Does the name Beth Dooley ring a bell? Thought so. Yeah, Beth and I go way back, not to brag. Bonnie Blodgett I am proud to say this local culinary treasure, who is not homegrown herself but does specialize in locally sourced ingredients and has done so ever since […]
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Does the name Beth Dooley ring a bell? Thought so.
Yeah, Beth and I go way back, not to brag.
I am proud to say this local culinary treasure, who is not homegrown herself but does specialize in locally sourced ingredients and has done so ever since she and her husband, Kevin, emigrated here from New Jersey 40-odd years ago, was a friend of mine even before she sought my help in packaging and selling her very first cookbook, “Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland.”
Another Minnesota-grown friend of Beth’s was her co-author on that book. Does the name Lucia Watson ring a bell?
Remember (how could anyone forget?) Lucia’s Restaurant in the Uptown district of Minneapolis?
Yup, that Lucia.
Lucia was among the very first local chefs to serve organic and free-range food back when it was first becoming obvious that there was something lacking in supermarket-freezer-case processed food.
The difference was so new and unheralded that most of her customers weren’t even aware that it was a thing, much less WHY it was a thing.
Most people still don’t know.
What matters to most people is how much food costs.
The type of food Lucia served is not cheap, even though the farmers who grow it are not rich. Her prices were so reasonable they’d look ridiculous now.
Lucia’s customers, myself included, had only an inkling of how hard it was to source “real” food. We were blissfully unaware that there were fewer and fewer farmers able to make a profit running bio-diverse farms that used animal manure instead of synthetic (oil-based) nitrogen fertilizer and practiced integrated pest management instead of RoundUp.
Since the old-fashioned type of farming was by necessity small scale, it relied on local customers. I joined a co-op around this time (I was living in Roxbury, Mass. then), though I wasn’t entirely sure why apart from the assurances of friends in my apartment building, all of them botany majors at Harvard (they taught me how to tend their huge vegetable garden in return for free zucchini of which there was always too much), that local food was better tasting and better for you.
Flower gardening was my wake-up call. It was the squash’s flowers I coveted but wasn’t allowed to cut until I grew my own, many years later.
Flowers aren’t “just for looks” … right?
But before that, all I really knew about food, farming or gardening was that Lucia’s Restaurant had the most perfectly harmonious menu in town.
By “menu,” I mean the whole package including venue — everything from the elegant dining room to the wine list was superb.
Lucia and Beth were buddies from day one. They both “got it.” Their shared passion for hearty and delicious food made it inevitable that they would produce a cookbook together, Beth having a knack for writing as well as a background in public relations.
That first cookbook sold well. It was republished a decade later by the University of Minnesota Press. It sold well again.
This led to another book contract, Beth going it alone this time. The formula was the same: a blend of recipes and folklore and “real food” cooking how-to. Her titles include “Minnesota’s Bounty: The Farmers Market Cookbook,” “The Northern Heartland Kitchen,” “The Perennial Kitchen,” “In Winter’s Garden,” “Sweet Nature: A Cook’s Guide to Using Money and Maple Syrup” and most recently “The Sioux Chef.”
Co-authored with indigenous chef Sean Seymour, “The Sioux Chef” won the James Beard Award for America’s best cookbook in 2020.
Covid-19 made it all but inevitable that Beth would launch an online Zoom-style cooking show for the homebound. This time her partner is her son Kip, now a budding foodie himself. It’s called “Barebones.”
As for her book-publishing career, no worries that this new online venture will monopolize her time. Beth has three in the works, all variations on the theme of real food and how to cook it, with special emphasis on the “how.”
Two recent trends in organic and free-range agriculture — which is now called “regenerative” to embrace ever-widening concern about climate change and species extinctions, both of which have been accelerated by modern farming methods –are indigenous and/or perennial crops such as Kernsa, a wheat variety that was bred both here in Minnesota and at Kansas’s Land Institute with financial help from General Mills.
The idea is to reduce flour millers’ dependence on wheat varieties that require annual tilling, which damages already fragile soils.
“Corn Dance, A Cookbook: Creative First Americas Cuisine” describes techniques being developed or rediscovered or both, that will encourage cooks to encourage farmers to plant an indigenous corn that is much lower in the fatty acids that make sweet corn bad for our hearts.
Most Americans don’t realize that the corn they see all over the Midwest growing so densely that it has eliminated the traditional rows between stalks, is not edible by humans. It’s either fed to animals or turned into corn syrup (and then into sweeteners) or used to make ethanol.
Sweet corn is a different plant altogether. Most of it is sold in farmers markets and roadside stands, and in supermarkets in the fall.
The point of “Corn Dance” is to make readers aware that sweet corn (the kind humans eat, fresh off the cob and slathered in butter) is not as nutritious as the sweet corn the indigenous tribes grew and that Beth writes about in “Corn Dance.”
Nor is it even terribly sweet.
Native corn not only has a different (slightly nutty) and probably acquired taste; it cooks different too.
That’s where home cooks like Beth come in. And professional chefs like her co-author, Loretta Oden, the legendary Santa Fe restaurateur whose indigenous heritage inspires her cooking.
The second book on Beth’s to-do-list was called “Breaking Bread: Stories and Recipes with an Appetite for Change.”
The third and most personal of the three is a sequel to Beth’s enormously popular memoir “In Winter’s Garden.” This memoir/cookbook she will write with her son Kip, the same son (she has two others) who is her cooking partner at Barebones.
Kip also happens to be the only one of the three who does not have a Minnesota zip code. He lives in D.C.
Innovation does have its benefits. The digital telecommunication revolution has let Beth and Kip combine their shared interests, cooking and writing, as effortlessly as if they lived across the street from each other.
I guess that’s progress.
Innovation of another kind enabled a New York State (SUNY-Cortland) botanist to make a thrilling discovery. The photograph shows Spiranthes odorata, a native member of the larger orchid family that is but a distant cousin to our own native lady’s slipper, and hardly a dead ringer.
It is closely related, though, to this new Spiranthes, found near Syracuse.
And while the botanist’s name is Michael Hough, he and his colleagues decided that the flower should memorialize the man who discovered it first, in 1982, but never named it.
That man was Charles Sheviak.
Thus, this stunning orchid will henceforth be called “Spiranthes ‘Sheviaki’”.
Also of note is the discovery of several “new” geums in the same region, which is a former Superfund site. The plant that turned out only to be new to botanists offers a humbling lesson in plant resilience.
The less populated regions further south, where these geums used to live, perhaps had fewer people per square mile (including botanists) than they had the sort of plants that only a botanist would be moved to honor with its very own name.
The obscure southern transplants were not new at all, but having been forced to relocate by climate change, they received an identity for the very first time.
They were now officially geums — a.k.a., prairie smoke, old smoke, old man’s whiskers, grandfather’s beard, lion’s beard, or purple avens, depending on where you happen to find them.
