Our State Fair is the Best State Fair

Big Chrissy and I recently took a trip to Illinois and Iowa to spend some time with his family and to put all that California cuisine behind us and do some serious hunkering down with the sublime and artergy-clogging tastiness of our country’s heartland.

Chrissy’s sister and family drove us to the Iowa State Fair, a beautiful drive through rolling hills of corn, farms and past the World’s Largest Truck stop. There are over 50 items that you can eat “on a stick” at the Fair. I asked to see the fried-butter-on-a-stick, just to see it, to confirm that it wasn’t part of some anxiety dream I had before getting my last cholesterol test. A half stick of butter, battered and deep fried. Butter reigns supreme here, there’s even a life-sized cow made of the stuff. And a butter Snow White, the queen and the seven dwarves. Or are we calling them the seven little people now?

The fair is pretty grand as fairs go, with so many things to do and see, all those prize-winning vegetables and flower arrangements… but the highlight for me was the Women’s Chicken-Calling contest. I don’t know how effective these calls are, as there were no chickens nearby to answer, but each woman chick-chicked and cluck-clucked and sang and hollered on an almost operatic scale that I couldn’t imagine any chicken not being completely seduced by.

Downtown Davenport, on the Iowa side of the Mississippi, is a lovely old town, with quaint brick buildings and interesting new architecture, like the Figge Museum. We visited the Davenport Main Library, designed in the 1960s by Edward Durell Stone, a building “designed for tomorrow.” The architecture indeed feels like it belongs in a future that hasn’t quite happened yet. Or that was supposed to have happened in the late ’60s but didn’t, except in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In Moline, on the opposite, Illinois, side of the Mississippi, we stopped at the Belgian Village Inn for sandwiches. Chrissy had the VandeRueben, a modified rueben sandwich the size of a laptop. Completely stuffed, we then ate ice cream sundaes at Lagomarcino’s, which has been around for 100 years, the interior unaltered.

I’m so comforted by things that never change, food from another time, when men lived to be 56 and died of heart failure, eating whatever tasted good. Back to California and whole grains and free range edible creatures… ho hum.