Cookbook author Amy Thielen often adds a little sauerkraut to this simple fried rice for a Midwestern touch. Thick-cut bacon will add more meaty, chewy notes.

Featured in: “Put Bacon in Your Fried Rice.”

The post Bacon and Egg Fried Rice appeared first on Saveur.

Featured in: A Unifying Nostalgia for Port Wine Cheese

Equipment

• Small Pot
• Food Processor
• Silicone Spatula
• Shallow Serving Dish

Note: Pounded cheese can be made a few hours ahead and kept at room temperature; or it can be made the day before and stored in an airtight container in the fridge. Just be sure to bring it back to room temperature before serving.

*See our step-by-step instructions for toasting nuts.

The post Amy Thielen’s Old-Fashioned Pounded Cheese with Walnuts and Port Syrup appeared first on Saveur.

So many people in the American Midwest grow rhubarb in their yards that many of the area’s local grocery stores don’t even bother to sell it in the spring. Come May, everywhere you turn there’s rhubarb crisp, or rhubarb pie, or stewed rhubarb over ice cream. Following the local tradition of adding rhubarb to every reasonable thing during the season, here’s a pie that looks and tastes like a pink Key lime pie.

The creamy filling gets its requisite tartness from a quickly stewed pot of fuschia rhubarb, to which you add the elements of a classic Key lime custard: egg yolks and condensed milk. The color depends on the rhubarb you use—the redder the stalk, the pinker the pie. (If you like, add a drop of red food coloring to a filling made with greenish rhubarb.)

And take a cue from those retro diners famous for their icebox pies: Whip the cream just until soft and billowy and sculpt it into a dramatic pompadour on top.

Featured in: Pretty in Pink: An Icebox Pie to Celebrate the Midwest’s Local Rhubarb

Equipment

• 9-Inch Pie Plate
• Large Bowl
• Fork
• Medium Pot
• Immersion Blender or Food Processor or Blender
• Large Baking Sheet
• Plastic Wrap
• Stand Mixer Fitted with the Whip or Large Bowl, using a Balloon Whisk

The post Rhubarb-Lime Icebox Pie appeared first on Saveur.

On a sunny afternoon in the last days of summer, I broke the first rule I had ever been taught about watercraft and stood up in a canoe. Mike Magney and Moon Jacobson of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe had offered to take me out onto Little Elbow Lake and show me the wild-rice harvest—not as a past-tense reenactment, we agreed, but in a present-tense this is how we do it sort of way. So as their canoe shot surely ahead into a thick stand of rice, I heaved my weight onto a 12-foot-long pole in an attempt to keep up. The wind took fierce bites out of the water, working against me. Cotton-­batting clouds sped across the blue gel of the sky. The northern Minnesota wild-rice harvest takes place during a two-week sliver of September, and the racing wind heightened our urgency.

We were at Sahkahtay, an annual wild-rice camp hosted by members of the Ojibwe tribe, one of the largest groups of Indigenous people north of Mexico, most of whom live in a long arc that stretches from the upper Midwest to Quebec.

Jacobson was at the three-day festival to teach ricing skills to the next generation and to harvest his own 50 pounds—”about half of what my grandma calls a year’s supply.” He grew up in Minneapolis but spent a lot of time with his grandmother in Mahnomen, a nearby town of 1,200. He followed her around, helping her put up her year’s worth of food: harvesting berries, foraging for medicinal plants, and filling a buried chest freezer in her yard with whole walleye, which the arctic Minnesota temperatures swiftly preserved to stiffness.

Magney stood at the back of the canoe, pushing his pole into the thick chocolate mud of the lake bottom, using its lever action to propel them across the water. Jacobson sat in the front with a short wooden stick—called a knocker—in each hand. The stands of rice are thickest 20 feet from shore, and we rolled into them as if into a darkened forest of pencil-thin bamboo, the rice seed heads rattling like a dorm-room bead curtain. Plunging one knocker into the rice stand, Jacobson parted the stalks like hair, bending a thick hank over his lap with one hand and neatly sweeping off its loose seed heads with the other. Rice rained down obediently into the canoe as they moved forward, his poles tapping out a click-click-click rhythm born of years of repetition.

Wild rice is one of the only grains native to North America, and definitely its most misunderstood. It is not directly related to Asian rice. What’s more, the black rice you see in countless Thanksgiving stuffing recipes every fall is an imposter. Here in northern Minnesota, at the center of the genetic reserve of wild-rice seedstock, where it grows naturally in lakes and creeks, we call that black stuff by its proper name: paddy rice. In the 1960s, the University of Minnesota began domesticating wild rice. They planted it in rows in flooded paddies, which they drained to harvest by combine like any other field crop. Ironically, paddy-grown rice isn’t wild at all.

Real wild rice varies in shape and color from lake to lake, but once cooked, it is always some shade of luminescent milky brown—the color of tea spilled onto a saucer. It curls into loose ringlets that pop delicately between your teeth. It tastes the way a morning campfire smells: of smoldering wood coals and lake fog at dawn.

I’d been a guest of Sahkahtay as a curious local once before—I live 20 miles down the road—but this time I was more attuned to the language of this harvest. Some people there referred to the grain we were harvesting—a foundation of Ojibwe culture and ceremony—as manoomin, “the food that grows on water.” No one called it “wild.” Mostly, everyone just called it rice.

We headed to the shore, where a group was cooking the green rice in a giant cast-iron kettle. Like coffee beans, wild-rice kernels need to be roasted, or parched, over heat to firm their tawny core and dry for long-term storage.

Jacobson introduced me to Logan Cloud, an artfully tattooed, soft-voiced 20-something member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. While parching rice in an iron kettle over a birch-wood fire, he described the difference between wild rice and paddy rice in blunt terms: “Paddy rice is the Western mindset, in edible form,” he said.

