Illinois Food & Traditional Cuisine

Illinois eats like the meat-packing capital it was: by 1900 eighty per cent of the beef in the United States was slaughtered in Chicago's Union Stock Yards, and the city's food is built on it. The Chicago-style hot dog is an all-beef frankfurter in a natural casing, most often Vienna Beef, on a poppy-seed bun with yellow mustard, chopped onion, neon-green relish, a dill pickle, tomato, sport peppers and celery salt -- dragged through the garden -- and never with ketchup, a rule vendors enforce; its ancestors were sold by two Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants at the 1893 world's fair. The Italian beef is thin-sliced roast beef simmered in its gravy on French bread, hot with giardiniera or sweet with peppers, dipped whole if you know what you are doing, an Italian-American invention of the 1930s made famous again by a television show in the 2020s. Deep-dish pizza, a tall crust filled with cheese and topped with chunky tomato sauce, was invented at Pizzeria Uno in 1943, and the stuffed version followed in the 1970s.

Downstate cooks the farm: the corn and soybeans Illinois leads the country in, the pork and beef of the county fairs, the horseshoe of Springfield -- toast, a burger, fries and cheese sauce, ham originally -- and the German, Swedish and Polish tables of the immigrants who broke the prairie. Chicago's neighbourhoods add everything else: the Polish sausage of Maxwell Street, the taquerías of Pilsen and Little Village, the Chinese restaurants of Armour Square, the Indian and Pakistani restaurants of Devon Avenue, and a fine-dining scene that grew out of the city's wealth.

Chicago-style hot dog

All-beef in a natural casing on a poppy-seed bun, yellow mustard, white onion, neon relish, a pickle spear, tomato, sport peppers and celery salt; no ketchup, and vendors mean it.

Italian beef

Roast beef sliced thin and soaked in its thin gravy on French bread, "hot" with giardiniera or "sweet" with peppers, ordered dipped, dry or wet; from the Italian West Side of the 1930s.

Deep-dish pizza

Pizzeria Uno's 1943 invention: a high buttery crust, a thick layer of cheese, the chunky tomato sauce on top, eaten with a knife and fork; the stuffed variant adds a second thin crust under the sauce.

Horseshoe

Springfield's open-faced sandwich: thick toast, a hamburger patty or ham, a pile of fries and a cheese sauce descended from Welsh rarebit; a pony shoe is the half portion.

Maxwell Street Polish

The grilled Polish sausage with fried onions and mustard of the old open-air market, the sandwich of the neighbourhood that incubated the blues.

Sweet corn and the county-fair plate

The prairie's own: corn on the cob in August, pork chops on a stick at the State Fair, and the pies of the church suppers.

The stand is the institution: hot-dog stands and beef stands on corners across Chicago, order at the window, eat standing, and never ask for ketchup. The pizzeria is a sit-down argument between deep-dish loyalists and the thin, square-cut tavern style most Chicagoans eat at home. Taste of Chicago in the downtown lakefront park in July is the world's largest food festival and the city's largest festival of any kind, and the Illinois State Fair in Springfield in mid-August, held since 1853, is where the farm eats out.

Neighbourhoods are the markets: Pilsen and Little Village for Mexican, Armour Square for Chinese, Devon Avenue for South Asian, the Polish delis of the North-West Side, the Greek and Italian districts near the old Maxwell Street. Farmers' markets fill the city's plazas from May to October, and downstate the roadside stands sell the sweet corn and peaches of the season.

Wine and beer: the Shawnee Hills wine trail south of Carbondale, the state's first appellation, and Chicago's brewers, who made the city a beer town long before the current wave.

Illinois has made wine since the Icarians and Germans of Nauvoo planted the Mississippi River bluffs in the 1850s: the oldest recorded Concord-grape vineyard in the state, planted in 1851 in what is now Nauvoo State Park, still bears fruit, the town had 300 acres of vines and forty cellars by 1880, and the Baxter family winery there became the state's first bonded winery after Prohibition in 1936. The modern industry began in the Shawnee Hills of the south, where Alto Vineyards was founded in 1982 and the region was named the state's first American Viticultural Area in 2006; the number of wineries rose from three in 1985 to 79 in 2008, and by 2024 there were more than 130 tasting rooms. In 2009 the federal government created the Upper Mississippi River Valley appellation, the largest in the country, taking in the state's north-west corner.

The grapes are mostly French-American hybrids, which the growers' association calls the state's strong suit in a climate of hard winters and humid summers, grown on the drained sandstone and limestone of the Shawnee Hills, 400 feet above the surrounding land. The state's growers promote five wine trails -- Shawnee Hills, Heart of Illinois, Mississippi Valley, Wabash Valley and Carlyle Lake -- and the stretch of Route 127 south of Carbondale is signed as the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail. No tasting fee is stated here, because no winery page was opened.