Utah's Curious Food Traditions
By Kerry Soper
(Published in Utah Life Magazine, January 1, 2023)
I was recently watching a TV series that celebrates the signature food traditions of our nation. In each episode they take on a different state, depicting in amber-hued, high-definition shots, scenes of photogenic young adults enjoying great bbq in Texas… laughing over a New York style pizza… picking apart lobsters in Maine… or licking their fingers at a crawfish boil in Louisiana.
Maybe I was just in a cynical mood, but I couldn’t help wonder, “What the heck are they going to film when they get to Utah? A ten-minute montage of senior citizens eating jello salad? Or maybe a slow motion shot of a heavy-set guy in a BYU t-shirt filling multiple sacrament-style cups with fry sauce?”
I polled my friends and family, asking if they could think of a hip but overlooked culinary trend in Utah that would look good on film. No luck. While our state can indeed lay claim to several distinctive food traditions that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, none of them would look good in HD on an oversized screen. (And most of them still haunt the technicolor dreams, unfortunately, of many of us who grew up during those decades.)
As a form of group therapy, allow me to take you on a slightly disturbing, but maybe cathartic, historical tour:
Crockpot Catastrophes: When I was a kid, every Utah kitchen featured one of these dreaded, olive-green slow-cookers, squatting malevolently on the counter-top, just waiting to destroy another meal. You could dump a bunch of random stuff into a single container, plug it in, and then show up hours later and unveil a “meal” of sorts—something like “Smothered Hash,” “Ground Beef Stroganoff,” or “Pioneer Goulash”—that you could then glop onto overcooked rice.
This cooking method was a disaster: the ingredients were essentially tortured into submission over a six-hour period, with flavors gradually destroyed and everything melded into a homogenous substance with a grayish-brown hue and mushy texture. My least favorite meal to emerge from these devices was “Stuffed Green Peppers.” I’ll never forget the awful reveal, when my mom would lift the lid on two rows of slimy, grey-green peppers oozing a molten slurry of tomato sauce, corn, ground beef, and Velveeta cheese—like a Utah version of those sinister, parasitical eggs from the movie Alien.
Casserole Casualties: A more respectable (but still often disastrous) cousin of the crockpot meal was the Utah casserole. These dishes could trace their history back to pioneer times, when the contents probably included some genuine ingredients; by the 1970s, however, you never knew what kind of weirdness you were going to get when you plunged a serving spoon into one of these rectangular concoctions.
The surface of the casserole might even look promising—an expanse of crushed corn flakes, for example—but the actual innards were usually a mess. Most often it was a sloppy combination of a gluey carb, some kind of limp protein (maybe tuna fish or fatty chicken chunks), a sprinkling of canned peas or undercooked onions, and (worst of all), a base of tepid cream of mushroom soup.
My frugal dad was infamous for making casseroles out of random and often expired leftovers from the fridge, dumping them together indiscriminately, like a drunken Julia Childs. Twice as a kid he gave me food poisoning; the second time was the morning of our grade school’s annual field day. Thanks to his “breakfast casserole surprise,” I set a personal best in the “repeated dash to the bathroom event.”
Salad Setbacks: Any random configuration of cold ingredients in Utah during those decades could be called a “salad” as long as it wasn’t technically a green salad. This would have been fine if the ingredients had been fresh, logically paired, and bound by something tasty, like yogurt or freshly whipped cream. Sadly, the opposite was true in most cases: the ingredients were usually dumped from a can, the pairings were often a savory-sweet nightmare, and the base was either gelatin, or a bland, space age condiment like Miracle-Whip, Cool-Whip or Redi-Whip. (Sheesh, enough already with the “whips.”)
We chuckle now about the iconic Utah jello salad with carrot shavings, but I’ve received reports of demented aunts who filled their gelatin with much more disturbing debris: corn, diced onion, tuna, green beans, mushrooms, lima beans, cottage cheese, and coconut shavings. My grandma’s go-to “dessert-salad” was lime jello riddled with mushy walnuts and a can of fruit cocktail in which all the various fruit chunks had the same flat taste and mealy texture—and then topped with a layer of mayo and grated cheddar cheese. Is it even possible to categorize that surreal dish on the food pyramid?
Mystery Meat Mishaps: Cheap, textureless meats were the craze in Utah in the 70s and 80s: spam, corned beef, meatloafs, pressed hams, and beanie-weenies (aka, “Vienna Sausages”). I never saw or tasted real deli meat as a grade schooler; my packed lunch was always a floppy slice of baloney smeared with miracle whip, melded to a sad slice of American cheese and a limp piece of iceberg lettuce, and then smooshed between two pieces of soggy wonder bread. I was forever jealous of friends eating the school cafeteria’s overcooked corn dogs and stale fries.
As if the inherent disgustingness of these processed meats weren’t enough, Utah cooks often took the yuck factor to another level by serving them in a “creamed” style (covered in a rapidly coagulating white sauce—usually made with margarine, flour and water or rehydrated, powdered milk). I dreaded Monday nights because we ate “chipped beef gravy” with canned peas dumped on a stale piece of white bread. It made me wonder if my mom (who is now an incredible cook), was moonlighting in her spare time as an underpaid chef in a low budget retirement home.
My mother did occasionally redeem herself in the mystery meat department, however, sometimes making “smothered flat dogs”—a recipe with no nutritional value, but which appealed, visually, to a seven-year-old’s morbid sensibility. She cut the hot dogs lengthwise, splayed them open (like patients in surgery), topped them with a smear of box-made mashed potatoes and then baked them in the oven with a squirt of ketchup and blanket of half-melted American cheese.
In conclusion, it looks like the makers of that tv series are out of luck when they get to our state. That is, unless, they want to do a different kind of show—maybe a grainy, black and white exposé on Utah’s unsolved food crimes? I’d appear as a witness on that program, as long as they hid my face, distorted my voice, and gave me a chance beforehand to warn--and apologize --to my mom.
Comments
Post a Comment