The cover of Cafe Indiana, Joanne Raetz Stuttgen’s 2007 guide to “Indiana’s down-home cafes,” features a photo of chrome stools bathed in early morning light while upended mugs await customers at the counter. The guide’s companion publication, a cookbook, bears a cover dominated by a single serving of coconut cream pie--“the most popular pie in Hoosier cafes,” according to Stuttgen (2010:114). These images succinctly suggest the goals and foci of the linked volumes. Cafe Indiana is an impressive ethnographic endeavor: between 2004 and 2007, Stuttgen visited hundreds of Indiana cafes, and the counter was her preferred place to observe, interact with, and evaluate the people and food she encountered. Cafe Indiana Cookbook, published three years later with co-author and food columnist Jolene Ketzenberger, incorporates some of the anecdotes and observations from the 2007 guide, but its focus is on teaching readers to prepare a discrete body of recipes. Both books are overtly evaluative: the first claims authority to distinguish authenticity and quality of experience, pointing readers to cafes that have met specific criteria. The second is more subtle in its brokering: as in any collection, the cookbook directs its audience to read its contents as representative, but the cull pile--the recipes not chosen for inclusion--is nowhere to be found. The two books are helpfully read together, then, since Cafe Indiana gives a sense of what Cafe Indiana Cookbook elides or enhances. As these accessible paperbacks call attention to good food, good stories, and good company, they also foster thinking about the nuts and bolts of fieldwork, modes of self-representation and heritage construction, and the consequences of bringing people and places to broader public notice.

Cafe Indiana (2007) is modeled on Cafe Wisconsin (1993), a guide Stuttgen published while pursuing a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University. Updated and republished in 2004 by Terrace Books (the trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press), Cafe Wisconsin includes a preface that establishes Stuttgen’s interest in traditional vernacular culture (i.e., those “things that maintain a familiar sameness despite change over time and across regions” [1993:9]), reviews previous roadfood literature, outlines her procedures for selecting field sites and her criteria for recommending particular eateries, and previews the layout of the book, which is organized by intrastate regions. Cafe Indiana includes a version of this essay that is revised in its Hoosier-state particulars but consistent in focus and methods: for both projects, Stuttgen looked for cafes located in the original business districts of towns with fewer than 10,000 residents. Ideal cafes for her purposes were owner operated, demonstrated some level of historical continuity, and catered to a significantly local (and primarily daytime) clientele. In both Wisconsin and Indiana she began with 400 or so possible restaurants, but only about half the list made the next cut. In her second round of selection, Stuttgen favored cafes with primarily “home-cooked” food, clean yet idiosyncratic décor, and friendly staff and patrons; she stayed away from the “trendy,” the mass-produced, and the aloof (i.e., staff or patrons who seemed begrudging or inarticulate; 2007:xiv, xvii).

While in 1993 it was enough to say that she’d “concentrated entirely on traditional cafes hiding in small towns off the beaten path” (11), by 2007, given other extant guides to Indiana’s “Main Street” diners, Stuttgen emphasized her “deep focus on Hoosier food traditions and the varied roles cafes fill in the lives of individuals and communities” (xiv). Indeed, Stuttgen attends to the taste, texture, and preparation of food served, but she also comments on the décor, design, and use of cafe spaces; the roles of staff and patrons, visitors and regulars; and the kinds of social performances (dice games, joke swapping, tale telling) that transpire at each site. Entries for individual eateries are recounted in the first person, in present tense; they include Stuttgen’s own observations and evaluations, but also contextual information and quotations from the many individuals with whom she spoke during her investigations. Most reviews in Cafe Indiana run three to four pages in length, and each one reads like an engaging and coherent example of expanded narrative fieldnotes.

Framed as a guidebook, however, Cafe Indiana makes clear the author’s preferences and outsider status in ways that ethnographies may not: both the Wisconsin and Indiana guides depict fieldwork as a process of discovery for Stuttgen, who grew up in Minnesota and began her cafe exploration as a “hungry [bicycling] tourist” eager to shout “the glad news to all her friends” (1993:13). Guidebooks are also more explicit than ethnographies in their claims to expert status, and Cafe Indiana differs even from the original Cafe Wisconsin in establishing a fourth layer of distinction: after winnowing the cookie-cutter cafes from the “down-home” “mom-and-pop” types, sixty-four of 181 merited full reviews, and twenty-three of these featured cafes were designated “standouts,” the best of the best. Stuttgen also specifically mentions a reflexive procedure in the 2007 publication: after the essays were completed, she invited feedback from Indiana cafe owners, who offered “corrections, clarifications, additions, and sometimes deletions” (xvii). Some cafe owners withdrew from the project, and their establishments are some of those 120 or so listed in abbreviated form as “next best bets.” To aid fellow “adventure eaters,” each cafe description carries a headnote listing name, address, and hours of operation (though readers are encouraged to verify this information, given the dynamics of small businesses).

