Thanks to Dr. A. Griffin for this review!

On Pioneer Day this year, I sat in Florida, some 2,000 miles from my beloved Salt Lake City, feeling homesick. Nobody in Sarasota would even know what it meant if I wished them a happy 24th, let alone want to listen to me wax poetic about the cheese fries and dipping sauce at the Training Table (RIP) or hear out my opinions about what should or should not go in funeral potatoes. (Green onions, not regular onions. I will die on this hill.) Fortunately, I had an excellent companion for this bout of homesickness: This is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions, edited by Carol A. Edison, Eric A. Eliason, and Lynne S. McNeill, a sprawling volume that is particularly interested in parsing the fine-grained details of Utah’s cuisine. Readers can ponder the foodways of indigenous people, Greek immigrants, Mormon settlers, Salt Lake City’s Nikkei Senior Center luncheons, and many other groups.

One particularly impressive aspect of This is the Plate is its sheer size and variety; clocking in at 74 chapters and nearly 400 pages, it covers a significant amount of territory. Contributors include academics, restaurant workers, members of Utah’s immigrant communities, and people who just plain enjoy food, to name a few. This variation does give the volume a somewhat uneven quality, in that the reader occasionally veers from carefully cited, academic-oriented history to much more informal reminisces. Most chapters also include at least one recipe for one or more foods mentioned in the chapter. This means that This is the Plate may be more useful as a reference work than as something to read straight through, depending on whether you’re more interested in the recipes or in the writing that goes with them. It is a testament to the sheer breadth of Utah’s food culture and history that even with a book this size, I found myself asking where specific things I think of as essential to understanding food in Utah was; whither Hires Big H, artisanal root beers, or the Pie? Perhaps it is less astonishing that the book is as large as it is than it is that it’s not even longer.

This is the Plate seeks to balance acknowledging the strong Mormon influence on many Utah foodways while not allowing it to dominate the volume. As many of the authors acknowledge, it can, in fact, be challenging to draw a hard line between what food is Mormon and what food isn’t. For example, Jacqueline S. Thursby’s chapter on funeral potatoes (45-51) notes that the phenomenon of a cheesy potato casserole is by no means unique to Utah or Mormons. However, the variety of cheesy potato casserole designated as “funeral potatoes” have taken on a specific cultural meaning within Mormonism and Utah more broadly.  

This book has a lot to offer to both academic and non-academic readers, and I would recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in Utah’s foodways. Whether you’re curious about the vaguely Midwestern origins of Utah’s thick, undrinkable milkshakes or are more concerned with the recipe for Cafe Rio’s signature rice, there’s something in This is the Plate that will hold your interest.