Hotdish on a Stick

The Minnesota State Fair may be the most popular and most vibrant state fair in America. This year, it had The Flaming Lips. It had Poison, and a dude wearing an "I got fucked up with Poison" T-shirt. It had extraordinary chickens, the Miracle of Birth center (featuring numerous baby animals and the occasional placenta-riffic live birthing), and it had well over 40 different sorts of edible things impaled and distributed on sticks.

The queen bee of these objects, in terms of pure hype, is hotdish on a stick. Though it resembles other street/fair food items in its overall portability and delightful lack of healthiness, it's at least two steps away from easy comprehension.

First of all: hotdish. Not a hot dish, or the hot dish — just "hotdish," like soup.

Q: "What did you bring to the potluck?"

A: "Oh, I brought hotdish."

"Casserole" is the nearest equivalent term in non-Minnesotan English — it's basically a whole bunch of mostly starchy and/or meaty shit, usually united by a nice thick blanket of cream of mushroom soup (AKA "Lutheran binder.") Chicken and wild rice is one archetypical variety; tater tot is, perhaps, the most well-known of the breed.

Minnesota State Fair hotdish on a stick is of the tater tot variety. Tater tots alternate with meatballs under a breaded coating, giving the thing the appearance of a very drably colored snake that has swallowed three spherical mice.

From a culinary perspective, hotdish on a stick fails due to an ultra-grotesque overdependence on starches. We know, of course, that the thing's got to be breaded in order to be fried. But do there really need to be super-ball sized tater tots interspersed with the bready meatballs? It seems impossible that anything could taste breadier than bread, but hotdish on a stick pulls it off.

Its surprising saving grace is the cream of mushroom dipping sauce that comes on the side. The moisture helps the bread go down.

So... is it good? Yes. And no. It's definitely not something you'd want to order — or eat — in a restaurant. But it's the perfect breaded stick-impaled thing to munch on while you're trying to find the stand that sells the bucket of four-dozen fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, which, in turn, go perfectly with the $1 all-you-can-drink glass of milk from the $1 all-you-can-drink milk hut.

And that makes it perfect fair food.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)