One of my idle hobbies is to look up regional cuisines, or less-well-known recipes from various international cuisines, on Wikipedia to see if I can find anything that seems interesting that I’d like to try making. That’s how I found out about Cincinnati chili, ragu Genovese, and a number of other dishes that I’ve since included into my kitchen repertoire. On one of those recent deep dives, I found an entry for a sandwich called a “South American”. It’s not from South America, or in a South American style, or even from the South of America - it’s from northern Minnesota, and is apparently an Iron Range tavern specialty that sounds kinda like a sloppy joe but far more complex, with several meats and a BUNCH of fresh veggies cooked down in a big pot for hours until it forms a sort of spread that’s then eaten on Italian bread.
The article itself is barely more than a stub, but the description, and the bizarrely inapt name, piqued my interest, so I sought to find a recipe… which was difficult, since “South American recipe” and “South American sandwich recipe” tend to yield results about, well, South America. Even searching for it on Minnesota subreddits is difficult. Ultimately, I managed to find two pages that both cite the same recipe from a cookbook of Iron Range recipes.
The recipe provided is big, but it looks like it could be halved easily enough, and I’d be able to make it in my own kitchen without buying any extra equipment, but since I live alone and I’m responsible for eating all of my leftovers, I’m always wary of trying a new recipe that’s gonna be on the pricier side of things if I don’t have a solid idea of what I should expect the result to be, and since I’m probably the only person in this state who’s ever even HEARD of these things, I seek the wisdom of any Minnesotan Dopers out there.
Ever had one of these? Are they good? Ever make 'em at home? How’s this recipe look? Have you ever even heard of these?
I consider myself a curious Midwestern foodie and I’ve not heard of the South American.
When I think Minnesota sandwich, it’s gotta be the Saint Paul! It’s an egg foo yong patty on a bun (edit: nope, sliced bread!) from Saint Louis, Missouri and I’ve never tried one. But Saint Paul is better known as a city in MN, sooo ..
I now live in MSP and have never seen it on a menu. Of course MSP isn’t da Range. However, many years ago I made many trips to the Range to visit in-laws and never heard of it then, either. To me, it sounds like a version of chili.
Based on the reactions from Minnesota Dopers, and the fact that the OP struggled to actually find additional cites on the sandwich, it suggests to me that it’s a hyper-localized thing, maybe only popular/known in a small region (or maybe even only at a single bar).
AFAICT, the “Spaghetti Inn” in Gilbert, where it was apocryphally invented, no longer exists and hasn’t for long enough that it has no web presence. It does seem to be hyper-local to the Iron Range, so it’s actually kind of surprising that it broke containment and got documented on Wikipedia in the first place.
I did find a Facebook post where some people were describing it as a back-in-the-day thing where their grandmas would spend all day chopping vegetables (in the days before food processors) while the men watched football and drank beer, and one person shared a handwritten recipe that looked to be from the early 20th century and isn’t too different than the one I cited in the OP.
I’d ask around r/minnesota to see if I can get more info on whether you can still find this in a restaurant anywhere, but apparently I need to accumulate comment karma there before they’ll allow me to post, so I guess the only way I’m gonna learn much more than that is by making a pot of it myself.
Wikipedia does have that “notability” standard where they’ll take an article down if it doesn’t meet their standards of being significant enough to merit being documented, so I guess it at least passed that test.
Now that I look into it, though, the original author definitely has a strong interest in hyper-local Minnesota foods. His other contributions include Minnesota sushi (lunch meat wrapped around a pickle spear and cream cheese), hot beef commercial (a variation on the open-faced roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy found throughout the Midwest), and the somewhat-offensively named hot dago (a spicy open-faced sausage parm sandwich).
I’m thinking it’s sort of a fusion between spaghetti sauce and loosemeat.
It’s an interesting way to find and try foods I’d otherwise never experience.
Ooof. I think I’m gonna have to lump that one in with Altoona-style pizza, lutefisk, hakarl, and mettbrochen in the “Interesting-Sounding Regional Foods That I Have Absolutely No Desire To Try” file.
It probably says something about how obscure this sandwich must be that this thread is now one of the top results on Google when I try to search for it.
I’m also from Minnesota, but far from the north where such a sandwich is from. I’ve never heard of it either, nor had I heard of “funeral bread” (mentioned above) until I read that Minnesota Star Tribune article. I’d call a Juicy Lucy the quissential Minnesotan sandwich. Or a fried SPAM sandwich. (Now I’m drooling thinking about that can of SPAM in our pantry.)
Huh. Around here in the Pacific Northwest, Spam is pretty much exclusively thought of as Hawaiian/Islander food - fresh meat was a premium when the Pacific became westernized in the early 20th century, and still is because there isn’t really much arable land available for ranching out there, so canned meats became an integral part of the local cuisine.
The iconic version is Spam musubi - a block of sushi rice, topped with a slice of fried Spam, and tied to it with a strip of nori.
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