The story of how real wild rice lost its name is a long tale of appropriation—­nothing less than one of the greatest identity thefts in American food history. Its story is braided tightly into the history of this region, a remote area where the economy, for both Native peoples and white settlers, has generally been one of subsistence. But it was the mostly white-owned paddy-rice industry, centered in California, that pushed to make wild rice a marketable commodity. In the ’70s, wild-rice prices soared, sending both tribe members and whites out onto the lakes in record numbers. Money—or at least the prospect of it—drove everyone to excess. People harvested too early, before the rice had a chance to reseed itself, wiping out once-flush stands. Tribe leaders moved without consensus to sow spent reservoirs with seeds from other waterways, wiping out age-old varieties. The University of Minnesota bred a rice with a thick stem that could handle mechanical harvesting, without any thought to the way it would cross-pollinate with the native plants.

Cloud bounced some hot, smoking rice onto the canoe paddle he was using as a stir stick, and lobbed a few kernels into his mouth to test for doneness, crunching audibly and spitting out the hulls. He threw another log onto his fire and described how he knew that the rice was getting close when it turned the toffee color of Golden Crisp cereal, “the one with the bear on the box.” He first went ricing at age 9 with his best friend, a portable radio set up in their canoe, to make some extra cash to buy the sneakers and jeans that fourth grade required. At his dad’s backyard rice camp, they parched rice over live fire in a steel drum.

At the point of first colonial contact, the Ojibwe smoke-dried their rice in birch-bark vessels strung up high over the fire. Cloud explained that these gave way to kettles sometime after “the invaders arrived and we realized that we could take something useful from them.”

Cloud moved to a treading pit lined with birch bark and filled it with about 6 inches of parched rice, then asked a volunteer in high moccasins to “jig” the rice, to loosen its hulls. She danced in short, halting steps, light and twisting at the hip. A drummer hammered out a bass beat, steady and hypnotic, the tempo set to keep the jigger jigging. Cloud transferred the rice to a shallow birch-bark basket and tossed it in the wind. This method was surprisingly effective at winnowing away the hulls, but still, it was hardly a speedy process. By the time it was finished, every grain of rice had passed through someone’s hands and every stray hull had been flicked out onto the grass.

Camps like this one anchor traditional ricing knowledge in the present, but they also function as social gatherings. Every- one I talk to at Sahkahtay remembers going to rice camps as children, where they moved through the harvest as if in reverse: first sitting next to the elders sorting out hulls, jigging as they got older, harvesting and parching as young adults. The people who come to Sahkahtay want to parch 50 or 60 pounds of rice for their own extended family in the most traditional and flavorful way, and preserve the social history.

Given that many local Ojibwe now parch in large steel-drum barrels over wood fires, Cloud’s iron kettle seems like a throwback. I asked him: In the long history of rice parching, from birch-bark vessels to the larger barrel parchers used today, why stop here? Why parch in the iron kettle? He smirked. “Doing it this way is like fixing your own car.” Then he said, more seriously: “When we began to mechanize the parching, we started thinking in a colonized way. Processing rice became easier, but our lives did not get easier.”

As we talked about large-batch parching, the age-old battle lines drawn between mechanization and handcraft, science and intuition, we ate wild rice from foam bowls. “Paddy rice is like chewing on wood chips,” he said. “It’ll stab your gums.” But his real wild rice, cooked simply and sauced with maple syrup, fell lightly from my spoon like snow, and melted almost instantly on my tongue. My small bowlful somehow filled me up. Simultaneous lightness and heft is one of its gifts.

Cloud, throwing fresh logs under a batch of green rice, described his small-scale parching in a sensory way. But his narrative quickly made tracks down the path of his people’s history: the original prophecy that led them to the rice beds; Ojibwe astrology; the Christian missionaries intent on converting the natives; the boarding schools that separated children from their families, their language, and their ceremonies. And he circled back to where we began: the enormous paddy rice operations that inject science and greed into what should perhaps remain an intuitive process. “Both the scientist and the preacher, they want to know everything. They want to remake rice in their image.”
Machinery and temperature gauges can break, making you question your own good judgment. And these modern methods can distance you from your culture. “If it weren’t for the rice, Ojibwe culture wouldn’t be here today,” he said, moving a log with his boot, squinting from the glare of the white sun sinking toward the lake. “And if we lose it, we won’t exist as a people for long. We’ll be done too.”

Even here, where wild rice grows abundantly, it can be hard to find a bag of the real thing. The grocery stores stock jet-black paddy rice and, occasionally, a few bags of sturdy, wood-parched Canadian wild rice. To get my yearly 10 pounds of the soft rice harvested nearby, I have to rely on my local connections.

Twenty miles down the road, in a parching shed near the town of ­Ponsford, on the White Earth Reservation, a fat black iron barrel the size of a commercial propane tank rolled on its spit over a jumping fire. The thick sweat of rice parching hung in the air, a mixture of smoke and water and grain. The toasting rice in the barrel exhaled humidity in quick, short bursts. Like a priest’s swinging censer, it gave off a thick smudge that rose up to the high crease of the shed’s peak. I’ve been buying rice from the Dewandeler’s parching operation for years—first from Lewy, now passed on, then from his son Richard, and now from Lewy’s grandson, Aaron. Among local wood-parched wild-rice processors, their shed is the cathedral. They parch in machines they’ve fabricated over the years. A 90-year-old engine pulled from a Ford Model A powers the huge barrel that spins over the wood fire. A cylinder painted sky blue houses a flywheel of soft paddles engineered to gently knock off the loosened hulls. And now Aaron has a new baby: a giant mechanical separator. It gyrated in the middle of the room, its screen plate shaking the good, beautiful finished rice to one end and the broken, undesirable rice to the other.

Three generations of parchers, and they all judge doneness differently. “You know how you don’t listen to your parents? My dad wouldn’t listen to his, and I didn’t listen to mine. My grandpa, he could see the doneness in the smoke, in the blue haze coming off the hot barrel. My dad can smell when it’s done. Me, I have a laser. And I taste it.”

He shot the laser into the rice to test temperature, then dipped a broom into the barrel, vigorously rubbed some loose kernels between his hands, and threw the rice into his mouth. Like most parchers, he can taste which body of water the rice came from. “This is heavy rice—mostly from Shell and Basswood lakes, but I like small-creek rice best. The little kernels take on more of the smoke.”

