Petrina Engelke on Iconic American Cuisine
Transcript of Writer's Voice conversation with German journalist Petrina Engelke about COOK ACROSS AMERICA
In this special holiday edition of Writer's Voice, journalist and author Petrina Engelke shares her journey exploring iconic American cuisine along Route 66, detailed in the book she co-wrote with food blogger Gabriele Frankemölle, Cook Across America: 66 Iconic Recipes Along the Legendary Route 66.
Engelke delves into the diverse cultural traditions that define American food, from maple syrup production in Illinois to fusion Tex-Mex dishes in Texas and barbecue’s African American roots. She also highlights the intersection of food, history, and climate change, discussing how environmental challenges threaten beloved traditions like winemaking and maple syrup harvesting.
“Barbecue is a testament to resilience, born from hard labor and innovation by enslaved African Americans.” -- Petrina Engelke
Cook Across America is written for a German readership (Engelke reports on America for German news outlets) but our conversation is an engaging exploration of the many-splendored diversity that makes American food traditions so rich that any English-speaker can enjoy.
Transcript
Welcome to a special edition of Writer’s Voice for this holiday feasting season, a fascinating take on iconic American cuisine from German author and journalist Petrina Engelke.
She reports on all things American for German news outlets, but has a special interest in American cultural traditions of food. She's co-written two books on those traditions with German food blogger Gabrielle Frankenmüller, one on holiday cooking, and their newest, Cook Across America, 66 iconic recipes along legendary Route 66.
Cook Across America isn't just a cookbook. It's a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. This journey's not only about the destinations, but also about the stories and people behind the dishes that define American cuisine, like Chicago deep-dish pizza, New Mexican three-sisters stew, and Southern barbecue, which was perfected by enslaved African Americans and passed down to their descendants.
I met Petrina Engelke through our common passion for climate activism, and she marries her two interests on her Substack blog, Climate Culinarians. As you'll hear, she warns that climate change threatens some of our most beloved agricultural products, maple syrup and wine.
But the biggest takeaway from Cook Across America is that American food traditions are all about the many splendid ethnic and racial diversity and that's what really makes America great.
Petrina Engelke, welcome to Writer's Voice.
Thank you so much for having me.
This book, Cook Across America, we've already told our listeners that this book is only available in German, but I just want to share it with my audience anyway because it's really a charming book and it's got great stories in it. So I think we can all enjoy the tour of this Cook Across America. First of all, I just want to ask you, how did this book come about?
The origin story goes a little bit like that. My co-author, Gabi Frankemöller, and I had written another book called American Christmas, which also is a German book. I know that's confusing, but our publishing company loves to take an American title for a book about something in America. And that is about the holidays from Thanksgiving to New Year's, including Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.
And after we published it, we asked our readers about feedback, and our last question was, what would you like to read about from us next? And quickly, people asked about regional characteristics, if there are any differences, and we were very interested in that.
And then the term Route 66 came up, and we figured, okay, that's a great idea. Let's see how we can come up with a new concept.
And I should say that your subtitle, translated into English, is 66 Iconic Recipes Along the Legendary Route 66. The recipes are really incredible. I mean, it's real American fare, and real American fare is made up of the cuisine adapted to America of so many different nations. And it's really a melting pot of a book of recipes, which I really loved, as well as real regional specialties.
So, you went along Route 66, you started in Illinois, and you met a couple who farm there, Mike and Debbie Funk, which is actually, I believe, a German name. You talked to them about maple syrup, something that is not produced in Europe. You can buy it in Europe now.
We were talking before the interview began that I couldn't find maple syrup 20 years ago when I went to Europe, but it's not produced there. So, tell us about them and their approach to farming.
Yeah.
So, you need sugar maple trees to produce maple syrup, and they are indigenous to North America. So, that's why nowadays you can buy them in Germany, but they are being imported from Canada or from the U.S. And Mike and Debbie were the sweetest people.
I mean, all of the people I interviewed were like, you know, I'd ask them, imagine I ask you, hey, I'm writing a German book. You'll never be able to read it. Can I ask you about your work?
