Meggan Hill's new cookbook arrives at a moment when America seems hungry for something deeper than sustenance: connection to place, to family, to a version of ourselves we're aching to remember.
"The Culinary Hill Cookbook: Modern Home Cooking With a Midwestern Heart," released June 16, centers on a broccoli and cauliflower salad—a simple dish of mayonnaise, cheddar cheese, bacon and vegetables that Hill uses as a portal to explore how humble dishes carry the weight of identity and belonging.
Hill, a Wisconsin native who has lived in California for 15 years, speaks about her childhood with the clarity of someone who understands that nostalgia isn't mere sentiment. Growing up, food was the grammar of her family's love language. Block parties featured raw mushrooms with dill dip. Thanksgivings were organized around the table. Birthday celebrations were measured not in candles but in casseroles. These weren't just meals; they were rituals that announced: you belong here.
The broccoli and cauliflower salad carries lineage. Hill's grandmother, mother and aunts made it generations before she was born, though Hill's own introduction came during summer camping trips to Lake Michigan, where she discovered the Piggly Wiggly version in Sheboygan. That grocery store chain, a pioneer of premade deli salads, became an unlikely cultural landmark in her memory—the place where a working-class family's dinner table could feel like abundance.
Beginning in high school, Hill crowdsourced recipes from her network while studying communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By 2010, that grassroots effort became a tiny spiral-bound self-published cookbook. She printed 100 copies and distributed them to everyone whose recipes were featured.
Culinary Hill grew into a digital archive home to 1,379 recipes: sloppy joes, slow cooker meatballs with grape jelly sauce, scotcheroos and ham roll-ups. These aren't dishes designed to impress; they're designed to feed people well and leave them with "a happy memory—or at least happy taste buds," Hill says.
In 2016, Hill enrolled at the College of the Canyons Institute for Culinary Education in Santa Clarita, California. Culinary training shaped her approach to recipe documentation—meticulous testing, thoughtful explanation—but it didn't distance her from her roots. Her classical education gave her the language and confidence to defend Midwestern food against the gatekeeping that often dismisses mayo-based dishes as unsophisticated.
That defense matters. Midwestern cuisine has long been subject to a particular kind of cultural condescension, treated as earnest but crude, filling but inelegant. Hill's work—both her blog and now her published cookbook—constitutes a quiet argument: that comfort food deserves dignity, that the food of working families deserves the same attention lavished on farm-to-table trends or fusion experiments.
The broccoli and cauliflower salad is a study in textural democracy. Crunchy, creamy, salty, sweet—it hits notes that appeal across preferences and ages. Hill's teenage son Calvin, her 11-year-old daughter Charlotte and her 6-year-old Julian have all weighed in on the mayo quantity, insisting on the full recipe despite Hill's occasional attempts at moderation.
The salad takes just 25 minutes to prepare, with bacon-crisping as the only cooking required. Hill grants permission to adapt, to make it your own. If bacon seems too rich, she suggests substituting raisins and sunflower seeds. If you're short on time, bacon bits work fine.
Hill lives 2,000 miles from where she grew up, yet she remains tethered through food—through regular visits home to Wisconsin where she shares these dishes with her family, through the daily act of maintaining a recipe collection that honors where she comes from. In an era of rootlessness and digital placelessness, Hill has found a way to stay connected: through cooking, remembering and sharing recipes as acts of love.
