that is an essential ingredient in Midwest cuisine blanc. The story goes that Miracle Whip is in fact the “X-tra Fine Salad Dressing” that was invented by Salem’s Max Crosset and served at his Main Street café. Crosset sold the recipe in 1931 for $300 to Kraft Foods, which firm renamed it. The company, however, says that’s just a bunch of mayonnaise, and even the corporati sometimes tell the truth. Big companies buy up the recipes for similar products as a matter of routine, to head off potential competitors, which I suspect is what happened to Crosset’s creation.
Robinson is the home of the Heath Bar, invented by the Heath brothers, who opened a confectionary on the west side of the square in 1914. In the 1920s they began marketing a version of a toffee bar known as “Heath English Toffee.” The Heaths thought to coat it in chocolate, which is what makes a Heath Bar more than toffee. It’s also why their firm ended up in the chocolate-stained hands of Hershey, which still makes it in Robinson. (The Heath Bar I recall from my long-ago boyhood was smallish; the makers reconfigured it so it looked like every other candy bar on the shelf. How right Lincoln was when he said, “It will all become one thing….”)
The Heath Bar company states on its website, “At some point they reportedly acquired a toffee recipe, via a traveling salesman, from a Greek confectioner in another part of the state.” Steve Frangos, an historian of Greek-American culture, writes that Greeks in Chicago widely assert that the mysterious Greek confectioner was Peter Vriner, who in 1898 opened a shop on Main Street in Champaign. “Vriner’s confectionary was located next to a vaudeville theater and near Champaign’s railroad station and it became popular with patrons of both.” So that’s one for the downstaters.
No one is daft enough to say that Port DeFrates, the Springfield restaurateur who gave us what became Ray’s Chilli, invented either chili or chili in a can. He tasted some in Texas he liked so much that (as the Ray’s corporate website sez) “he somehow got the recipe and took it back home and started making it for family and friends in 1914.” There’s a story in that “somehow,” I bet, but I don’t know it. What Port DeFrates did invent was chili with two “l”s. The General Assembly once proclaimed Illinois as the “chilli” capital of the civilized world, which it undoubtedly was, as everyplace else made chili. Spelling chilli with two l’s was no doubt an error, but local manufacturers have bravely insisted that the “illi” was intended to honor Illinois. Believe it if you want; I don’t.
Contact James Krohe Jr. at [email protected].