And Mike's family has been producing maple syrup in Funksgrove, Illinois, for 200 years. I think this year is their anniversary. And they walked me through how it's being produced.
And it turned out later on, when we again asked for feedback from readers, that was one of the chapters that they were fascinated by. And I think not too many people, even here, know how it works.
So it goes a little like that, if I got that correctly from Mike and Debbie. You need freezing temperatures and also temperatures above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And that change, called freeze-thaw cycles, is necessary to get the tree sap out of the tree.
Now, the tree sap in a sugar maple tree will really taste horrible as long as there are leaves on the tree. There's a different chemistry to it, so you can only use it when the tree is dormant. So that's where the freeze-thaw thing comes into place, because as long as it's frozen, as you can imagine, the sap is mainly made from water, it freezes and there's no movement.
But when it thaws, you can get it out of the tree. And the freezing also constricts the vessels in the tree, so it's kind of like a straw pulling it up. And then when it thaws, it comes down. So if you make a hole in the tree trunk, the sap will come out of the tree.
This is a method that indigenous people in North America discovered. There are great origin stories in different tribes how that happens. I could talk for ages about it, but I won't. Just make a note, it's an indigenous method.
And when the Funk family came to that area in Illinois, there already was a maple grove that they then used. And they are still using pretty much the same method nowadays.
Of course, you put a metal plug in there, and you have different kind of buckets to collect the sap that's coming out of there. And then, well, you collect the sap, but there is a high percentage of water in it. It's only two or three percent sugar. Maple syrup has 66 percent sugar. So in order to get it that way, you need to get the water out of it.
In traditional indigenous methods, they would first just let it freeze over and then take the ice out of their bucket and then afterwards boil it so the water evaporates more and also the sugar caramelizes.
That makes the nice brown color that we like. So that is what Mike and Debbie explained to me, how they do it.
They use reverse osmosis for the first part of the evaporation. One of the main reasons why they do that is to conserve energy because it turns out that Mike and Debbie are very concerned about climate change and they want to do what they can to stop greenhouse gas emissions and saving on energy, as we know, is a good way to go there.
They told me they are concerned about climate change because they feel it every day. As I said before, you need freezing temperatures to get maple syrup, so when the earth is getting hotter and hotter, that could be a problem. And that's what I thought is the main problem. The trees won't grow there.
They are on the pretty much southernmost part where sugar maple really thrives. But from them, I learned there is a different problem, which is volatile temperatures. So it's hard for them to say, and I heard that from farmers all over, it's hard to say when the temperatures are right to do your harvest or in other farmers when to sow stuff, etc.
So they don't really, it's harder for them to tell when to start harvesting. And then when you suddenly have, usually they have in February, March, they have temperatures around freezing. Now, sometimes, as we know here on Long Island, same in Illinois, sometimes it can get 65 degrees on a day in February.
Now, you would say, OK, if it goes back to freezing, it shouldn't be so bad. Well, little did you know, Mark and Debbie told me that once it gets so warm, the tree gets ready for spring, and then it starts to change the chemistry in the sap because it starts to bring out the buds.
And as I said before, then the tree sap doesn't taste well anymore. Nobody would like maple syrup made from that. So for them, if that happens, they're finished. That was their harvest. They can't or won't harvest anymore.
So that is a climate change effect I've never heard of before. I was very fascinated by that.
Wow.And that was not the only climate change impact. We'll get to at least one more later on. But that's really striking. I used to live in New England. I lived in Western Massachusetts, where there also is a lot of concern about losing our maple syrup production. Maple syrup is iconic in this country.
There is a great recipe, actually, for maple-glazed bacon. Looks pretty simple. Have you tried to make it?
Now, I want to mention all the recipes. I don't know if you already said that, but your co-author, Gabrielle Frankenmüller, was the one who developed the recipes. But have you tried any of them?
I tried quite a couple of them, but I am vegetarian, so the pig candy or maple-glazed bacon is certainly something I didn't do. But again, we worked with a group of about 15 readers. We gave them the book and said, try out what you want, give us some feedback.
