Buckeyes – Ohio’s Pride Since 1919
The sweet treat as we know it today likely originated in the 1960s, though peanut butter and chocolate combinations existed earlier. These peanut butter and chocolate confections look exactly like the nuts from Ohio’s state tree. The tree produces a nut that resembles an actual buck’s eye, and the confections look pretty identical, with their chocolate coating leaving just one small circle of light brown peanut butter visible.
While the instantly recognizable Ohio buckeye is toxic to all animals except squirrels, its kitschy confectionary counterpart is cherished in the Midwest with buckeye candies being sugary little balls of peanut butter filling and chocolate coating. Food historians note these became holiday staples precisely because they require no special equipment or exotic ingredients. The bite-sized, chocolate-coated peanut butter balls are staples around holidays and the perfect treat for gift-giving.
Gooey Butter Cake – St. Louis’s Sweet Accident
The real deal is far less sweet than its cake-mix cousins, with a creamy custard atop a yeast-raised coffee cake base, and like so many great culinary creations, it came from a happy accident. According to legend, a baker in St. Louis, intending to make one of his bakery’s traditional German yeasted coffee cakes, made a ratio-swapping mistake and added too much butter and sugar, but that mistake proved profitable.
The dessert represents everything food historians love about Midwest sweets: born from necessity, perfected through repetition, and impossible to improve upon. If you ask a Missourian, gooey butter cake is at the top of the list of great Midwest desserts, and this cake is unfussy and unfrosted but has seriously rich flavor. Modern Pinterest versions pale in comparison to the original’s subtle sweetness.
Scotcheroos – Iowa’s Party Essential
Scotcheroos are made up of two layers, the bottom of which can be best described as a sweetened peanut butter Rice Krispies treat, and this dense concoction is topped with a layer of melted butterscotch and chocolate. The scotcheroo is a Midwestern party essential and it truly feels like no get-together is complete without a nine by thirteen inch pan of these bad boys, though the recipe didn’t come from the kitchen of a hardworking Midwesterner but from the side of a box of Rice Krispies.
Though the breakfast cereal corporate overlords introduced the recipe in post-World War II America, it’s the state of Iowa that really takes pride in the dessert. Scotcheroos are one of the go-to desserts for Midwesterners to bring to potlucks, school lunches, or really any gathering where food is a focus. What started as corporate marketing became genuine cultural heritage.
Frozen Custard – Wisconsin’s Dairy Crown Jewel
Interestingly enough, frozen custard actually comes from Coney Island, New York, where back in 1919, the Kohr brothers began adding egg yolks to their desserts to slow them from melting in the hot summer sun, and people loved the creamier product – thus, frozen custard was born! Frozen custard never caught on in New York the way it did in the Midwest, though, and by 1933, the World’s Fair in Chicago introduced the treat to the nation.
When Prohibition started, many taverns started selling custard instead of alcohol to stay in business, and soon enough, frozen custard made its way into Wisconsinites’ hearts, with Milwaukee now regarded as the unofficial custard capital of the world. The primary difference between frozen custard and ice cream is eggs, as frozen custard incorporates egg yolks, and the difference is reflected in the texture and richness of flavor of the frozen treats.
Kringle – Danish Heritage in Wisconsin
Kringle dates back to Danish settlers in the 1800s in Racine, Wisconsin, and has been pleasing palates ever since, being another cultural dessert inspired by immigrants who flocked to the Midwest with its roots in Danish culture but standing strong in American culture as Wisconsin’s state pastry. Traditionally, kringle is an artisan dessert where the pastry is folded into a beautifully arranged oval of thinly layered dough, which is then sometimes decorated and displayed for gatherings.
Kringle tastes like the holidays, and for those who grew up with the dessert as tradition, it likely tastes a bit like home too, with the braided dough containing a variety of fillings so the actual taste is dependent on the whims of the maker, with popular choices being almond, apple, pecan, cherry, raspberry, and a number of other fruits and nuts. Food historians prize kringle as evidence of successful cultural integration.
Kuchen – South Dakota’s Official State Dessert
Kuchen is the German word for cake, but it isn’t a direct parallel to the cake most Americans are used to eating, and you won’t find a frosting-coated, layered dessert when presented with kuchen as the Midwestern dish is rooted in German and Russian heritage and is like a cake-pie hybrid where you picture a pie, replace the crust with cake, and you’ve got a good idea of what kuchen is.
With German culture prevalent in the Dakotas, residents created their own version of traditional kuchen, pronounced KOO-ken, literally translated as cake, with this fruit and cake combo starting with a custard and adding whatever regional fruit is available, like apples or prunes, and you’ll often find it topped with almonds or even streusel. Kuchen is the official state dessert of South Dakota, showcasing how popular and ingrained the dessert is in local culture.
Sugar Cream Pie – Indiana’s Hoosier Heritage
Also called Hoosier Pie, Sugar Cream Pie can be served warm or chilled, and though it might appear like a custard pie, sugar cream pie isn’t made with eggs as the pudding-like filling is baked in a crust, topped with melted butter and cinnamon and then broiled. It is also the official state dessert of Indiana, and sugar cream pie is Indiana’s state dessert.
It’s a great recipe to keep in your back pocket because it can be made with ingredients you typically have right in the pantry. This dessert emerged from practical necessity during lean times when eggs were precious commodities. Desperation desserts like sugar-butter pie – filled solely with sugar, butter and cream – were a way to satisfy cravings when the economic situations of most households were not so sweet.
Jell-O Salads – The Midwest’s Gelatin Legacy
Catherine Lambrecht, a culinary historian who specializes in midwestern cuisine, explained that you could show people what you have without saying ‘I have a refrigerator at home’ by bringing a gelatin dessert in the middle of summer, and Jell-O’s status signaling was especially important for the Midwest, where rural areas lagged behind other regions in refrigeration, making Jell-O-based dishes especially popular to bring to potlucks, maximizing the display of wealth.
While Jell-O salads fell out of vogue with much of the U.S., they remained common in the Midwest, enough to earn the nickname Midwest Salad, a distinction it shares with a few other decidedly non-leafy dishes. Ken Albala predicts that it’s going to come back, citing the rise in lab-grown meat as potential evidence that Americans are ready to embrace futuristic foods yet again, with Google trends data indicating a rise in popularity of searches for Midwest Salad.