Aaron is white but has a complicated interface with Native culture common in the area. His kids are White Earth members; his grandparent’s farm is on the reservation, but only because the majority of White Earth land has been owned by non-native people since its inception.

He parches rice very differently from Logan Cloud, but they have some things in common: a desire to protect the genetic diversity of local rice, and a hatred for paddy rice—and for sand. Sand that gets in the rice, whether in the canoe or in the parching shed, is the enemy. Once it’s in, you can’t get it out. Every chance he gets, Aaron sweeps his cement floor clean.

He paused when a black Chevy Tahoe rolled up. “It’s the tribe, here to collect their rice,” he said, and started heaving the first of 15 burlap sacks toward the door. He loaded 900 pounds of finished rice into the back end, and the Tahoe slumped.

Aaron’s operation is as big as it gets around here. He parches tens of thousands of pounds of rice each fall, all within three weeks—possibly the limit for a solo operation. He usually sells out before Thanksgiving.

Two weeks later, Aaron texted me: “Come get your rice. It’s sitting there making my grandma nervous.” When I arrived, I found Bette Dewandeler in a housecoat at the kitchen table, sorting scrap-paper orders, her wit as dry as ever. Once a fixture behind the counter of the local post office, Bette would send me boxes of rice when I lived in New York City. As she is recently retired, everyone must now come to her.

As we talked, two trucks pulled up. My neighbors Adeline and Winnie walked into the kitchen, followed by some other guys I didn’t recognize, all of them with checkbooks in hand. Here, under the bright light of Bette’s kitchen, her table piled with plastic bags of rice and checks and wrinkled magazines, the transaction has the warm veneer of an illicit thrill, as if we’re buying something that will get taken away.

And it might. While the rice still grows wild on many local lakes and creeks, clogging up open channels the first week of September, its future is in question. Climate change and genetically modified rice threaten the manoomin seedstock. In this area alone, seven distinct varieties are at risk of being reseeded with hybridized rice, which ducks move from lake to lake. State wildlife management workers blow up beaver lodges, interfering with the natural water-level consistency that wild rice requires. Runoff seeps into the soil, raising sulfide levels above what this sensitive plant can handle.

The tribes continue to sell and ship out rice—some of it coming straight from Dewandeler’s parching shed—via their websites. And yet it feels like the local interest in hand-harvested, wood-parched rice—the smoky, good stuff—is on the wane. Most small-town gas stations used to sell a few bags in the fall but rarely continued the practice when they gave way to national chains. Meanwhile, health-food advocates—the same people who talk a big game about high-protein organic grains—ignore the one right under their noses.

But viewed another way, the rice has returned to the tribes and to the small parchers. It sits where it always has: in sheds and garages, tightly sheltered in burlap sacks, far from the masses—­perhaps just where it belongs.

The post The True Story of Wild Rice, North America’s Most Misunderstood Grain appeared first on Saveur.

My sister-in-law Sarah and I are walking through the art nouveau district of Latvia’s capital, Riga—though, more correctly, you might say we are wobbling, having just toasted our arrival with many glasses of Riga Balzams, the country’s famous tar-black botanical digestif. Its bitterness feels like a properly dour Eastern European tempering to the bald beauty of this city. Riga is ancient with big modern ambitions, full of manicured flower beds, a perfectly restored Old Town, vendors who sell amber and Latvian runes and thick woolen mittens year-round, and particularly vicious cobblestones. As the stones strain the straps of my sandals, a woman in swank culottes and high-heeled booties, carrying a huge bouquet of freesia, passes us like we’re standing still. In fact, every third person on the sidewalk carries a bouquet of flowers, headed to happy hour somewhere.Riga is but a portal to our real destination, the rural town of Aloja, where Sarah completed what she calls a “relatively cushy” Peace Corps service from 1998 to 2000, and which she hasn’t returned to since. But really, this story begins in Brooklyn, when, after leaving Latvia, Sarah moved into an apartment in Fort Greene with me and her brother, who would eventually become my husband. When we fought—for sure, we fought—it was always about food. It was no wonder we had a hard time sharing a kitchen. I was an ambitious young line cook practicing searing duck breasts, running up ridiculous grocery bills I expected her to split. She was a returned Peace Corps volunteer who brought home dusty bottles of practically lethal 70 percent acid Russian vinegar, and just wanted to fry up a couple of carrot cutlets for her own dinner. She had already learned to cook from the women in Aloja, and she still lived and breathed its flavors, its ethics, and its hardships.Looking back, I can see that she hadn’t fully left Latvia, and instead she was drawing me into it: We drank Balzams and fizzy fermented birch sap, and talked about the famed “fat buns” of Aloja, the speķa pīrāgi, or bacon and onion buns. This, the unofficial national dish of Latvia, has increasingly become Sarah’s memory trigger. So while I’m here to finally go to Aloja with her, meet her friends, and taste these dishes she hasn’t stopped talking about for the past 20 years, I’m also here to see the country through her eyes.

Latvia’s history is a complicated and somewhat disturbing roll call of conquests that finally ended in 1991, when it gained its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. For centuries previous—save a brief period of independence between the two World Wars—the Swedes, the Germans, and the Russians have all claimed this land as their own. So it makes sense that nature and symbols of the forest have always been incredibly important to the Latvian identity; unlike cities and towns, which can be occupied, wilderness can never be fully won.

So I think we are on the right path, out of the city, headed to the sleepy town of Aloja in the Vidzeme region. Unlike most of the country, which is half-populated by ethnic Russians, Vidzeme is ethnically and culturally Latvian. We stop first in Saulkrasti, a coastal town of pale sand beaches, cabins, and fish shacks along the cold Baltic Sea, to meet up with Vija Skudra, a friend of a friend of Sarah’s. We’ve been told that we’ve come to Latvia at the right time, during the three weeks of the year that she and her husband, Jānis, harvest and make smoked lucīši—tender baby ocean eelpout, an exclamation point of a fish, whose bulbous heads taper neatly to a point—a seasonal Latvian delicacy.