And that was one of the things that people really loved because apparently it's quick to make and it's a great snack if you're into that kind of stuff.
Exactly. And we are talking with Petrina Engelke.
Her book that she wrote along with Gabriele Frankemölle is Cook Across America. It is only available in German, but she's got some fascinating stories to tell, which is why we wanted to talk with her here on Writer's Voice.
So, Missouri. I did not know that that's where the waffle cone was invented.
Yeah.
When you research what's different in different states, they are all very proud of certain things, and then you find all kinds of stories.
I had played around with it because our book follows Route 66, so it goes through eight states, from Chicago in the Midwest all the way to Santa Monica or Los Angeles in California.
And so my co-author, Gabi, she traveled Route 66 because she developed the recipes and she had to try all the food.
Now, there's not that much in book budgets, so only one of us could travel that, and she had the best reason to do it.
I did some kind of armchair journalism here and did a lot of interviews with people along the way, and I have traveled half of those states extensively before we made the book.
Anyway, back to your question.
Now I forgot my train of thought. Sorry.
So the question was about the waffle cone being invented, and there's also a special kind of custard, frozen custard, which also I hadn't heard about, I mean, unless you mean ice cream.
No, no. It is custard, but it's pretty hard, pretty dense.
Yeah, the waffle cone was one of the stories.
So in the book, we follow the route that is the concept for the book.
So it's not breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but it's Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, etc.
And for each state, we have an opening page that just explains in a few words some things about that state.
And in Missouri, there is a story about the waffle cone.
It's hard to corroborate it, but it says, like, well, there was a big fair, and people went there, and they needed, you know, food that you can take out on your hands.
And then people apparently, at least according to the legend, work together, you know, an ice cream stand and a waffle maker work together to come up with something new.
And it's a charming story.
And the custard that you mentioned, that is an iconic, I think it's not a diner, but an ice cream shop along Route 66 where a lot of tourists go.
And they call it [something] cement because it is so dense. So I told Gabi, hey, you have to make a stop and try it, and she did. And she said it's good. It's really good.
It's Ted Drew's in St. Louis, who is famous for his frozen custard if anyone wants to go to St. Louis and try that out.
Another place was in Springfield, Missouri. Did you speak with the chef David Leong?
Now, he died, he actually died four years ago at the age of 99. But he's got an amazing story.
Tell us about what you learned from him, about how he brought, basically he brought a kind of, well, he's famous for the Springfield cashew chicken, which is a combination of American fried chicken and a Chinese dish.
So it's a kind of fusion, early fusion cooking there with Chinese food.
Yes, I never got a chance to talk to him because he died before we made the book.
So I had to rely on, and this is only a small story in it, but I think, as you said, it's iconic or it tells a lot.
It's about the puzzle pieces that make America, America.
He was a Chinese immigrant and he had restaurants. He lived in many places, but later on ended up in Springfield in Missouri. And he had a restaurant, but he met with a lot of racism and a lot of people who didn't approve of him, and also other rival restaurants tried to make it really hard for him.
And that, even though he was a decorated war hero, he was one of the D-Day soldiers in World War II, but that didn't help him really get accepted in that community. And he tried really hard.
Some people apparently liked the food, but it was very foreign in his heyday. And so he tweaked it and he came up with the idea to get an American way of making chicken and combine it with a Chinese recipe.
And now it is, if you look up what people eat in that state, that is one of the meals and the recipes that you will find.
So he won, I would say, or he won people over.
Right. And that restaurant is still around because I looked it up on the Internet, and yes, it's still there.
Sorry, can I add one more piece? So he had this big win. He finally won people over, but he didn't keep the recipe to himself. He was always open for sharing it with other people. His restaurant, of course, was the origin and the one, you know, where everybody went to get the original cashew chicken, Springfield cashew chicken.
But other, especially Asian, Chinese restaurateurs who wanted to go out were, as far as I know, welcome to use that or that idea to combine things to make it more palatable to Americans.
