You see, I attended a funeral on Saturday up in Eau Claire for a friend's mother who had passed away earlier in the week. After the service there was food served at the Masonic Temple. One of the dishes was this stuff:
(Photo found here.)
It looked like they had taken a bag of mixed frozen vegetables (i.e. – corn, peas, and carrots), stirred it into some cream of chicken soup, and topped it with tater tots. For some reason, tater tot hotdish/casserole just seems blatantly small town Wisconsin to me. I'm sure the Ore-Ida & Campbell's folks have done their best to make sure that this dish is universal, but I don't recall eating it as a kid in Chicago. It appears neither in Apple Betty & Sloppy Joe nor The Flavor of Wisconsin so I am at a loss to say if it's a regional thing or what. Presumably it appeared in the late 1950s and, for whatever reason, really took off up nort.
Where is Terese Allen when you need her?
So, how was it?
ReplyDeleteAlthough fancy Hopalicious-whipped butter makes me weak in the knees, I do me love some junky comfort food. Tater tots with cream of chicken soup? Mmm. It'd be fun to make the homemade, non-canned version of this, too.
Also...
ReplyDeleteThis is the kind of food my mother grew up on in the '40s and '50s in northeastern Indiana. She rebelled against this white bread cooking as a result and ran her own vegetarian, whole foods catering business in the '70s and '80s. I grew up on tempeh casseroles, palak paneer, hummus, brown rice and Indian tea (way before chai lattes became trendy in coffee shops). This was a great source of embarrassment for me as a child.
Now, as an adult, a tater tot casserole is subversive, exotic and strangely appealing. I don't associate it with growing up. I associate it with rebellion.
It was pretty much what you'd expect from a hotdish prepared by Norwegians - bland. However, I give it credit for not being overly salty.
ReplyDeleteA lot of Baby Boomers grew up on this stuff. My parents grew up at the end of the Depression and during WW2 so, as a kid, we didn't eat a whole lot of stuff like tater tot casseroles. It's not that everything was made from scratch but there just weren't a lot of dishes where you threw everything in and baked. Plus we ate a fair amount of ethnic food from my parents' ethnicities. And so we had kielbasa, golabki, pasties, schnitzel, et al.
Ya, JM (the Osswegian) knows his hotdish, whereas I came up with MKE food similar to what you had, Palmer. Mebbe it's dose Luterans?
ReplyDeleteIt could be dem Luterans. Or is it a rural vs. urban thing?
ReplyDelete