We arrive two hours later than expected at Vija and Jānis’, a sweet little country place surrounded by a neatly trimmed orchard of black currants, apples, and plums. In the backyard sit homemade wooden smokers the size of garden sheds, one of them exhaling smoke. On the picnic table, fashioned from split logs and soaked in cheery red paint, Vija sets out what I’ll come to recognize as the usual Latvian spread: coffee, fresh cows’-milk cheeses rolled in various herbs, jars of homemade jam, canned fish, and a loaf of their excellent rupjmaize, a humid, black sour rye bread, its crust so caramelized it could have been baked in the campfire coals—and, of course, a vase of homegrown flowers.

Jānis is sitting on a chair over a bucket, expertly knifing the innards from baby lucīši. Less than a foot long, they have fat heads and full bellies that thin into quill-shaped tails. “In Soviet times,” he says, flipping the fish into a bucket, “only pensioners were allowed to go fishing, but I went out with them early before work and learned from them anyway.” As he and Vija thread the fish onto the metal rods, he explains that the lucīši are smaller than they were years ago. “In Soviet times, they took too many,” Vija says, with an air of both irritability and inevitability. “They gave them all to the fox farms, to make the pelts shinier.” It makes me think: If you’re a conqueror whose aim is to tear apart the cultural fabric of the native population, there’s no better target than a beloved food tradition. The big stuff—collectivizing the economy, shipping landowners off to Siberia—delivers the major, life-changing blows, but messing with harmless seasonal fish celebrations, that’s the insidious fiberglass that really gets under people’s skin.

Vija shows us how to eat the lucīši. It’s a lot like opening up a snap pea: You bend it open at the tail, peel off the spine on one side and the hard ridge of skin along the other, then open it up to pluck out choice nuggets of sweet meat. As we eat in the garden, friends begin to arrive carrying gifts—jars of pickled beets, cheeses, homemade schnapps, beer—some of it in trade for the fish, some provisions for the party to come. Jānis, who had run off on his motorized bike, has now returned with what our late arrival warrants: a happy-hour bottle of Armenian brandy.

The Sarah I know back home is pretty careful about the drink—more so than me—but this Eastern European Sarah, speaking Latvian like a native, does not hesitate to shoot back obscure liquors. She tips back her glass and slams it down with a thunk—the international cue for a refill. Jānis picks up on it and tops her off.

Jānis doesn’t join us to peel lucīši, but sits back and smokes a cigarette. “I like to make the lucīši,” he shrugs, “but I’ve never liked to eat it. I’m just happy that other people like it so much.” I try to think what it must have felt like to keep my family traditions hidden from the government eye for as many years as they did, if the only way to keep them alive was through the food I cooked, the songs I sang to my children at night, the traditional Latvian runic patterns I hid in my knitting.

The next day, we meet the town baker of Aloja. Ruta Gailīte lives with her grown son, also named Jānis, in a weather­worn house on the last block of the town’s short main street. As we walk there, Sarah points out the ghosts of stores behind shuttered storefronts, including the collective bakery where Ruta used to work. When Sarah arrived in 1999, Latvia had gained its independence from the USSR less than 10 years prior, and people were filled with hope, but joining the world market midstream has proved to be hard on Aloja. At Ruta’s house, we turn the corner onto a picturesque farmyard—a place that neither modernity nor capitalism seem to have ever touched. In the space of a city block, she has a cow, a garden, and an old stone water well. The scene is both idyllic and heart-rendingly small in scale, a village pastoral straight out of a Vermeer painting. When the Aloja bakery in which she worked closed, Ruta continued to bake for profit at home. Her prized possession is Runcie, a literal cash cow.Ruta, a feminine woman with light blue eyes the color of a distant horizon, speaks in a high musical voice without breaking stride. “She says you need a cow,” Sarah translates for me as we walk into Ruta’s house. “She says that the foundation of cooking is the cow.” After I see her small refrigerator filled with luminous pans of cooling milk, I am momentarily convinced. People keep backyard chickens; why not a backyard cow?In her kitchen, Ruta feeds wood into the firebox of her cepeškrāsns, the traditional Latvian wood stove that is the centerpiece of her house. An impressive beast made of stacked glazed bricks with a firebox at one end and an oven door in the middle, its stovetop is nothing more than a heavy sheet of iron. On the stove’s hottest spot, directly over the oven, sits a wide pan of water, perpetually hot, for washing dishes. Bricks cover the top at varying levels, some sitting low enough to hold a simmering pot, others high enough from the heat to dry her clean cups and bowls.Ruta speaks in a fast xylophonic spree, and Sarah struggles to translate—not because she doesn’t understand Latvian, but because Ruta is speaking the highly technical language of cooking. Visually, I can translate. This is how Ruta makes her sponge cake: She stands a clean one-gallon metal coffee can in a pan of hot water on top of her wood stove, she adds five eggs, exactly five spoons of sugar, five spoons of flour. She uses a hand mixer—even though she doesn’t have running water, she does have electricity—and whips the egg mixture until it rises to the very top of the coffee can.

She whips seven eggs into two liters of Runcie’s thick cream, making the dough for both klingeris—a sweet cake—and speķa pīrāgi, those fat buns. In the meantime, she moves her pan of dishwater aside, and sautés cubes of bacon fat and onions on the stovetop’s hot spot until they melt and shimmer, then pours them over a pot of cooked pelēkie zirņi, the large brown pea that is the pride of Latvia. With thick, chewy skins and soft, cakey centers, the humble peas are luxurious when sauced with homegrown pork fat.

“Where did you get the bacon?” I ask, loving its fruitwood tang. “From Līga!” she says, setting off an effusive litany of praise about the cheesemaker we will meet the next day. They trade regularly: Ruta’s cakes for Līga’s lard, Ruta’s biezpiens (fresh cow’s-milk cheese) for Līga’s siers (fresh goat’s-milk cheese). When I ask Ruta if she buys anything at the store, she says, “No, no, no, no. I’m allergic to the food from the store.”