What a great story. So, just with one last stop in St. Louis, I was struck by the hot dog king of St. Louis, Steve Ewing, who is actually a vegan.
He is not anymore, but he was for a while. He was going vegan, vegetarian for quite a while.
And he's a musician. And they do serve a vegan version of hot dogs, too. He made sure of that.
And he says back in the days, in the 80s, it was really, really impossible to go out and get vegan food or even vegetarian food. And that changed a lot.
He is a musician. He's the singer in The Urge. He started in high school. He's still doing that.
And he always had a side job, as many musicians have. So this is a great story about entrepreneurs in America. Because he got sick of going back and forth between jobs. He wanted to have his own business and make his own time.
So that would make it easier to go on tour. And after one night of playing a show, and he's been touring everywhere, he realized, we really don't have street food around here.
So after a show, I'm not the only one who's hungry. There's 300 people here who would like some food, and there's no food.
So he came up with a hot dog stand, because that is the easiest thing you could do with just one person and little equipment. So he started doing that, then realized you need a permit, and it's a lot of paperwork. So he went somewhere else, and the story takes on.
And now he has a brick-and-mortar store, and still combines it with music. So he does shows there. He has a great following, and now he claims he has the original St. Louis hot dog, because we all know New York hot dogs are different from Chicago hot dogs, and they have something in Houston that's also very different.
And he had one, and Chicago didn't have an official hot dog, so he went to the town officials and said, should we not have an official St. Louis hot dog? And there you go. Now that's his.
So moving along to Texas, you spoke to someone who was called the mother of fusion Tex-Mex cooking, Sylvia Casares. She runs Sylvia's Enchilada Kitchen. You asked her, what does the word authentic mean when it comes to cooking? What did she tell you?
She had a little problem with that word.
She says many people who claim that, you know, it's hard to say what is authentic, especially because so many influences go into food, and also she said something like, well, if you want authentic Mexican food, let's say, and you go to that restaurant that people say, this is authentic, and then you don't like it because of something that the restaurant does, and it doesn't, it's not a hit with you, you might never again try Mexican food because you think, well, that's the real deal, and I didn't like it, so I'm not going to try it.
So that was a little bit her take on that apart from the issues with defining what is authentic because there are many different regions in Mexico too and many different tastes, and even if you look at your own family dinners, there are people who don't like Brussels sprouts and people who love it.
People who are allergic to nuts and wouldn't touch it, and so they would never serve that.
So you always have this diversity in food, and that makes it hard.
But on the other hand, you see in another interview with Stephen Freed, who wrote a book about the first chain restaurant in America, the Fred Harvey Company, he told me that they sometimes, they had a lot of mixing of different cuisines.
o they had a guacamole with all kinds of weird things in it that we today would say, like, that's not, you know, cream cheese, for instance, that's not guacamole.
And he claimed that often when foreign influences came together, they were tweaked in a way that Americans would like it, and then later on, Americans would complain that this is not authentic.
And on a side note, I read Sylvia Cazares' cookbook, and she has a recipe that combines avocados and cream cheese for a dip.
It's not called guacamole, but it is a dip that you can make and that's really tasty.
Who cares if it's authentic?
Well, many people care and fight about, you know, the only real way to make something is this. Take apple pie or something like that. Everybody, every family has their own recipe. You can't swear by it. Or not every family. That's a little exaggeration, but yeah.
So in the time that we have left, I'd like to hit on just two more things. One is, and maybe just a quick answer on this, that barbecue actually was developed from, on the one hand, colonial influences from Europe and from Africans who were sold into slavery in this country. They developed the barbecue.
So tell us just a little bit about that story.
There are good books about it I would recommend, if you want to really dig deeper, Black Smoke by Adrian Miller. I interviewed him about the book, and so much of what I know is from him, not all of it.
So the origins are, again, indigenous people in the Americas. The first European contract, I think, was in the Caribbean somewhere, but there's also evidence that Native Americans in North America had a technique where they dug something, put a fire in there, put some branches over it, and then smothered it a little bit so it developed a lot of smoke.
