From tapioca to truffles
To mark the paper's 60th birthday, we dig into our tasty past and find much to chew on
Corn pancakes with pork sausage gravy.
That was the first recipe the Sun-Times Food pages offered to readers.
(Richatd Chapman/Sun-Times)
It appeared on Feb. 4, 1948, not exactly the season for fresh corn.
But the six-ingredient recipe was meant to be a budget meal -- World War II was just behind us -- and so we let readers know it was fine to substitute canned for fresh, leftover for just-bought.
"The sausages may be purchased for the occasion or be the leftovers from a previous dinner service," the article, written by one Martha Reynolds, assured. "The same is true of the corn -- one cupful of the whole kernel type -- may be canned, quick-frozen or leftover."
Today's home cook would surely still appreciate such tips.
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Sun-Times. Fasten your bibs as we look back on six decades of food in Chicago.
Times were good. Rationing was a thing of the past, reflected in the food pages. Recipes were of the stick-to-your-ribs variety.
"People coming back from the war wanted abundance," said Bruce Kraig, Roosevelt University professor and president of the Culinary Historians of Chicago. "This goes hand in hand with their move to the suburbs. They wanted new housing. They wanted big new cars. The bigger, the better."
On Dec. 21, 1950, the paper offered recipes for a Christmas dinner menu: hot clam juice, baked ham, corn pudding, slivered green beans au gratin, hot rolls, cranberry salad mold, plum pudding and hard sauce snowballs.
Tapioca, one food that wasn't available during the war, was a particularly bright spot.
"Vanilla, chocolate or orange coconut tapioca pudding is now available in all food stores," a June 3, 1948 story crowed.
Freezers and bigger, snazzier refrigerators were en vogue. In 1953, the C.A. Swanson company introduced the 98-cent frozen TV dinner. It was a hit.
Back then, the Sun-Times didn't have a separate food section. Recipes ran deep in the paper after the real news.
Readers then might not have known that the food editor, Martha Reynolds, wasn't, well, real. She was just a name conceived by the editors. But they seemed to love her and her "Feminine Angle" cooking column.
(Alma Lach, the Sun-Times food editor from 1957 to 1965, initially wrote under the Martha Reynolds byline but says that practice quickly faded so she could write under her own name.)
The paper sponsored regular recipe contests, asking readers to send in their best recipes for dessert, salads and so on. The top prize was usually $25.
Readers also contributed to the Barter and Swap column. A version of that column still runs today; we call it Swap Shop.
Chicago's ethnic communities shone through in Barter and Swap. There were Mrs. Frank Fanelli's Italian anisette Christmas balls and Mrs. J. Bazma's mazurek czekoladowy, a Polish almond chocolate cookie.
When Lach was hired, she injected a European sensibility into the food pages. She had lived in Paris and had a diploma from Le Cordon Bleu.
"At that time, it was very easy to make a difference because people were tired of gravy and mashed potatoes," said Lach, who has written several cookbooks and still lives in Chicago. "I was introducing them to French cooking and sauces, not gravy."
In a August 1958 Sunday spread, Lach explained the dish Filet de Sole Medici to readers, calling it "perhaps the most aristocratic dish you will see this summer." The recipe called for madeira wine and a small can of truffles, among other ingredients.
Not all of it was highbrow. That same year, Lach offered recipes for barbecued tuna buns -- essentially gussied-up tuna fish sandwiches.
"You couldn't be pure French. You had to put it together and make it taste good," Lach said. "You more or less had to make it fit into their lives, rather than having them change their lives completely. And wines, they didn't know. It wasn't an everyday thing in most homes."
With the 60s came the advent of cooking schools and TV cooking shows.
In Chicago, home cooks tuned into a show hosted by Antoinette Pope, founder of a cooking school in her own name.
In 1963, viewers watched Julia Child in her debut program, "The French Chef," on Boston public television.
"She inspired a lot of chefs, and I think home cooks were, on special occasions especially, trying some of her more simple dishes," said Camille Stagg, Sun-Times food editor from 1965 to 1977.
This also was the decade of the gadget, Kraig says. The Popeil brothers' Vegematic came on the market. Toaster ovens began to take off.
At the supermarket, shoppers collected S&H Green Stamps, redeemable for kitchen gadgets.
"The standard wedding gift was the electric frying pan," Kraig said. "Everybody had one."
More food magazines came into print, and cookbooks started to lift the veil on regional cooking.
By the mid-60s, the Sun-Times Food section was a separate section on Thursdays called "Good Food: A Guide to Creative Cooking."
Recipes didn't skimp on cream or lard and used prepared, canned and frozen foods to their fullest extent.
Dated Chicken, a 1964 recipe, called for frozen lemonade concentrate, tomato sauce and fresh dates. Crabmeat Casserole used condensed cream of celery soup and salad dressing.
But we also gave readers recipes for from-scratch yeast breads. A May 1964 story delved into a delicacy called flan, dubbing it "a pie in a foreign costume."