Given Ruta’s meager 100-euro-per-month pension, her optimism is inspiring. “A single cake,” she boasts, “pays for two months’ worth of firewood!” As if on cue, a woman calls to Ruta from the doorway and drops off a box of garden vegetables in the foyer. In a few hours, another woman will do the same, leaving a box of foraged wild teas—clearly payment in kind to the village baker. As Ruta cooks, I watch her add butter, cream, and bacon with a heavy hand, and make this mental note: In trading, as in baking, a consistently heaped-up cup always pays you back. There’s something uncommonly beautiful about this bartering economy that modern capitalist societies miss out on. With money, the transaction is short and direct: money for goods. Bartering leaves some space for the exchange of other, more-human qualities, like kindness. Ruta “eats well” in an older sense, from when good living had more to do with creativity and know-how than it did with money.

The now-risen sweet dough feels as whispery soft as a deflated balloon. She rolls it out and brushes it with homemade condensed milk—fresh cream and sugar, boiled and reduced, which will keep for days without refrigeration. The dough ratio reminds me of a German kugelhopf, and I ask if she ever adds anything else to it—candied fruits or nuts. “No,” she says, “my friends don’t have expensive tastes. And they don’t have the teeth anymore for almonds.”

After feeding split logs into the fire to raise the oven temperature, Ruta sits on a wooden bench in front of her oven, pops in the pan of speķa pīrāgi, and stays there to monitor them—the only time today she has stopped moving. Every few minutes, as she opens the oven and turns the pan, I can see the tops browning rapidly in the waves of wood heat. When they come out, burnished to a dark caramel, we tear into them, their centers molten with onions and bacon fat. Ruta’s wiry son, Jānis, who has come back from his logging job, emerges wordlessly from the back room to grab a hot bun from the tray. Ruta smiles, as mothers do when their boys swipe pastries at any age. “I hope he finds a wife,” she says. “The problem is, girls today don’t want to milk a cow!”

The next day, we meet Līga Kozaka, the cheesemaker. She lives with her husband, Vasilijs Kozaks, her mother, daughter Marika, and grandson Rodgrigo in a modern farmhouse built around a rustic central wooden post-and-beam structure. The house vibrates with Chopin played at top volume, the piano music cleansing the room to its corners. As at Ruta’s, the centerpiece of Līga’s house is a hulking brick cepeškrāsns. On hers sits a huge vase of flowers—tiger lilies and wild roses and dianthus the size of golf balls, so fresh they’re still damp and breathing.Wearing leopard-print pants and a pair of reading glasses perched on her cropped gray-blond head, she slices her goat cheeses into thick slabs for us to try, telling me that she has 60 goats, 38 of them milkers, and is building a new cheesemaking facility. All of the cheeses I taste in Latvia are fresh, none of them aged, and Līga’s goat cheese is by far the best of them: creamy and sweet, its goaty muskiness just an innuendo. Some are rolled in caraway, others in dill, but my favorite is studded with tan fenugreek seeds, which pop in the mouth with the taste of maple syrup.She says proudly, “I am my own boss.” And then points to Vasilijs, her husband, a man with kind, attentive eyes. “I am also his boss.” The room laughs.

We hand Līga the many gifts Ruta sent with us: a block of fresh biezpiens, the double-layer biscuit cake, the braided loaves of caraway-seed bread. She sighs fondly and puts them away with an appreciative murmur.

Līga has generously offered to host a party for us and a crew of Sarah’s Aloja friends from her Peace Corps days, and she has assembled an impressive array of dishes, already stacked high on her brick stovetop. There are two batches of hot soup, a cold blueberry soup with chewy drop dumplings, cracked cooked barley ready to be made into asins desa (a traditional blood sausage), a cucumber salad to go with Ruta’s biezpiens, and a glistening bowl of kiploku grauzdiņi, the addictive rye-bread croutons I’ve seen all over Latvia. I learn, finally, that the secret to their deliciousness is a heavy pour of vegetable oil and an incendiary amount of raw garlic. “We call them narcoteek,” Liga says when she sees that I can’t stop eating them. Narcotic they are.

Liga pours a bag of glowing magenta pigs’ blood onto the barley for the asins desa. “I’ve been making this sausage for more than 30 years. These days I use spices like this,” she says, shaking a large plastic canister of spice mix, “but when I was a kid, we always added peppermint.” With their short growing season, Latvians make extensive use of perennial flavorings, herbs that need to be planted only once to come back with a vengeance every year: sorrel, chives, fresh horseradish, and the worst colonizer of them all, mint, which will spread across a garden faster than spilled water on a table. I ask if her goats like mint, and she responds with a tilted head and bugged eyes. Obviously, yes, the goats eat everything.

She needs no further prompting to show me and Sarah her “babies,” as she calls the goats, and we head to the barn, an airy wooden structure newly built on top of a centuries-old split-rock foundation. The animals immediately circle around her in a tight mosh pit. So anxious is the group to connect with Līga that I imagine she could leap onto her back from the rafters and crowd-surf around the barn.

“As I milk them,” Līga says, “we talk. Sometimes I even cry with them. They’re my best friends.” Then she yelps suddenly, slapping at one particularly naughty gray-beard, who has snuck over and begun to nibble on the loose end of Sarah’s belt. “They’re also a bunch of hooligans.”

Back in the kitchen, I help Līga bring food outside to the table, which has been set with a delicate lace tablecloth and a vase of fresh flowers. I pour her chunky beet soup—studded with melting cubes of fresh pork belly—into pots, and open a jar of rowanberry preserve to serve with the blood sausage, its skin caramelized, popping, and crisp. Līga sprays a handful of chopped dill on the tiny hot dogs one of Sarah’s friends has brought—which Liga’s 5-year-old grandson Rodgrigo snatches in handfuls from the bowl.

Following his cue, I filch a cucumber coin from the salad and pop it into my mouth. The growing season has been dry this year, and we’ve seen very little fresh produce, but it seems that the entirety of Latvia’s collective green thumb has been funneled into this single cucumber. Grassy and alkaline, ferociously green, it has the intensity particular to vegetables grown with care but without irrigation—a stubborn, tenacious cucumber-ness, made strong from hardship.