And that technique, as you said, was developed further both by European colonialists and by people from Africa that they forced into slave labor.
So it was hard work, and on some of the plantations, owners wanted to have big feasts, and that was all slave work. So they needed to dig a trench and get the meat ready for it. It has been cooked for a long time.
So a little fun fact, if you put a burger on your grill, that is not a barbecue. A barbecue is made from indirect heat, and it requires smoke, but usually, you know, it cooks very slowly and takes a long time. That's a real barbecue.
So because those people of African descent who were enslaved had to do this work, they also became masters in this cooking technique.
So the many barbecue chefs in America, if you go to really good barbecue restaurants, are African Americans and have a long tradition in that. That has changed a little bit when foodies discovered those restaurants. Nowadays, when you look at books about barbecue, it's usually white males with beards.
Even though the first person, I think, who won a barbecue contest, because now it's a contest thing, was a woman. I think it was a Black woman. I might be wrong about that. But yeah, it was a woman.
That's a great story. So, Petrina Engelke, finally, let's go to the West Coast. You talk about California and wines. You are a climate activist as well as an author and a writer. You learned some stuff about climate and the future of wines in California. Tell us about that.
So, we all hear about wildfires in California. And they always had wildfires, but they are increasing in intensity and in frequency. And that is related to climate change.
And one thing I discovered about wineries was pretty amazing to me. I thought, well, if they burn down, that's really bad, right?
But that's not the only problem. The wildfire smoke is a problem. And the smoke carries over long distances. So, even if the fire is not next door, threatening your vineyard, your grapes might pick up the smoke.
And apparently, you can't taste it right away, but you might taste it later on when it's become wine.
So, the vineyards pressed universities to do research. How can we find out if we should even harvest the grapes?
And that sounds a little funny, but there is, of course, a dark side to that. The vineyards, as most farms in America, have insurance. So, if they lose a harvest, they still get money.
But the people who work the farms or the vineyards, they are usually paid by piece. Not even by the hour, but by how many pounds of grapes they harvest.
So, when they don't get to harvest because they think, well, there was too much smoke, they don't get paid.
However, I got a chance to talk to a vineyard worker in California. I couldn't do that by myself because I don't speak her language. But I found somebody willing to translate my questions for her and translate back what she said. Her name is Maria Salinas. She is an ex-vineyard worker and now an activist with North Bay Jobs with Justice.
And as you can tell, they have something to say also about wildfires. Because when there are evacuations for wildfires in California, many vineyards have exemptions for that. And they can send their workers into the vineyards while people are being evacuated.
Now, the work in the vineyards is hard work. It's physical labor. You can imagine if you carry a couple pounds of grapes, that is exerting you.
So the vineyard workers, even if they had KN95 masks, they can't really work with that, as you wouldn't wear them in a gym. So they, you know, maybe have a little t-shirt in front of their faces, but they work the vineyards.
And Maria told me, when her relatives get back from work, they cough something black.
So vineyard workers banded together and they advocate for safer work environments. Little things like extra pay, if they choose to go into that, and health insurance or, you know, help with that. And also pay for the days when they can't go to work because of wildfires. That is not their fault. And yeah, so they advocate for that.
And they advocate sometimes in front of tasting rooms, where people are very surprised, because they have no idea what it takes to make wine and the risks that vineyard workers take.
And also how climate change-related wildfires affect their wine supply. And I think wine and chocolate and that kind of stuff, that's where you really get people interested.
Well, this has been just a great conversation, Petrina Engelke. The title is in English, Cook Across America. The subtitle is in German, but it translates to 66 Iconic Recipes Along the Legendary Route 66. Thank you so much for talking with us here on Writers Voice.
Thank you so much for having me.
You can find links to Petrina's journalism website, her Substack blog, Climate Culinarians, and Cook Across America's website at our website. https://www.writersvoice.net/2024/11/petrina-engelke-on-iconic-american-cuisine/
Happy Holidays!