“You see, this land is built on stories. It’s one big story, this country, woven of many small ones. Few of the small ones are strictly true, and the big story is mostly a lie. The more important stories are the true ones – the ones people will tell you about their own lives. Those often get lost in the weave of the big story. The more true stories you can find and tell, the more you can weave that truth into the big story. Tarnish it a bit, perhaps, but isn’t a dingy and battered truth better than a shining lie? (…) Hunger, weariness, thirst, and despair. They’re all part of the stories – the part often not told.”
– Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Dire Wolf’s opening monologues.
It’s been a heck of a decade.
So, I created this recipe far longer ago than I like to admit. I’ve been waiting for the right time to post it. Of course, I’ll post the jump link to it below. However, I hope you stick around first to learn about the game Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and why I developed this dish the way I did.
Click here to jump to the recipe for Vagrant’s Hotdish.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine
In Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, you play a vagrant drifter in the Depression-era United States who has lost a card game to a mysterious figure. In doing so, your debt to pay is to wander the country and collect stories. The figure wants the true, fully developed stories the most. To get them, however, you must trade your stories with those you meet for theirs.
The people and stories vary, of course. Some of the characters you meet include:
- a Coal Miner on the run from union-busters,
- a Migrant Farmer picking grapes to support her son back home,
- a Great War Veteran mourning the death of his brother,
- a Navajo survivor of The Long Walk,
- and a Hobo Kid traveling the rails with his dog.
The music and sometimes the language change as you walk from region to region and coast to coast, but the song is still the same. The stories you tell morph gradually until you are just as woven into the nation’s fabric as those you meet. I bring this up because we need to realize as much as our country likes to boast of its rugged individualism, we are all in this together. Capitalism may have raised us with riches in our eyes, but its blind worship has made survivors of its wrath. As we move into another dark chapter of our nation, we need compassion instead of cruelty and education instead of indoctrination.
As the Direwolf says, “isn’t a dingy and battered truth better than a shining lie?”
Hot Mess into Hotdish
I got the idea for this recipe from another game mechanic from Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. If your Vagrant gets injured during his travels, you can replenish his health at restaurants in major cities. In Minneapolis, you can get Hotdish, where “[y]ou have no idea what’s in this casserole. It’s pretty good, though.”
The first known recipe for Hotdish comes from a Minnesotan church cookbook published in 1930 and involves baking ground beef with onions, elbow macaroni, celery, peas, and tomato soup. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup started making an iconic entry into this dish in 1934 when it first sold. I decided to use both canned tomatoes and cream of mushroom soup.
Beyond including those first three ingredients, a hotdish tends to involve whatever’s on hand to feed the community quickly. So in the spirit of community, I used ingredients found on the Vagrant’s travels. I included apples and sweet potatoes because, at one point, you find a bushel of the latter in a field, and at another, you meet a man planting apple trees across the country, a la John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed). Another instance you happen on a Chinese cook who’s forced to cook after hours for a pack of rowdy coal miners. You watch him take scraps of green onions and garlic from the garbage and fry them in a spirit-possessed wok into a delectable Tsap Sui.
Quinn, the hobo kid, talks about craving red beans n’rice “cooked with some fatty bacon.” So naturally, I obliged with this request. I left out the rice because I had another starch in mind for this dish.
Little Ben, the coal miner, offers cornbread when you join him at his fire, so I baked a pan of it to cube and crumble over the top. I then returned the whole skillet to the oven to mingle and meld into a sweet, savory, and creamy Hotdish.
A recipe is like a big story—or at least, that’s the entire purpose of my blog. Each ingredient is a character with its background and role, bringing something different but weaving together into the bigger picture. What role will you play in the story to come? I think I’ll start by setting the table.
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My Vagrant’s Song
Like to cook with a soundtrack? I’ve created a Spotify playlist for you to listen and cook along to!
Vagrant's Hotdish
Equipment: Dutch oven or 12-inch by 2-inch oven-safe skillet with a lid, oven, stovetop, and paper towels.
Ingredients:
- Two 10.5 oz cans of condensed cream of mushroom soup
- 1 lb ground beef
- 15.5 oz can of red kidney beans, drained
- 6 strips of bacon
- 4 cups of 1-inch cubed cornbread
- 1 bunch of green onions, chopped with green and white parts separated
- 1 sweet potato, peeled and diced
- 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, drained
- 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 1 apple, cored and diced
- kosher salt
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 350°F and preheat the dutch oven over medium heat on the stovetop for 3 minutes. Add the bacon to the pan and fry until crispy before transferring to a paper towel-lined plate to dry. Drain the excess grease.
- Add the ground beef to the pan in 1-inch chunks. Let brown for 30 seconds, then stir-cook and break up the meat until it is mostly cooked. Stir in the sweet potato and apple and cook for 4 minutes.
- Blend in the white onion parts and garlic and cook for another minute before removing the pan from the heat.
- Chop up the bacon. Add three-quarters of it and the green onion parts to the pan. The remainder will be your garnish.
- Stir in the beans and condensed soup to coat. Then scatter the cornbread over the top. Bake covered for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake another 10 minutes,
- Let the hotdish cool for 5 minutes before garnishing with the remaining onion and bacon. Serve while hot.
