16 Butter, Cheese, and Church: Lessons from Cheesy Potatoes

Nearing the end of my first year of college, my Californian, Bostonian, and New Yorker friends remarked how they couldn’t wait to return home to eat “good food with actual flavor.” Though they appreciated many things about moving to Indiana, their experience with higher levels of processed foods and fewer exotic options at the grocery store wasn’t among them. But I stand by my starchy, buttery, cheese-covered roots. When I come home for Thanksgiving, I stuff myself with pounds of potatoes—and to me, that’s beautiful. To explore my Indiana cooking roots, I interviewed my mom. A midwesterner through and through, she’s cooked the majority of my meals and first taught me how to cook.

Cheesy potatoes are a staple at my family’s holiday celebrations—not a replacement for mashed potatoes, but a complement. I can’t recall a Thanksgiving or Christmas with my extended family where they weren’t present. To be honest, food traditions in my family don’t run very deep. Yes, my mom learned this recipe from her mom, but her mom got it from a church cookbook. This is a common theme in our family’s foodways. My mom got many of the staple dishes I grew up with from church cookbooks—a noteworthy way that my family and many in my community cultivated our foodways. The quintessential church cookbook is something that I’ve always grown up with, so I’d never given it a second thought. But I realize now its importance as a mechanism for shaping local culinary traditions and sharing local culture through food. They are a sort of history book in their own way. Prater (2024) explains that “[c]ookbooks from different areas reflect the culture of the immigrant communities and denominations who settled there”, noting that many Midwestern examples are Lutheran.

My family, proudly Lutheran to our roots, grew up in a close-knit community in Monroeville, Indiana—a small town near Fort Wayne made up of middle-class families, often with Christian traditions. At every family meal, we prayed together. We attended church potlucks where dishes, often casseroles, were made to share and we collected recipes from other church members. In many cases, staple dishes in my family are prepared for deep rooted, sentinel reasons, rather simply because, as my mom (Hockemeyer 2024) said, “everybody likes it and it serves a lot of people.” This reflects a foundational idea of midwestern foodways. Long (2015) remarks on her study of green bean casserole, an iconic midwestern dish, “Casseroles have a special place in American identity. They connote communal eating, sharing, and generosity” (Long 2015). Though Cheesy Potatoes aren’t exactly a casserole, they have a parallel formula and share the communal values described here. My mom, like her mother before her, and her mother before her, etc. largely values Christ-centered service, which is reflected in her cooking.

When asked what influenced our family’s foodways, the economic aspect stood out to my mom. “Saving money was a large part of food preparation” (Hockemeyer 2024). As middle-class Hoosiers, frugality was highly valued. This connects us to other Hoosiers, as Lucy Long explains that the qualities often seen as diminishing a dish’s culinary value—its affordability, simplicity, reliability, and portability—are the very traits that make it celebrated in Midwestern food culture (Long 2015). While my out-of-state friends might have grown up with more culinary sophistication, this “diminished culinary value” reminds me of the importance of generosity in our foodways. And what’s a cheap, easy way to make midwestern dishes more flavorful? Butter and dairy. This dish has plenty of both. In this way, it connects me to Indiana foodways, especially those “heavy on carbohydrates and starches” (Long 2015). Though not the healthiest, it provides nostalgic comfort foods like this one.

Though recipes in my family don’t often span generations, I’ll be sure to pass this simple comfort food to my child (God willing) when I teach them to cook, as my mom did for me. I hope this dish helps them understand the value of selfless service, as the matriarchs of my family have done for me.

“Potatoes Deluxe” a.k.a. “Cheesy Potatoes”

Ingredients

• 2 lb package frozen hash brown potatoes (shredded or cubed)
• 1 can cream of chicken soup
• 1 lb sour cream
• 1 stick butter
• 8 oz. sharp cheddar cheese, grated
• 1 c. crushed corn flakes
• Salt and pepper

How to Prepare

1. Before preparing, leave the 2 lbs of frozen hashbrowns out for 1-2 hours to thaw
2. Spray 9×13 in. pan with cooking spray, spread hashbrowns evenly onto pan
3. Melt butter, and mix all ingredients except corn flakes in a bowl
4. Pour bowl contents into the pan with the potatoes, mix with spatula to ensure even spread
5. Top with crushed corn flakes and bake in oven for one hour at 375 degrees fahrenheit

References

Hockemeyer, Jill. Phone interview by Mallory Hockemeyer. Bloomington/Fort Wayne, IN, November 13, 2024.

Long, L. M. (2015). Green bean casserole and Midwestern identity: A regional foodways aesthetic and ethos. The food and folklore reader. London: Bloomsbury, 191-204.

Prater, Lisa Foust. “Church Cookbooks: Food, Faith, and a Way to Honor Women.” Successful Farming. January 25, 2024