Both Cafe Wisconsin and Cafe Indiana conclude with an epilogue that touches on the history of US restaurants and outlines social functions of the cafes in question. While the final essay in the Indiana guide devotes some space to the ways food preferences reflect and reconstruct ethnic settlement patterns (e.g., Anglo-Irish Appalachian and German-speaking immigrants in agrarian southern Indiana, Eastern European and Greek populations in the more industrial north), for the most part the epilogue reiterates conclusions first voiced in Cafe Wisconsin. Stuttgen asserts that down-home cafes self-consciously and materially display ethnic and place-based identities, allow for exchanges that foster socialization and health monitoring among local patrons (especially retired men), and act as “chambers of commerce” that facilitate local economic and civic efforts by means of informal networking and visual promotions. Finally, endnotes and a bibliography direct readers to sources that investigate more fully culinary precedents, local histories, non-food expressive genres and practices (e.g., ethnic jokes, Xeroxlore), and the relations of food to social identities. Cafe Indiana also includes two helpful indexes: in one, cafes are organized by location; in the other, they’re sorted by name.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Stuttgen convincingly plugs Indiana details into the interpretive framework she established for cafes in Wisconsin. On the one hand, she certainly found the “familiar sameness” she sought to document: though she mentions some differences between the two states (e.g., men who gather to drink coffee and talk story in Indiana are unlikely to throw dice or play other games), for the most part her conclusions remain unchanged. Is the “down-home cafe,” then, a cultural pattern distinct to the Midwest, or do these institutions exist in other regions as well? Are the interactions and social functions that Stuttgen identifies unique to the contexts she consciously selected for, or might they also be provided by the kinds of cafes excluded from her surveys? For that matter, do “mom-and-pop” cafes differ substantially in function from other tertiary, or mediating, institutions (cf. Berger and Neuhaus 1977; Oldenburg 1989)?

Where Cafe Indiana aimed to describe cafes and invite potential tourists to sample local fare, however, Cafe Indiana Cookbook offers its readers a chance to inhabit authentic locality by creating those dishes at home. The preface extends the trope of “adventure eating,” asserting that the cookbook “takes readers to Main Street, gets them a table at the local cafe, and hands them a menu of hearty home cooking” (2010:vii). But it also appeals to locals and expats, those who share “our collective Hoosier heritage” (viii). The cookbook’s back-cover blurb caters explicitly to populist nostalgia, promising to reveal “the favorite recipes of Indiana’s Main Street eateries, including some rescued for publication before a diner’s sad closure,” and to document “old-fashioned delicacies now fading from the culinary landscape.” Still is an adverb used frequently in the cookbook’s preface, one that conjures up mild surprise but also pride that in Indiana, at least, “old-fashioned real food” is “just the way you remember it” (viii).

Published just as Main St.-Wall St. rhetoric was ramping up, the cookbook thus appeals to outsiders craving working-class authenticity and to native sons and daughters living far from home. At the same time, Cafe Indiana Cookbook bolsters other forms of cultural conservatism, constructing, for instance, a vision of the state’s true foodways (“pure Hoosier”; 2010:vii) as Anglo-Germanic. Though the preface makes reference to diverse cultural influences--Eastern European, Mexican, Asian, African--four Ethiopian stew recipes represent the only significant exceptions to “white” food. African American contributions to (or absences from) Indiana’s small-town cafe scenes go entirely unremarked. Cafe Indiana Cookbook does suggest how cafe cooks innovate: wrap the hash-brown casserole in a tortilla and you’ve got a breakfast burrito; add spinach to creamed chicken to make Florentine soup or to beaten eggs for an Obamalet (“go green”); brighten up the salad bar with marinated fresh vegetables. But the subtle variation evident in Cafe Indiana’s reports of individual restaurants is flattened out in Cafe Indiana Cookbook. Even if one argues that Anglo-Germanic foods are indeed “down-home” cafe bestsellers, these selected establishments do not represent all of Indiana’s eateries or foodways--yet the book’s preface repeatedly conflates small-town cafe food with statewide preferences. Identifying recipes as “quintessential Hoosier eats” and “Hoosier home cooking” (in a volume named not after the vaguely hillbilly mascot, but rather invoking the entire state) reinforces a sense that the “real” Indiana is as palely homogeneous as the mashed potatoes and bland flavors that dominate cafe cuisine (2010:vii, ix).

