This week we served a new menu item Homemade Chili with a Cinnamon Roll. Here is a little back story regarding the odd combination.
It turns out that the pairing of chili and cinnamon rolls is a big, beloved deal in regional pockets of the Midwest and across western states like Wyoming and Washington. But for those who’ve never heard of or tasted this treasured food combo, just a mention of serving these two items together can be as polarizing as putting pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs.
By the 1960s, chili and cinnamon rolls were appearing on school cafeteria menus from Lake City, Iowa, to Greeley, Colorado. The school lunch program director of Brookline, Massachusetts, public schools, Marion Louise Cronan, even featured a recipe for chili con carne and cinnamon rolls—something she may have learned about during her many years editing the school lunch section of Practical Home-Economics magazine—in her 1962 cafeteria textbook, The School Lunch. Soon, regions of Nebraska, Washington, Wyoming, the Dakotas, became well-versed in the pairing, creating quite a fanatic following west of the Mississippi River. Why it didn’t catch on in the east may be a combination of culinary heritage and regional food tastes.
“Many people who grew up here in the Midwest and in these smaller farming communities come from a baking tradition,” says Maulsby, “and they were used to baking their own breads.” This included the many retired farmwives who often found work in local school cafeterias. Cinnamon rolls were a part of their repertoire, and were considered a grain to boot.
“We didn’t realize how lucky we were,” she adds.
Still, Maulsby believes that the cinnamon-chili combo is not really all that unusual, since Cincinnati-style chili, a meaty sauce made with a distinct blend of spices—including cinnamon—dates back to the 1920s.
As to how to eat the distinguished combo, use the roll as a dipper; using parts of the roll to sop up the chili; some eat the chili first, cinnamon roll second, it all depends on where you grew up. This, after all, is a meal that thrives on nostalgia. Although the Spokane school system has more recently shifted to serving chili with cornbread (“We went more toward whole foods and tried to reduce some of those sweet treat perceptions,” says Wordell), just talking about the pairing has Wordell dreaming of its sweet-savory goodness. “It’s one of those childhood memories that when I came back here as the director 24 years ago I thought, ‘Yeah, there it is!’ Now I feel like it needs to make another appearance on our menus,” he says.
