Just curious: This occasional feature in the Des Moines Register aims to answer your questions about Iowa. Is there some place, event, lore, history or cultural quirk you're just curious about?

The easy answer is that there wasn't a Maid-Rite near Iowa City, where I lived -- though a Google search turns up a location in Coralville, the next town over. At any rate, when I heard that Maid ...

THIS METEORITE’S BEEN HERE SINCE 1926 AND NOW IT’S HERE TO STAY IN NEWTON, IOWA. Under new management, the Newton tradition lives on. The Maid-Rite restaurant is once again open for business ...

"Food & Wine," however, is published by Iowa's own Meredith Corporation, so it makes sense that they went with the classic loose meat sandwich from Maid-Rite. The entry reads: "To the outsider ...

The original Maid-Rite sandwich was invented during 1926 in Muscatine, Iowa. Butcher Fred Angell steamed hamburger instead of frying it and slurried in some spices. He offered one of his ...

MAID-RITE SCHOOL. SINCE 1926, THEY’VE BEEN THROUGH DEPRESSIONS AND WORLD WARS AND, YOU KNOW, AND MULTIPLE LOSSES, AND THEY STICK AROUND. IT’S AN IOWA THING. KETCHUP, MUSTARD, PICKLES AND ...

Kohlsdorf: The store's connection to Iowa's roots extends to the diner counter, which dishes out nostalgia in the form of Maid-Rites. A lot of people have a real historic tie to Maid-Rite ...

The Barn in Brainerd was opened in 1945 by a family from Iowa. It was part of the original Maid-Rite franchises and still serves the loose-meat sandwich. A black-and-white photo of the exterior of ...

Have you ever had a Maid-Rite? Iowa's loose-meat sandwich — perhaps second only to the pork tenderloin as the state's most famous culinary concoction between two buns — is known as a Maid-Rite ...