That said, the cookbook’s layout is clear, and the instructions informative and easy to follow. A brief headnote to each of the 130 recipes lists the name, city, and owners of the contributing café; each also offers a sentence or two about the recipe and a quote from the cafe’s proprietors. Recipes are organized in seven sections: Breakfast (mostly variations on eggs, grain, sausage, and potatoes), Daily Specials (twenty-six offerings, heavy on cuts of meat dredged, fried, and/or gravied), Soups and Sandwiches (often, Daily Specials on a bun or in a broth--including the intriguing “BLT Soup”), Salads and Dressings (dominated by a bevy of creamy mayonnaise-based salads: pea, broccoli and cauliflower, kidney bean, cabbage, apple, potato, or macaroni), Sides and Extras (including tomato gravy, fried green tomatoes, and a visual marvel: pickled eggs and beets), Pies (baked and refrigerator style), and Desserts (brownies, sheet cake, bread pudding, cobblers). Variation is on display throughout: for breakfast, one can choose among recipes for four kinds of French toast, four versions of grain mush, three breakfast burritos, and three hash brown combos; for dinner, several meat-and-cabbage dishes are offered (though, surprisingly, there’s no recipe for Slavic cabbage rolls). A number of included recipes that are marked as bestsellers were not volunteered by cafe owners, including Southern-style (savory) cornbread, mile-high biscuits, deviled eggs, and rhubarb pie; Stuttgen and Ketzenberger offer their own recipes for these items, and they also give instructions for two different pie crusts (as Stuttgen noted in Cafe Indiana, Hoosier cafes often rely on canned biscuits and factory-extruded pie crusts).

Other features of the cookbook also offer insight into how Hoosier cuisine has been shaped and interpreted by the authors. Cafe Indiana Cookbook contains no photographs, but interspersed among the recipes are short essays and sidebars, some adapted from similar texts in Cafe Wisconsin or Cafe Indiana, others entirely new additions. For instance, Ketzenberger--a native Indianan who tried each of the dishes in her test kitchen--offers guidance on cooking without a recipe, scaling down instructions sized for a crowd, ensuring that hash browns crisp, and adding variety and spice to basic recipes like macaroni-and-cheese or canned salmon patties. (This despite the preface’s promise that these recipes are not “dolled up with gourmet touches” [2010:ix].) Stuttgen’s essays, on the other hand, survey varied contexts in which food is served (a music hall, a repurposed school, a summer Chautauqua gathering, a town festival) and sourced (local meat markets). Several short features drawn from Cafe Indiana tell cookbook readers a bit about individual cafes--one chronicles how the owners of Windell’s Cafe in Dale, Indiana, had to remodel and regroup after magazine, newspaper, and television reports sent busloads of tourists their way. For the most part, however, the cookbook concentrates on regionally meaningful dishes, discussing the origins of goetta and washday ham-and-beans, the state Noodles vs. Dumplings split, the difference between “Hoosier Chili With” and other regional chilies, and variations on the fried baloney sandwich. A short bibliography points to further readings and an index lists recipes by name and by type.

Both Cafe Indiana and Cafe Indiana Cookbook represent a tremendous amount of work, and they fulfill their stated goals admirably. The guidebook directs its readers to distinctive food and distinguished establishments—and I have eaten my share of the breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches recommended therein—and the cookbook makes it possible to create Eier Datch, Marty’s Famous Pot Pie, or even a fried brain sandwich at home. I do wish that Stuttgen and Ketzenberger had been more careful with their terms and their rhetoric in the cookbook. They write, for instance, that “[m]uch of cafe food is edible folk art” created by “humble folk artists carrying on a precious cultural heritage” (2010:viii); yet despite Stuttgen’s academic training and her diverse ethnographic studies of material culture, folk art is never defined and the cookbook says little about the techniques or aesthetics of food preparation and presentation. Heritage and home cooking are also used loosely; invocation of the first term raises any number of red flags for folklorists, and the second merits at least some discussion, given that the sites under study are extra-domestic and that the selected recipes use their share of mass-produced commodities (soup mixes, bottled dressings, boxed crackers, processed meats and cheese).

