As we're all prone to doing from time to time, I found myself in Nebraska last weekend.
Wait, no. I don't mean I FOUND myself in Nebraska. I wasn't on a soul-searching mission to discover my true inner Cornhusker or anything. But I WAS in Nebraska last weekend for a visit. Well, technically a visitATION, but that was the bummer part of the trip. I'd rather talk about the WEIRD part.
We had just crossed the state line when I saw the first sign. "IT'S CHILI AND CINNAMON ROLL SEASON," said the friendly restaurant lettering.
The weirdness of what I'd read didn't really hit me until I saw ANOTHER sign. "CHILI AND FRESH CINNAMON ROLLS SERVED HERE!" Well, that's just kind of odd. Why were all these restaurants advertising chili and cinnamon rolls simultaneously? Did some bakery in the area have a dramatic overstock on cinnamon rolls or something?
Eventually, we decided to find someplace to grab a quick bite to eat. And when you need a quick bite in Nebraska, there's really only one correct choice. If you want the true taste of Nebraska, you need to stop at a Runza. The iconic fast food chain has 85 locations, and nearly all are in Cornhusker country.
The chain has scant locations outside Nebraska, but for a short time, we had one right here in Moline. One of the first restaurants to set up shop in the late, great Southpark Mall food court was a Runza. My best friend is from Nebraska, and when he discovered they'd opened a Runza here, I think it's the only time I ever saw him dance. Sadly, it was also one of the first food court failures. Maybe the Quad Cities just wasn't ready for the magic of a Runza sandwich -- a yeast-dough rectangle filled with ground beef, onions, and cabbage. At Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, they sell over 10,000 every time the Cornhuskers take the field.
So there we were, waiting in line at Runza, when I spotted it. Combo #3: Chili and a cinnamon roll. A sign stuck to one of the windows proudly announced "It's chili and cinnamon roll time!" What the WHAT? And then it happened it front of my eyes. As we sat there eating, I spied a family gathered around a table full of chili bowls and plates of cinnamon rolls -- and I watched in horror as they eagerly tore off chunks of sweet glazed cinnamon roll, dunked them whole-heartedly in chili, and wolfed them down.
I'm all for cultural differences among peoples. I enjoy trying different cuisines and foods I've never eaten before. I love chili. Lord knows I love a good cinnamon roll. I have absolutely no issues with the two sharing a plate in front of me. But to take the cinnamon roll and dunk it INTO the chili? That's a crime against nature.
Just then, a perky teenaged Runza employee came round to clean a nearby table. I proceeded to irritate her.
"Soooo... chili and cinnamon rolls. Is that a thing?"
She looked at me like I was crazy.
"Because in Illinois, it's definitely NOT a thing."
Then she looked at me like I was crazy AND from Mars.
"Of course it's a thing. What else would you eat with chili?"
I could think of a dozen or so pairings less gross than cinnamon rolls -- but before I could comment, she was off, soon to be seen whispering to her co-workers while covertly pointing our way, assuredly telling them about the weirdos at table 13 who dare to eat chili without cinnamon rolls.
Upon getting back to Normalburg where good foods don't make gross decisions, I did some investigating. It turns out I'm not only one astonished by this odd pairing. Internet sleuths have long tried to trace the origins of the exotic mash-up. The general consensus is that it started in Washington state as a "logger's breakfast." Logging camps would take the leftover chili from the night before and dump it over cinnamon rolls for a calorie infusion to power their workers through the day.
As for Nebraska, the fad seems to have been spread by the trendiest of all people -- grade school lunchladies. Chili and cinnamon rolls as a combo showed up on Nebraska school lunch menus in the 1960s and spread regionally from there.
I wondered if anyone else outside of Nebraska knew of this peculiar pairing, so I posed it to the collective hive-mind of Facebook. Most of my friends found the idea pretty weird. Some said they grew up with it. But then OTHER comments started drifting in that completely freaked me out.
"That's nothing," a distant Facebook friend chimed in. "I once had a roommate from Galesburg, Illinois. He used to eat chili with peanut butter sandwiches and thought it was completely normal."
Umm... that's NOT normal? Having grown up in Galesburg myself, I spent most of my childhood being fed chili and peanut butter sandwiches on the regular by the fine folks at Community Unit School District #205. Just the other day, I heated up some chili, pulled out some Wonder bread, slapped on some peanut butter, and called it lunch. I've eaten chili with peanut butter sandwiches my entire life. Not once, not until that very second, did I think it was weird. Its just how people eat chili -- isn't it?
Spoiler: It is decidedly not normal. And I had no idea. And now I've lost all sense of right and wrong and I'm in an existential crisis. Thanks a lot, lunchladies.
I'm thinking the moral of the story here can go two ways: Either (1) all of us are weird in our own way, whether it's our upbringing, our culture, or the state we call home, and maybe we should stop finger-pointing and just embrace our collective weirdness, or (2) grade school lunchladies were the original social influencers and FAR more powerful than any of us ever realized.
Should my illustrious faux journalism career ever end, maybe that's how I'll spend my golden years -- working in a school cafeteria and devoting my life to making little kids think that insane food combinations are perfectly normal. If one day my column disappears, and then soon after your child comes home from school asking for a sausage and banana pizza with extra mustard, my work will be done.
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