









































< Kallen, Jeffrey. “Chicago: A Food Biography.”  
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 5:1 (2016): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2016

Review of:
Chicago: A Food Biography.
Daniel R. Block and Howard Rosing. Lanham: Rowman & 
Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xvi + 326, illustrations, bibliography, index. 

 
Review By: Jeffrey Kallen 
Trinity College Dublin 

One does not need to know Chicago first-hand to know that it has a special 
relationship with food. Many literary works of the early 20th century depict the 
social and material life of Chicago in terms of its restaurants and saloons, its 
meatpacking industry, and the struggles of ordinary people in the buying, selling, 
and consumption of food: think of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Upton 
Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916). In more 
recent times, the ‘Chicago Deep Dish Pizza’ can be found in the frozen food sections 
of supermarkets all over the world, while celebrity chef Rick Bayless (to pick just 
one example) operates from Chicago to entertain, to instruct, and to sell his vision 
of Mexican food. My own awareness of the city, having spent many family vacations 
in Chicago as a child, is firmly tied to the specialties of my grandmothers’ cooking 
and vegetable gardening, the ethnic diversity of the restaurant scene, and the 
visibility of large-scale food production. No doubt there are many of us who would 
need no persuading that a ‘food biography’ of Chicago offers rich opportunities.

Block and Rosing start with a geographical perspective that introduces the reader 
to the problems of drainage and transportation which faced the development of 
urban Chicago in the early 19th century, linking it with food production in and 
around the city. The geographical perspective broadens in Chapter Two, which 
considers regional ‘indigenous foodways’, relying on archaeological evidence and 
accounts which stem from contacts between native populations and later traders, 
colonists, and settlers. Chapter Three turns to migration. After a brief consideration 
of immigration from Great Britain, the discussion focuses on ten ethnic groups, 
treated in roughly chronological order. Irish, German (including Jewish), Polish, 



< Kallen, Jeffrey. “Chicago: A Food Biography.”  
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 5:1 (2016): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2016

Eastern European Jewish, Greek, African American, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, 
and Puerto Rican migration are considered. The next three chapters examine the 
more commercial side of food in Chicago. Chapter Four covers major wholesale 
food markets as well as the later development of chain supermarkets and the 
current revitalization of farmers’ markets. Chapter Five gives some details about 
older industries (such as meatpacking, grain production and wholesaling, and the 
manufacturing of crackers and chocolates) as well as contemporary developments 
that include, in a twist of fate, seitan-based substitutes for meat products. 
Chapter Six offers a historical perspective on restaurants in Chicago, subdivided to 
include ‘upscale’ and ‘fine dining’ restaurants, ethnicities (more or less reflecting 
the ethnic groups discussed in Chapter Three), and current movements involving 
molecular gastronomy and experimental approaches to the eating experience.

It is only in the final chapter that Block and Rosing start to provide details on 
‘street food, recipes, and cookbooks’ (205). A brief discussion of Chicago’s role 
in creating the McDonald’s empire is followed by a look at ‘street food’. This 
term in Chicago refers more to a type of food than to the physical location of 
sales, since, due to a combination of regulation and custom, most ‘street food’ is 
sold from fixed locations rather from peddling carts. Topics include the ‘tamale 
craze’ of the 1890s, Chicago’s distinctive approach to the hot dog (or ‘red hot’, 
to use the more idiomatic Chicago term), Italian beef sandwiches, gyros, pizza, 
and Chicken Vesuvio. Three recipes are provided. The second half of the chapter 
gives a historical overview of cookbooks based in or focused on Chicago.

There are no firm rules for judging what constitutes a biography of the food of 
a city. Readers who want to know about foods, drinks, and practices or beliefs 
associated with food will not find abundant information. For those who understand 
the ‘biography’ not in terms of food on the plate but in terms of food production 
and distribution, there is material here which touches on the rise and fall of the 
stockyards, the importance of Chicago at the centre of the railroad network (and, 
very briefly, the role that the invention of the refrigerated railroad car played in this 
development), and the current commercial role of major Chicago-based corporations. 
This story is not told in detail, though, so other sources must also be consulted. 
Given the vital role of neighborhood demography and commercial development in 
the Chicago story, it is unfortunate that there are no maps included. Since this book 
is about food, some basics of proofreading should have been observed: ‘dessert’ is 



< Kallen, Jeffrey. “Chicago: A Food Biography.”  
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 5:1 (2016): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2016

spelled ‘desert’ on several occasions (leading to references such as that to ‘marzipan-
topped deserts’ on p. 226), and references to ‘streudel’ (pp. 182, 226) appear to be 
to ‘strudel’, not ‘streusel’. There is a German sausage which can commonly be spelled 
as ‘Thüringer’, ‘Thueringer’, or even ‘Thuringer’, but not ‘Theuringer’ as on p. 183.

Everyone is likely to learn something about Chicago food from this book, which 
has clear documentation and an impressive bibliography. The authors point out a 
number of foods that originated in Chicago, or at least are alleged to have done so: 
though they state bluntly (p. 239) that the chocolate brownie originated in Palmer 
House in Chicago in 1893 and thus ignore the origins controversy documented 
most recently by Zanger (2013), I am not aware of any challenges to the view 
that Cracker Jack also originated in Chicago (p. 156). Given the wide scale of 
the historical and geographical approach in this volume, a reader who is looking 
for an overview of aspects of food in Chicago may find it useful to start here. 

References Cited

Dreiser, Theodore. 1900. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday & Page.

Sandburg, Carl. 1916. Chicago Poems. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

Sinclair, Upton. 1906. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page, & Company.

Zanger, Mark H. 2013. Brownies. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in 
America, 2nd edition., ed. Andrew F. Smith, 220–222. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