Perhaps most interesting is the way the cookbook sometimes glosses over or perhaps compensates for data Stuttgen includes in Cafe Indiana. Take pie, for example. In addition to the front-cover photo of coconut cream, pie is highlighted on the cookbook’s back cover and in its preface; furthermore, pie gets its own recipe section. Yet in Cafe Indiana, Stuttgen observed that “real” baked goods and dairy were “noticeably missing from Indiana cafes” (2007:257); so was good pie. Noting a “worrisome drift toward partway pies” (277, n10), Stuttgen wrote that pudding pies in prefabricated crusts dominated cafe menus and that she “rarely encountered” sugar cream pies at all. The one handmade sugar cream she tried during her fieldwork “was flawed with floury lumps and a wiggly under-doneness” (253, 254); in fact, most sugar cream pies are produced in Wickersham, Indiana, at the Wick’s Pies factory. “So much for the Indiana icon, sugar cream,” lamented Stuttgen (256). Despite the pie’s infrequent creation in cafes across the state, the cookbook offers three recipes for sugar cream, as well as an essay about it (2010:115-17). In a sidebar feature in this section of the book, Ketzenberger also gives a shout out to the Indiana Foodways Alliance, an institution founded by several county convention and visitors bureaus in 2007 to foster the “pursuit of authentic and palatable dining experiences,” “preserve local food culture identity,” and encourage “excellence in culinary pursuits” (IFA 2012). In 2009, the Indiana state legislature designated the sugar cream pie as the official state pie, and this pie dots the IFA site, appearing in the organization’s logo, its history and signature recipe sections, and in one of the several “culinary trails” the IFA has established for tourists. Still, one cafe owner noted that “many customers have never heard of [sugar cream],” though they like it when they try it (Stuttgen and Ketzenberger 2010:116).

Why, then, so much emphasis on pie? In part, sugar cream pie boosterism increases the market for a local Indiana industry; in part, it brings Indiana into line with dozens of states that have designated official foodways since the turn of the millennium. Pie in particular sells a number of stories. Dessert pie--with its presumed British origins and its ties to Thanksgiving and founding national narratives--has long had conservative overtones, but during the years Stuttgen and Ketzenberger were compiling these books, pie also became hip. Young quirky bakers dusted off old recipes and added variations of their own in movies and television series like Stranger than Fiction (2006), Waitress (2007), and Pushing Daisies (2007-09). Why pie? A nine- or ten-inch pan pie is too large to be eaten alone but too small to serve a whole company; thus, multiples are often made at a time, and pies have come to index variety and community. Often filled with seasonal/local ingredients, pies also eschew fussy external embellishment; their preparation requires time and skill, but not dedicated expertise or much special equipment. Thus, pies fit a contemporary DIY (do-it-yourself) ethic that emphasizes locality, simplicity, uniqueness, and accessibility. In 2011, for instance, food critics pointed to pie as the year’s food trend, with the honest community-centered pie beating out the more precious and atomistic cupcake or doughnut. Cafe Indiana Cookbook’s celebration of pie undoubtedly helps the publication reach multiple audiences; I believe it also illustrates a tendency to define what should be representative of the region rather than simply document “honest home cooking, straight from Main Street, from the cafe cooks and restaurant owners who know what their customers want” (2010:viii).

The issues raised by these two publications mean that they have great promise as classroom resources. I have outlined some tensions that could be explored if the books were used together. Alone, Cafe Indiana Cookbook could be compared to other ethnographically enhanced recipe collections (e.g., Dabney 1998; O’Neill 2010); attention to dominant ingredients and written instructions could also help students think about “cuisines,” including foundational foods, flavor preferences, and protocols of preparation and consumption (Belasco 2008). And students preparing for field forays of their own could work backward from Stuttgen’s polished accounts in Cafe Indiana. What kinds of questions might she have asked? What details did she have to notice? How do material culture, proxemics, and verbal discourses interact to accomplish particular kinds of social business? Are small-town cafes in fact mini-museums? In addition, exploring Cafe Indiana alongside other regional and national roadfood guides (e.g., Willard 2008) could jumpstart conversations about the dynamics of culture, the role of the ethnographer as authenticator, and the implications of culinary tourism (cf. Long 2003). After all, when Stuttgen began her research, one of her framing questions was “How do small things survive?” The answer, in part, is “Due to books like these.”

Works Cited

Belasco, Warren. 2008. Food: The Key Concepts. New York: Berg.

Berger, Peter L., and Richard John Neuhaus. 1977. To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy. Washington, DC: AEI.

Dabney, Joseph E. 1998. Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House.

Indiana Foodways Alliance (IFA). “About Us.” Indiana Foodways Alliance website, accessed in March, 2012. http://www.indianafoodways.com/.

Long, Lucy M., ed. 2003. Culinary Tourism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Oldenburg, Ray. 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House.

O’Neill, Molly. 2010. One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Stuttgen, Joanne Raetz. 1993. Cafe Wisconsin. Heartland Press: Minocqua, WI.

Willard, Pat. 2008. America Eats! On the Road with the WPA: The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts that Define Real American Food. New York: Bloomsbury.

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[Review length: 3312 words • Review posted on May 13, 2012]