Back-to-Basics Cuisine : Down-Home Cooking Is Latest Trend

Move over sushi, mesquite and jambalaya, there’s a new cooking trend sweeping out of the nation’s breadbasket and showing up on tables at a growing number of American restaurants--”heartland chic.”

Many current Midwesterns and transplanted “flat-landers” know the trendy dishes as “down-home” cooking, but cuisine featuring quality ingredients, home-grown vegetables and fruits are increasingly popular on the coasts.

“I really do think it’s a current trend,” said Thomas A. Benson, publisher of Midwest Living magazine, which is distributed to some 450,000 families. “It would be hard for me to give any hard evidence, but I really think people would like to go back to basics.

“And when you’re talking about going back to basics, you’re talking about quality, you’re talking about things made from scratch, you’re talking about the way mom and grandma used to do it,” Benson said.

In a presentation to a Midwestern Governors’ Assn. leadership forum in Davenport recently, Benson said: “What used to be called ‘down-home’ Midwest cooking is now known--from trendy San Francisco eateries to fancy New York restaurants--as ‘heartland chic.’

“We’ve all known that for years, but the food writers are just now discovering Midwestern cuisine,” Benson said.

Heartland cuisine apparently has not been specifically defined at this point because it encompasses a variety of ethnic origins, but Benson said Midwest dishes were a big hit at a recent international food conference in Kansas City, Mo.

“It’s going to take us a long time to try to define what that Midwestern cuisine really is. I think the freshness, the quality of the food, particularly meats, are part of our cuisine,” Benson said.

A ‘Wonderful Mixture’

“We have a wonderful mixture of all kinds of countries and a lot of cooking traditions have been preserved. I think all that relates to the deep-roots that Midwesterners have,” he added.

“I think what we’re really talking about is people are going back to some of the basics that they can feel good about,” Benson said, “and I think the down-home cooking that we’re talking about is something that people can feel good about.”

The magazine publisher said a natural base exists for such cuisine because many people with Midwestern roots have transplanted in other parts of the country.