In her new special, Lidia Celebrates America: A Heartland Holiday Feast, chef and author Lidia Bastianich travels to rural communities across the country to explore the traditions that make up America’s diverse cuisine for a celebration of big meals from small towns. It airs 8 p.m. Tuesday on AETN.
In Sunbury, Pa., Bastianich returns to the small town where she lived for a year with relatives shortly after arriving in the United States with her family from present-day Croatia at the age of 12. She visits family and friends, and retraces her roots in Pennsylvania Dutch country, with its traditions of succotash and shoo-fly pie. She also cooks pizza in an outdoor brick oven, reminiscent of one from her Eastern European childhood.
Down south in Natchitoches, La., she learns to make filé powder, which is made from leaves of sassafras trees and used for thickening and seasoning gumbo. There she also eats and visits with locals whose families have been there for generations.
In Denton, Texas, an area restaurant family of Mexican heritage shows Bastianich how they make tamales, and in Wausau, Wis., she is served a Hmong ceremonial dish made of pork and greens by Laotian refugees who escaped to the United States after the Vietnam War.
She stops in Lawton, Okla., to check out Sam’s Soul Food, located in the building that once housed the famed Buffalo Soldiers in the late 1800s. In honor of those black troops who served on the western frontier following the Civil War she cooks dinner on an open fire, making a meal of salted pork, cornbread, baked beans, dumplings and coffee.
Back up north she travels with her grandson to the tiny town of Walker, Minn., where she takes a snowmobile ride to the annual Eelpout Festival. Fishermen from all over flock to fish for the freshwater cod that hides at the bottom of Minnesota lakes. They do so through holes drilled through 30 inches of ice to catch the strange eel-like fish, Bastianich kisses a fish for good luck, then fries eelpout nuggets in oil on an open fire out on the ice. She also learns an old family recipe for lefse, a Scandinavian flatbread.