Set Your Latvia Table With These Recipes

Fatty Bacon and Onion Buns

Cucumber and Radish Salad with Fresh Cheese

Garlic Rye Croutons

Hot Beet Soup with Pork Belly (Bietes Zupa)

Latvian Braided Birthday Cake (Klingeris)

The post Cooking Lessons from the Latvian Countryside appeared first on Saveur.

I’m in the middle of the area known locally as “the Finnish Triangle,” sampling a highly unusual yogurt whose active culture arrived here 100-some years ago on a sun-dried rag. Every surface in Miriam Yliniemi’s bright kitchen is covered with a bowl or platter wearing a crinkled beret of aluminum foil. The bluish February sunshine shoots low through the large plate glass window, jumping from foil top to foil top and lighting up her kitchen like a disco. Even though I’d asked Miriam to just make the karjalan piirakka, traditional rye hand pies, she’s chosen to override me and instead make a feast that charts a day in the life of a Minnesota Finn, from morning to midnight snack. There’s a pile of flour-dusted ruis, Finnish rye bread; joulutorttu, flaky cream-rich star-shaped pastries with prune jam centers; a towering whipped cream cake topped with a mosaic of fresh fruit; and in the center of her stove, a large disk of “squeaky cheese,” fresh curds broiled to a speckled brown, still warm and weeping whey at the edges. Before I can wedge off my winter boots, she peels a soft plastic lid from a sky-blue Tupperware container and hands me the traditional Finnish breakfast: a cup of homemade yogurt dusted with a flurry of cinnamon sugar. “This is viili. Our yogurt. It sets at room temperature.” The viili has the consistency of custard but falls from my spoon in a long slithering cord. Stretchy like mastic, it has a disarmingly glutinous quality—a muscularity to it that suggests it might just keep on moving on its own. But that tension-hold breaks in the mouth, where it dissolves in a sweet puddle, its tartness soft like background noise. “What does viili mean in Finnish?” I ask, my crush on this yogurt progressing from flirtation to full-blown love by the third spoonful. “Wild,” Miriam says. And it is. The sourdough of yogurts, this culture needs no coddling or extra heat to activate. Stirred into milk, it gels on its own. “Miriam,” her husband, Elmer, coaxes from his easy chair in the nearby living room, “tell her the story!” But Miriam, a highly articulate woman who has nearly single-handedly kept Finnish food traditions alive for the area youth, who has translated three academic books from Finnish into English, waves him off with a tsk-tsk flip of her manicured silver hair. Turning her attention back to spooning creamy ovals of rice pudding onto thin coaster-size circles of rye dough, she quickly lines up rows of ruffled rye pies—machine-perfect karjalan piirakka.

She can’t talk while she’s making them, I get it. Her knuckles flash, her fingertips pinch the dough into even pleats, her eyes rarely lift off the counter­top horizon. She has a good hand, I think. Her fingers know the difference between right and wrong, good enough and great.

So Elmer, the retired pastor of the Apostolic Lutheran church in Wolf Lake, and a vivid storyteller, tells me instead.

“When our relatives first moved here from Finland at the turn of the 20th century, they found that after a while, their viili culture weakened, so they wrote to their relatives back home. The women there soaked clean rags in viili—”

“Not rags,” Miriam interjects. “Probably something handwoven. Weaving is very important to Finnish culture.”

“Right, woven cloths. They soaked them in viili, dried them in the sun until they were stiff, and then mailed them to Wolf Lake.”

“And you’ve kept it going ever since?”

“Yes, of course,” Elmer says, dropping a wobbly cube of the now-cool squeaky cheese into his hot coffee, the tiny Finnish cup almost disappearing inside his large hand.

“This is traditional?” I ask, dropping a cube into my own cup. A shimmery constellation of fat droplets rises to the surface. I sip quickly and tip the warm cheese into my mouth. Not as weird as it sounds, the coffee tastes toffee-tinged but not sweet, a bit like Bulletproof coffee studded with cubes of soft gum—squeaky, milk-flavored gum.

“Sure, when you’re having a coffee break, you want to warm up the cheese to make it squeak again, so you drop it in the coffee,” she says.

We sit down at the table formally set with Finnish tableware, designs not only inspired by winter but seemingly constructed from its raw materials: glassware molded from icicles; blue glass candleholders the color of a sky slinking into twilight; a tablecloth woven in alternating bands of white and tan, fresh snow and old snow. Finns know that the beauty of the North lives in its contradictory extremes: searing sunlight, insulating snowbanks against the house, air so cold it burns your cheeks.

Miriam pulls a tray of karjalan piirakka from the oven, brushing the browned frilled tops with a final glaze of melted butter. I take one and smear a clod of butter mashed with hard-boiled eggs into the gash of hot steaming rice, as instructed, which melts instantly into a silky yellow puddle. At the bite, the crisp rye pastry crumbles, and I think it’s just about the oddest, most hard-to-categorize, weirdly delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. Both feminine and earthy, the rye pies look like a fancy pastry a child might whip up out of her mother’s kitchen scraps for her dolls at teatime, and they taste just as otherworldly perfect.

We conclude the breakfast feast with slices of delicate sponge cake sopped with fresh fruit and juice and held together with an inch-thick grout of whipped cream. My belly dares me to finish it, and I do, picking up every light, staticky crumb on the plate with my fingertips. I get the sense that no occasion around here goes down without cake.

Before I go, she fills a clean pill jar with viili, what she calls “the seed.” With this precious culture in hand—my sorely needed prescription—I feel as though I’ve been given a glimpse into the greater subculture of the Wolf Lake Finns.

My husband, Aaron, and I live about 20 miles from here. I’m reminded of a moment a few years back while skiing on our trails when we passed over a curious cluster of snow mounds before realizing that we had skied right into a wolf pack’s home den, all of whose members were likely napping peacefully in their snow caves. Discovering this underground cuisine, hidden in plain sight, is just as thrilling. I’ve always considered this tightly knit and self-sustaining community of hardworking people to be protective of their values, their faith, and their families, but now that I’ve tasted their food I wonder if my assumption was wrong: Maybe they didn’t move here to keep their culture intact and unspoiled. Maybe they moved here to keep it wild.

