Limitations of school cooks led to the popularization of the dish.
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While it may sound unusual to the uninitiated, the combination of chili and cinnamon rolls is a classic meal across Iowa.
In 2017, the internet discovered yet another Midwestern oddity: in some of the flyover states, folks are mixing chili with cinnamon rolls.
Immediately, this discovery brought back memories of the time the New York Times dared to insinuate Minnesotans favorite dish was a “grape salad” in a 2014 fallout the paper later termed “a recipe for wrath.”
Here was another such situation…except in other parts of the Midwest – places like Kansas and Iowa – this combination did and does apparentlyexist and it was all due to elementary school lunches.
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
While it may sound unusual to the uninitiated, the combination of chili and cinnamon rolls is a classic meal across Iowa.
The Des Moines Register investigatedand published a story on Thursday explaining more of the history.
The paper talked Darcy Maulsby, who wrote‘A Culinary History of Iowa’ and about the tradition of chili and cinnamon rolls.
She said the limitations of school cooks led to the popularization of the dish.
"My guess is that back in the '60s when commodity programs were supplying items to the school lunch programs, you could get things in bulk," Maulsby said. "Bulk hamburger, bulk dried beans, products like that. At that time ... a lot of the school cooks, especially in the rural schools, were retired farm wives. These were gals who had cooked all their lives ... (and) knew how to make a hardy, filling meal and knew how to stretch a dollar.
"I'm guessing somewhere along the line the savvy cook looked at the ingredients available to them and thought, 'What could we make with these items?' And I'm guessing that's where chili and cinnamon rolls came from."
The chief of the Bureau of Nutritional and Health Services in Iowa’s Department of Education, Ann Feilmann, echoed these sentiments and said the kids liked it.
“Students liked dunking the cinnamon roll in the chili, so that is one reason they were served together," she said. "Back in the day, the cinnamon rolls were larger with frosting and students liked them, so participation increased on days when this menu was offered.”
So there you have it.
