Midwesterner

This is the end of 513 Week, a three-part series about Cincinnati food. Monday’s piece covered chain pizza. Wednesday’s covered ribs. To finish, I’m taking a bigger-picture look at the city’s food traditions, capped by a Cincinnati-on-Cincinnati recipe that sounds like a dare but tastes like it should already be a butcher shop staple. See you next year, with a Grippo’s seasoning how-to, if I can crack it by then.

Happy 513 Day! This is the midpoint of Midwesterner’s 513 Week, a three-part celebration of Cincinnati’s foodways. On Monday, we shared a recipe inspired by the Queen City’s go-to chain pizza. Now, here are the city’s most (in)famous ribs. There’s more than one way to make a delicious rack of ribs.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been getting into theme weeks, like last month’s Dorothy Lynch Week and last fall’s Black Walnut Week. It’s been a good way to tackle bigger topics and a reason to finish the recipes and drafts that I’ve been ruminating on for too long. This Wednesday is May 13, also known in southwestern Ohio as 513 Day, for Cincinnati’s primary area code. To celebrate, I’m calling this 513 Week: three stories about my hometown of Cincinnati, with recipes.

The only real trick to making ranch dressing–washed liquor is managing the blob. Commercial ranch dressing, with its industrial-strength emulsifiers and stabilizers, can “do a funny thing” when it’s mixed into alcohol, says Amy Connor, beverage director at Mean Mule Distilling Co. in Kansas City, Missouri. “It can form this gelatinous blob that’s big and unwieldy.” For now, she strains the blob out and throws it away, though a local chef has been asking about deep-frying it.

This week, we’ve been all in on Dorothy Lynch, a salad dressing from St. Paul, Nebraska, that’s become a Plains Midwest phenomenon. Monday’s piece was an intro to Dorothy, with recipes for a copycat version and oven-roasted Dorothy wings. On Wednesday, we put celery seed and mustard in a Plains red beer. Now, here’s a tomato-tinged final course from Liz Cook, a Midwesterner regular and the creator of Haterade.

This is part two of a weeklong series about Dorothy Lynch dressing. To read Monday’s piece, an intro to the Nebraska staple that includes a copycat recipe and oven-roasted “Spicy Dorothy” wings, click here. Part three is coming on Friday. Red beer with olives, Dinty Moore’s Bar, Nebraska City, NE Maybe the Great Plains red beer evolved from the Mexican michelada.

Yesterday, Dorothy Lynch would have turned 113. That seemed like as good an excuse as any to celebrate the Nebraskan’s claim to fame—her tomato soup–based salad dressing. Stay tuned for three days of tributes, including a celery seed–laced dessert from the creator of Flucker. For those of you who don’t know Dorothy yet, we’re starting with the basics, including a recipe for a DIY version of the dressing and another inspired by the best-selling wings at a pizza place in Grand Island.

I have two words for you: breakfast pasta. No, make that four: maple bacon breakfast pasta. Those were the words that got my attention when I sat down at FioRito Ristorante in Wichita, Kansas, last January, windburned and hungry after a bitterly cold run along the Arkansas River. The brunch menu at FioRito includes a whole section of breakfast pastas. It’s one of the ways chef and co-owner Jordan Rickard is adapting Italian traditions for a Kansas audience.

Is it just me, or does the Christmas cookie seem to have gotten a little… high concept this year? Everyone seems to be candying their own ginger, mixing rosewater into jelly with an eyedropper, or slicing logs of cookies meticulously constructed to evoke cured meats. I support big swings and beautiful tablescapes. But to me, the best Christmas cookies are invariably the smallest and humblest. And I can think of few Christmas cookies smaller and humbler than pfeffernüsse.

The country’s most famous Native American chef is a Midwesterner. Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, was born and raised on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Known professionally as “The Sioux Chef,” he worked for the Forest Service in the Black Hills before moving to Minnesota, where he runs the nonprofit NATIFs and the James Beard Award–winning restaurant Owamni. The area where he grew up has shaped America’s ideas about Native Americans for generations.