Three towns—Sebeka, Menahga, and New York Mills—form the points of the Finnish Triangle, which was homesteaded almost exclusively by Finns at the turn of the 19th century. The jokesy Finnish culture present in the towns of Menahga and Sebeka is the one I’m familiar with: the St. Urho’s Day parade that celebrates the made-up saint who drove the grasshoppers from Finland, the Wife Carry Competition (the victor wins his wife’s weight in beer), and the famous Changing of the Guard, a line of men ceremonially peeling off the one-piece long underwear they’ve worn all winter long. They call themselves “Finlanders,” and they’re rowdier than the Apostolics, more apt to hang out at the Menahga Muni (the municipal bar). But the more traditional cultural heart of the Finnish community resides among the dairy farms of Wolf Lake Township. My own Two Inlets area, just two townships over, feels a world away. The hills are higher here, the roads windier, the winter light hotter and more unreal.

Many of the area’s dairy farms are certified organic—eight at last count. At Salmen farm, 10 miles from Miriam’s house, the world might be frozen, the noonday temperature hovering at 20 below zero, but the milk in the barn still flows.

As a Minnesotan without a drop of Scandinavian heritage inside her, I realize that my dairy senses need some tuning—a feeling that increases when I arrive in Tyyni Salmen’s kitchen. I can tell that I don’t see milk the way that Tyyni sees milk. Like the veteran skier she is, she scopes out the bucket of fresh milk as she does the latest snowfall; she looks beyond the whiteness to see conditions. The five-gallon bucket full of milk fresh from the bulk tank is crying out to be made into cheese.

As Miriam did, Tyyni raises my simple request for squeaky cheese to the third power and also makes the star-shaped prune pastries, plus a pot of smooth yellow pea soup, and of course brings out a fresh jar of viili. Hers, made from unpasteurized milk, is clotted heavily at the top, due to the higher butterfat content of the farm’s organic milk, 4.2 percent butterfat as opposed to the average conventional 3.6. The flavor is kaleidoscopic in comparison to store-bought milk, with a bit of barn floor on the nose. Earthier, yes, but lustier too. As I experienced walking past the milking stalls filled with sweet, unblinking cows, the aroma initially shocks but quickly fades.

Tyyni, a small woman with a girlish voice and a gray-blonde bob, stands at the stove in a knit skirt and wool knee socks. As we talk about Christmas traditions, she tells me that she’s the proud grandmother of 40, and I try to conceal my shock. Her face is as unlined as a teenager’s.

“For Christmas, what do you make for the main meat?” I ask.

“Usually more than one ham!” she replies, while cracking open a two-gallon plastic bucket to reveal a slow wave of creamy milk.

“And many pans of squeaky cheese.”

She sets a wire hanger bent into a star shape on top of her electric burner to diffuse the heat, pours the milk into a large well-worn pot, and seasons it with a big pinch of salt and a smaller pinch of sugar. I recognize this as the typical Scandinavian restraint with dairy. Similar to the way my Norwegian-American mother-in-law sweetens her whipped cream—with just a wink from the sugar—Tyyni keeps her cheese pure and chaste.

As the milk heats, I admire her shiny painted wood floors, her potted plants rambling everywhere, her wide-slatted dining-room table, bleached and sanded down to raw smooth wood in the Finnish way. As at Miriam’s, the winter light beams like a stage light through the place.

Tynni scoops out the cheese curds into a rectangular cheesecloth-lined wire sieve, pushes on the curds with a backhanded ladle to remove the standing whey, and then flops the contents expertly into a baking pan and pops it under the broiler. We stand at the oven door and watch it frizzle under the heat, the brown spots spreading across the surface of the cheese. As we watch, members of Tyyni’s family stream into the house and ladle goldenrod-colored soup into bowls. Four cousins who seem to be all the same age pile into one living-room chair to wait for the cheese. When it’s done, she cuts it into cubes and the kids make swift work of it, swabbing the cheese through a saucer of her homemade raspberry jam. The fresh curds, sweet and salty, squeak in my teeth.

“You have time for a sauna?” Tyyni asks, pointing to the whitewashed building across the driveway, its chimney puffing steam. Built in the 1930s, the sauna has the traditional two rooms: a front changing room, lit by a kerosene lamp, and a dark back room lit by a curtained window and a raging woodstove fire. Usually, men and women sauna separately, in the nude. Today, the little boys volunteer, in swim trunks for my benefit, and scamper in. Tyyni drops grapefruits into the snow to chill and says, “So refreshing after a sauna.”

After about 10 minutes, the boys, their skin as pink as boiled crab shells, blow out of the sauna door and hit the snow, rolling down the hill like a bunch of bear cubs. Shaking off snow, they each take a wedge of cut grapefruit and go back in.

I laugh, and Tyyni says, “You think that’s funny, the teenage boys down the road are really crazy. They drive their snowmobiles after their saunas to cool off, and one night they came all the way to our driveway—two miles away!” “They were riding naked?”

“Of course!” She tucks a plastic-wrapped wedge of squeaky cheese into my hand, squints out at the closest rolling white hill, gives me a quick hug and says, “I think I still have time today for a ski.”

As I leave, I turn back to take a picture with my phone and see that it has turned itself off because I’ve been standing out so long in the cold.

Wild.

The third stop on my Wolf Lake Finn tour takes me down an even skinnier trail, to the house of my friends Bruce and Budd at the end of a forest road in the south Smoky Hills. Bruce Engebretsen is Swedish-American but grew up 20 minutes west of Wolf Lake amid a number of Finnish ladies who schooled him in their domestic arts. A dedicated handweaver, he and his spouse, Budd Parker, moved here a couple of years ago with their collection of antique wooden looms, spinning wheels, history books, old cooking tools, and Budd’s enviable stash of enameled Dansk cookware. Here in the summer months, in the middle of the woods, they hold weekly weaving workshops that are open to anyone. In his studio, Bruce demonstrates everything from spinning flax into linen to Sami belt weaving; they make a cauldron of soup, pull a mountain of bread from their outdoor wood-fired clay oven, and call potluck for the rest. The evenings often end with Bruce at the piano leading a sing-along of old-timey songs while the crowd passes around a bottle of homemade pea-pod wine.

