St. Louis cuisine

St. Louis cuisine, the food culture of the Greater St. Louis area, has a long history and broad range of influences. The cuisine's influences primarily stem from Italian, German, Irish, and French cuisines, but it includes many American contributions. The cuisine includes unique forms of pizza, barbecue, ravioli, pork, and pastries.

History and composition

St. Louis has a history going back to an early French settlement in 1764,^[1] but its cultural styles are seen as centering most significantly around immigrants from Italy, Germany, and Ireland. People from those countries immigrated heavily during the city's significant growth in the nineteenth century. Oktoberfest, sauerkraut, and bratwurst are still popular, as are Irish pubs, and Italian restaurants on The Hill dominate the local culinary topography.

The city was the home of Irma Rombauer, the author of the highly published cookbook The Joy of Cooking.^[2]

St. Louis foods

A number of foods are specific to, or known to have originated in St. Louis:^[3]

Toasted ravioli

Locals consider St. Louis' region of The Hill to have among the best Italian food in the country. One food that originated there is toasted ravioli, which is a ravioli coated in breading and toasted dry or fried, instead of being boiled or baked wet. Credit for its invention is generally given to a restaurant called Oldani's, which is now known as Mama Campisi's.

St. Louis-style pizza

St. Louis has a unique and regionally popular variation of pizza known as St. Louis-style pizza. Among the archetypical St. Louis-style pizza makers are Imo's and Cecil Whittakers. The pizza's traditional characteristics include:

• It is cut in squares ("tavern cut") as opposed to wedges.
• The crust is thin and crisp and is not made with yeast.
• Greater crust strength through square-cutting and crisp crust is needed because the toppings are traditionally arranged in much larger pieces, and are often sliced instead of diced.
• The white processed cheese Provel (composed of provolone, Swiss, and white cheddar) and was originally created because of the low melting point. This allowed for a faster cooking time than other cheeses,
• Its pizza sauce is seasoned with more oregano and less basil than is typical.

Gooey butter cake

Supposedly originating with a botched cake recipe in the 1930s, gooey butter cake and gooey butter cookies are popular in the region. The bottom layer of the cake is flat and dense, made with a box cake mix. The top layer is the "gooey butter" and is made from powdered sugar and cream cheese. The cake is typically dusted with powdered sugar once cooled. Nationally, food enthusiasts largely became aware of the cake when Paula Deen published the recipe in one of her cookbooks.

St. Louis-style BBQ

St. Louis was listed by Kingsford as one of the top ten barbecue cities.^[4] St. Louis-style barbecue involves direct grilling rather than indirect heat and smoking, as well as a larger volume of the style's sweet, sticky, and acidic tomato-based sauce. It is commonly used with two local meat cuts:

Pork steak

In St. Louis, one of the most common pork dishes is the pork steak, a shoulder cut that is slow-cooked until it becomes very tender, after which it is then barbecued.

St. Louis-style ribs

St. Louis-style ribs are spare ribs with the sternum, cartilage and rib tips removed to create a rectangular-shaped rack. The cut of ribs, formally recognized by the USDA as "Pork Ribs, St. Louis Style," supposedly originated with numerous meat-packing plants located in the region in the mid twentieth century.

Modern St. Louis barbecue

St. Louis has experienced a recent boom in popular barbecue restaurants, possibly initiated by the critically acclaimed Pappy’s Smokehouse that opened in 2008.^[5] In 2011, the Huffington Post and Zagat named Pappy’s the number one "U.S. Barbecue Mecca."^[6] Direct offshoots of Pappy’s, which share an ownership group, include Adam’s Smokehouse and Bogart’s Smokehouse in St. Louis, and Boogie’s BBQ in Nuremberg, Germany.^[7] Other critically acclaimed barbecue restaurants in the St. Louis area include Sugarfire Smokehouse, Hendricks BBQ, Roper’s Ribs, PM BBQ, Lil' Mickey's Memphis Barbeque, and 17th Street Bar & Grill.^[8]

In recent years St. Louis has routinely been named one of the best cities in the country for barbecue.^[9]

Slinger

The Slinger is a St. Louis diner food consisting of two eggs, hash browns, and hamburger, steak, or other meat, all covered in chili, onions, and cheddar or American cheese.

Gerber sandwich

The Gerber sandwich originated at the locally well-known Ruma's Deli. It is an open-faced sandwich, with Italian or French bread, garlic butter, ham, and provel cheese. It is sprinkled with paprika and toasted.

St. Paul sandwich

The St. Paul sandwich originated in St. Louis in the 1940s. It is made with white bread with an egg foo young patty inside, served with dill pickle, white onion, mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato. Its inventor, Steven Yuen at Park Chop Suey in Lafayette Square in St. Louis, named the sandwich after his hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Famous contributions

Other foods were originally invented or originated in the St Louis area, but are now integrated into wider cuisine.

St. Louis World's Fair

The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, popularly known as the St. Louis World's Fair, is famous for originating, or more often introducing to the world, a number of foods that have worldwide popularity today, including:

• The ice cream cone, especially the waffle cone. George Bang, owner of the Bannery Creamery reportedly ran out of bowls for his ice cream at the fair, and he started using rolled up waffle-shaped Italian cookies called pizzelles.
• Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by the dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton and first introduced to a wide audience at the 1904 World's Fair as "Fairy Floss"^[10] with great success, selling 68,655 boxes at 25¢ per box ($7.09 today^[11]).
• The fair introduced the phrase "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."^[12]

Concrete (Blizzard)

The local ice cream shop Ted Drewes originated the "Concrete", a frozen custard mixed into a milkshake thick enough to hang a spoon in it upside-down. The frozen custard was imitated years later by Dairy Queen as the Blizzard.^[13]

Mayfair salad dressing

Mayfair salad dressing is a salad dressing incorporating anchovy, created at St. Louis's first five-star restaurant,^[14] The Mayfair Room, at the Mayfair Hotel, downtown.

See also

• Cuisine of the Midwestern United States
• Louisiana Purchase Exposition
• Quad City-style pizza
• Horseshoe sandwich
• Red Hot Riplets

References