9 Illinois Foods That Horrify the Rest of the Country

Ketchup on a hot dog is an argument Illinois already settled.

Ask a Chicago vendor for a ketchup bottle and watch their eyes roll.

That’s just the opening move in a state that piles sandwiches higher than most forks can manage and dares first-timers to clean their plate.

These are the Illinois foods that horrify the rest of the country.

1. Mother-in-Law Sandwich

Illinois’ most jaw-dropping sandwich starts with a tamale, not a hot dog.

Vendors on Chicago’s South Side steam a corn-meal roll wrapped in paper, drop it into a hot dog bun, then bury it under chili, onions, tomato, and cucumber.

Fat Johnnie’s Famous Red Hots has served the sandwich from its stand on South Western Avenue since 1972, and regulars order it by its real name, the Mother-in-Law.

Nobody agrees on how that name started.

The sandwich’s origin is just as tangled.

Chicago’s hot tamale tradition came north with the Great Migration, carried into the city by cooks from the Mississippi Delta long before anyone stacked a tamale in a bun.

Smithsonian Magazine dug into the sandwich’s history and hit a wall.

Historian Peter Engler told the magazine no documented record of it turns up before the 1950s.

Ask a first-time visitor to guess what’s inside before they bite.

They never get it right.

2. Horseshoe

Springfield’s answer to Chicago’s sandwich culture skips the bread almost entirely and buries a meat patty under French fries and cheese sauce instead.

Chef Joe Schweska invented the dish at the old Leland Hotel in 1928, working off his wife Elizabeth’s family recipe for Welsh rarebit.

His first version used ham cut into a horseshoe shape, stacked over potato wedges.

The name stuck even after the ingredients changed.

A modern Horseshoe starts with toasted bread, adds a meat of the diner’s choice, and drowns the whole plate in a cheese sauce thick enough to hold a fork upright.

Fries pile on last.

Springfield’s tourism board hung an official plaque at the old Leland Building to mark where the dish was born, and downstate diners still order it as a knife-and-fork meal, never a sandwich you pick up.

3. Jibarito

Order a Jibarito outside Illinois, and most people ask where the bread went.

There isn’t any.

Juan Figueroa built the sandwich at his family’s Borinquen Restaurant in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood in 1996, swapping every slice of bread for two flattened, fried plantains instead.

He’d read about a similar plantain sandwich served at a restaurant in Aguada, Puerto Rico, and reworked the idea into his own creation.

Steak, garlic oil, grilled onions, and white cheese fill the middle.

Figueroa’s brother pushed him to patent the sandwich.

He never bothered.

That decision let restaurants across Chicago’s Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican communities put their own Jibarito on the menu, and the plantain shell still confuses first-timers who expect a roll.

4. Chicago Mix Popcorn

Cheese popcorn and caramel popcorn sound like two separate snacks until Illinois puts them in the same bag.

Garrett Popcorn Shops opened in the Loop in 1949 selling two flavors, CaramelCrisp and CheeseCorn, kept strictly apart.

Customers had other plans.

Fans kept asking for an empty bag so they could mix the sweet kernels with the salty, cheesy ones themselves, and by 1977 Garrett’s gave up fighting it and put the combination on the menu.

They called it the Mix.

Everyone else calls it the Chicago Mix, a sweet-and-salty combination that strikes newcomers as a mistake until the first handful changes their mind.

Lines still wrap the block outside the Loop shop on a busy Saturday.

5. Hot Dog With No Ketchup

A Chicago hot dog carries seven toppings, and ketchup has no place among them.

Vendors dress the dog in mustard, chopped onion, bright green relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato wedges, pickled sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt, then set it in a poppy seed bun.

Not a drop of ketchup touches it.

One popular theory holds that vendors once saved ketchup for a low-quality sausage that needed the sugar to mask its taste, and Illinoisans kept the rule long after the reason for it disappeared.

Ask a Chicago hot dog stand for a squeeze bottle, and the vendor won’t hide the look on their face.

The Slow Food Guide to Chicago put it bluntly: No self-respecting Chicagoan would think of using ketchup as a condiment.

Illinoisans agree completely.

6. Italian Beef, Dipped

Order an Italian beef the local way, and the cook dunks the whole sandwich, bread included, into a pan of hot meat juice before it ever reaches your hands.

Al's Beef started the tradition from a small stand in the Little Italy neighborhood in 1938, thin-shaving roast beef and piling it onto Italian bread with giardiniera.

That's just the base order.

Ask for it dipped, and the whole sandwich takes a swim in the jus, bread and all, until it barely holds together.

Sweet peppers or spicy giardiniera go on top, and the first bite runs down a wrist that wasn't braced for it.

Napkins disappear fast.

Out-of-town visitors ask for a fork.

Illinoisans just lean over the plate.

7. Deep-Dish With the Sauce on Top

Illinois' pizza doesn't come out until 45 minutes after ordering, and when it lands, the sauce sits on top instead of underneath the cheese.

Giordano's brothers Efren and Joseph Boglio built their stuffed pizza in 1974 from their mother's Italian Easter pie recipe, a double-crusted pie packed with cheese and toppings.

A second layer of dough goes over the filling before the sauce covers that.

Cut a slice, and it stands on its own, three inches deep, closer to a casserole than anything a New Yorker would fold in half.

Out-of-state visitors need a second just to figure out where to start.

Deep-dish itself dates back further, to 1943 at Pizzeria Uno, where owners Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo first baked pizza in a pan with walled sides, using a recipe chef Rudy Malnati Sr. worked out in the kitchen.

A fork comes standard.

8. Flaming Saganaki

A waiter walks toward the table carrying a small skillet of fried cheese, and before anyone can ask what's happening, he sets it on fire.

The whole restaurant yells Opa!

Greektown's Parthenon restaurant claimed credit for the dish in 1968, when owner Chris Liakouras took a dinner guest's suggestion and lit a wedge of fried saganaki cheese right at the table.

A rival restaurant, Dianna's, argued its own Kogeones brothers had already been dousing cheese in brandy and setting it alight years earlier.

Nobody ever settled it.

The Parthenon ran the trick for 48 years before closing for good in 2016, but Greektown kitchens up and down Halsted Street still light the cheese and shout along with every table that flinches.

First-timers usually flinch.

9. Pizza Puff

A hot dog stand in Chicago hands over a fried, folded dough pocket instead of a slice, and first-time customers assume the kitchen ran out of real pizza.

It didn't.

Illinois calls it a pizza puff: A deep-fried dough pocket packed with tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings like sausage or pepperoni, wrapped in a shell closer to a flour tortilla than pizza crust.

The Illinois Tamale Company started in Chicago in 1927, years before it became Iltaco and started freezing pizza puffs by the thousands for hot dog stands and grocery stores across the state.

Food historians credit Iltaco with inventing the pocket, though nobody wrote down the exact date at the time.

Order a pizza puff at a Chicago hot dog stand today, and it comes wrapped in wax paper, hot enough to burn a tongue that doesn't wait.