Top Ten Kansas City foods to eat before you die: Number Eight
By OWEN MORRIS
I have another Kansas City Top Ten list to pass along. This one comes from the constantly inventive blog Venus in the Kitchen. Venus has some great and surprising choices. In fact, she and I share a couple, including my Number Eight selection today.
Martin City was a good 20-minute drive from my childhood home, so my parents rarely took me or my brothers there. When we did go, it meant one of two exciting things: We were going to see a show at the Martin City Melodrama's original location (I can't remember a single thing from the various shows, but I do remember that they slayed the nine-year-old me), or we were going to Jack Stack Barbecue.
Back then (for at least part of the time) Fiorella's Jack Stack was known as Smoke Stack and wasn't the upscale barbecue behemoth that it is now. When you entered, you were immediately hit by two smokes -- barbecue and cigarette.
Like German cars, barbecue was something I did not appreciate until I got older. I was a typical boring kid who preferred sickly sweet sauces (KC Masterpiece). At barbecue joints, I'd order a boring roast beef or turkey sandwich. Jack Stack was the first barbecue place where I bucked that trend. After seeing a couple big plates of cubed beef walk by, I pleaded, begged and cajoled my parents into letting me get something called burnt ends. I like to think my real Kansas City education started that day.
What I l really loved from Jack Stack as a child -- and still do today -- isn't the burnt ends, though. It's not even barbecue, but it is Number Eight on my list of Top Ten Kansas City Foods to Eat Before You Die.
Cheesy corn!
Or, more officially, Jack Stack Cheesy Corn Bake.
In a city where barbecue restaurants have problems distinguishing themselves from one another, cheesy corn bake is uniquely Jack Stack's. I have never seen it on another menu, and the older I get, the happier I am for that. It's a good thing I'm only tempted at one restaurant.
Jack Stack describes it as "A casserole dish filled with our smoked ham and cheese," which is technically correct but leaves out a lot. It's tough to describe the intensity of the cheese and the smokey flavor that ham gives the cheese. And that it's usually so hot when it comes out, you can' t taste anything for a second. Hidden underneath the cheese are large bits of corn that you only sense when you actually take a bite and the corn releases its flavor to combine with the cheese.
Before that first bite, though, you notice the dark brown country casserole bowl, with the cheese is still slightly bubbling, often slightly spilled on the side of the bowl.
This isn't a firm casserole but a milky one. Like a thick corn soup almost. It's a testament to the way Jack Stack makes it that the corn neither rises nor sinks but sits perfectly spaced inside that milky casserole. If you don't eat the cheesy corn immediately, it will start to cool and thicken up slightly. Yet it never "sets" the way so many other casseroles do.
As children, my brothers and I were fascinated that two bland items our mother served us all the time -- cheese and corn -- can be turned into such a yummy dish. I guess that fascination never disappeared.
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