Chef Louis Szathmary's restaurant, The Bakery, opened in 1962 and opened diners' eyes to a new level of fine dining, with dishes such as roast duck and beef Wellington. (Our readers would become more intimate with the larger-than-life Szathmary through a column he penned for the Sun-Times starting in 1978.)
By the end of the decade, consumers were on the verge of a huge shift in cooking and eating, said Stagg, now a part-time instructor at the College of DuPage.
"Food suddenly became very important," she said. "When I first started, people were making the gelatin molds and casseroles with green beans and canned mushroom soup... Not that they stopped using those entirely, but they really became aware of the wholesomeness of foods and fresh foods."
The Cuisinart food processor debuted in 1973 at the National Housewares Show in Chicago. With food authorities like Julia Child and James Beard singing its praises, home cooks soon followed.
Abby Mandel, founder of Chicago's Green City Market, wrote a column for the Sun-Times called "Turned On Kitchen," with recipes that could be made in the food processor. Microwave cooking was hot, too.
Home cooks were more sophisticated, having traveled abroad. Though nouvelle cuisine was the flavor of the day on the dining scene, food stories delved into the cuisines of different cultures.
A March 1974 Food section devoted to Middle Eastern foods opened with this line: "The Middle East has been in the news so much that when the area is mentioned, one automatically thinks of conflict."
As consumers, we were getting savvier, too. Voluntary nutrition labeling of foods went into effect in the early part of the decade. Stagg recalls working on a project to expose shady supermarket practices such as mislabeling of meat cuts.
"We were getting more demanding. We wanted fresh. We wanted to know what we were paying for," said Bev Bennett, who followed Stagg as Sun-Times food editor until 1995. (Bennett now writes the syndicated food column "Two's Company," which appears regularly in the Sun-Times.)
By the end of the decade, the section -- which grew to 52 pages at its peak -- featured a wine column and a diet column, both written by men, and Szathmary's column, "Chef Louis," which ran until 1987.
In 1979, the paper even held a series of cooking classes, led by Szathmary and Mandel, at the Drury Lane Theater at Water Tower Place.
In 1982, the Food section ran a story on the California pizza craze invading Chicago. Toppings like goat cheese and prosciutto were much lighter than the cheese- and sauce-laden pies we were accustomed to, but spoke to the growing foodies in us.
The section also ran a "Food of the World" column to introduce readers to dishes such as Indian curries and Viennese pastries, and a new gadget and cookware column.
Home cooks, as always, were a favorite for the paper. House Special, a spinoff of the Swap Shop column, profiled home cooks known for signature dishes or certain skills.
Readers saw more recipes from restaurants and chefs, who collectively were undergoing a renaissance.
"That's when you saw this huge birth of American cuisine," Bennett said.
Chef Michael Foley's new Printer's Row restaurant adhered to the philosophy of locally sourced ingredients championed by Alice Waters, who had opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. in 1971. In the late 80s, the Sun-Times ran a regular column by Foley called "An American Chef."
In 1987, Charlie Trotter's eponymous restaurant and Rick Bayless' Frontera Grill opened. Across the city, diners saw an explosion of sushi joints and other Asian eateries.
The section's annual 10 best recipes list in 1989 showed our eclectic taste in food. Among the recipes we deemed our favorites: Thai basil chicken, fillo-wrapped lamb and chocolate babka.
No fat. Low fat. Reduced fat.
That was the mantra, and the Food section responded with more "light" recipes. Indeed, we boasted in 1993, five of the 10 recipes in our best recipes issue that year were low-fat.
In 1994, the Sun-Times began including the nutritional breakdown for each recipe.
"We were all going through diets, and it was a matter of balancing out the popularity versus the health aspects of the diets," Bennett said.
At the same time, fusion cooking was all around us, and our obssession with regional Italian food was never stronger, fed by the opening of Tony Mantuano's fine-dining Spiaggia restaurant on the Magnificent Mile.
"Italian became Northern Italian," Kraig said.
Another momentous event: the debut of the 24-hour TV Food Network.
"The trend will be to simple," chef Sarah Stegner told the Sun-Times in January 2000, when asked to predict food trends in the coming year. "That doesn't mean the work that goes into it is simpler. If the products are good and continuing to get better, you don't need to do much to it."
She was -- still is -- right.
This decade so far has seen a return to simplicity, an embracing of comfort foods and a deeper appreciation of regional cooking.
We've also seen a rise in the cocktail culture and, though we are making an effort in a kitchen, a continued need for prepared foods.
More than anything, consumers want to know as much as they can about the food they're buying, cooking and eating.
The words organic, sustainable and local roll off our tongues and onto the pages of the Food section.
"We're thinking local, we're thinking green, we're thinking impact on the environment, we're thinking consequences, which is a huge shift in our thinking," Bennett said.
Like we said -- times are good.