I came here to round out my Wolf Lake education not only because Bruce is a disciple of Finnish food and weaving but because he’s promised to make me vispipuuro, whipped cranberry pudding, and to help cook a Finnish feast in their clay oven—in the middle of February. He’s invited yet another cold-hardy Minnesotan, Amy Tervola-Hultberg, a Finnish language and culture educator from New York Mills who is eager to make her wood-fired ruis, or traditional Finnish sour rye.

She begins with a porridge of cooked rolled rye, called rye chops, then adds a lump of her bubbling rye starter and enough flour to make a sponge. After it rises, she adds just enough flour to make a sticky dough and pats it out onto a heavily floured surface in two shapes: flattened rounds, for sandwiches, and the more traditional donut shape. The central hole is essential, for these breads were traditionally made all at once, stacked on a dowel, and stored for months.

“Didn’t the bread get hard?” I ask. “How did they eat it?”

“Oh yes, it got hard, as hard as wood, but then they would shave it off in thin slices with a handheld wood planer, you see,” Bruce says, demonstrating the slide on the countertop, “and soften it in a bowl with sour milk.”

“Sounds delicious,” I say, and we all laugh. Then Bruce says, “Remember, these people were no strangers to famine. In food, sometimes there’s hardship, too.”

Amy holds up her hands, furred with sticky dough. “But not today,” she says. “We’re going to eat it fresh, when it’s perfectly soft and chewy.”

Bruce whips the vispipuuro pudding made with foraged cranberries. “The wild highbush cranberries that grow here taste a lot like the traditional lingonberries,” he explains. The dark cranberry juice, thickened into a slurry with farina, lightens as it whips until its shiny, pink meringue-like cloud rises up over the rim of the bowl. Across from him, I roll a pork belly that I’ve pre-salted and rubbed with herbs to go into the clay oven. When it’s tender, we’ll slice it, fry it until crispy, and dress it with blackened leeks and mushrooms. This, together with a dish of creamed spinach and a huge pan full of wood-roasted cabbage cooked in horseradish cream, will give us plenty of fatty, creamy juices to sop up with the bread.

When Budd calls the oven ready, we take turns hustling outside. Inside for more food, outside to cook and stand around the oven, back inside to grab another dish, back outside for another snow-chilled cocktail. Those of us with glasses are blinded by hot-house fog, the bane of our Minnesota winter existence.

Amy takes hers off and says, “This meal takes sisu!” and everyone but me knows what the word means.

“Sisu,” Amy says. “Finnish perseverance. Grit. It means digging down within yourself to tap into a heroic will to succeed, even in the most adverse of circumstances.”

“The cool thing,” Bruce adds, “is that sisu is personal, but it usually benefits the group.”

Finnish or not, I think, sisu has got to kick in at 20 below. I’ve never heard the Finnish character described this way, but I recognize this tenacity deep down in my rural Minnesotan bones. Bruce and Budd, with their house full of utilitarian old relics and their backwoods cultural community-building, have sisu. The Wolf Lake Finns, preserving their wild, natural foodways in a beautiful patch of hill country in Minnesota, have sisu. Amy, driven to bake loaf after loaf of rye until the chew feels just right, has sisu.

We toast to that, with a pink-grapefruit champagne cocktail I’ve improvised. It has no Finnish connection beyond that it simply reminds me of Tyyni’s sauna grapefruits in the snow and reflects extremes: bitter and sweet, healthyish but potent.

We may not be devout, and not even altogether Finnish, but today we feel it.

Feasts of the Finnish Midwest

Roasted Cabbage with Horseradish Cream

Finnish Twice-Cooked Pork Belly with Pickled Mushrooms and Leeks

The post The Midwest’s “Finnish Triangle” is a Land of Saunas and Squeaky Cheeses appeared first on Saveur.

Eaten throughout Finland as a snack during the traditional afternoon coffee break, these pastries consist of a simple rye flour and water dough tucked around a thick, creamy rice filling and topped with a salty butter mixed with chopped hard-boiled eggs. In this recipe, adapted from the author’s friend, local Finnish cooking teacher Miriam Yliniemi, extra melted butter is brushed on the pastries before, during, and after baking for a richer-tasting, crispier dough.

The post Savory Rice Pudding Pie (Karjalanpiirakka) appeared first on Saveur.

In Minnesota’s “Finnish Triangle,” vispipuuro, a sweet, whipped, pudding-like porridge, is sometimes made with a tart wild fruit called the highbush cranberry. Classic versions also use lingonberries, red currants, or conventional cranberries. Cranberries contain natural pectin that helps to thicken the fruit juice; the addition of starchy farina allows the syrupy juices to be whipped to a tangy mousse that holds soft meringue-like peaks. The author advises that you use frozen berries rather than fresh, as they break down much more quickly into juice.

The post Finnish Whipped Porridge with Yogurt Cream (Vispipuuro) appeared first on Saveur.

In this buttery, creamy side dish, dry white vermouth and freshly grated horseradish help to make wintry cabbage lively and robust. In Finland, a splash of barley or rye syrup would be added to enhance the cabbage’s natural sweetness; Finnish-Americans are likely to use more widely available dark corn syrup. Cut into large wedges, the peaks turn brown and crispy while the inside layers soften in the cream.

The post Roasted Cabbage with Horseradish Cream appeared first on Saveur.

The author’s creamed spinach is an ultra-fine, silky version of this traditional staple, puréed with parsley leaves for a vivid green color and vermouth for a pop of acidity. For the brightest green color, cool the spinach mixture down fully before puréeing, then reheat. You can eat this dish by the spoonful or use it as a sort of sauce through which to drag meat and vegetables on the plate.

The post Finnish Creamed Spinach With Crumbled Egg Yolks appeared first on Saveur.