Traditional Scandinavian home cooking—now in paperback!

Beatrice Ojakangas brings to life the cuisines and customs of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, countries that share borders and bounty. Danes lead with smørrebrød (an open-faced sandwich), which may be topped with cheese, green pepper, and sliced fresh strawberries. Finns specialize in earthy, chewy whole grain bread. Norwegians have wonderfully fresh fish and seafood, and the Swedes gave the world smörgåsbord!

Ojakangas offers us true Scandinavian home cooking that features the best of what is in season. Scandinavian Cooking provides traditional menus for different occasions and seasons—from a Farmhouse Brunch with Buttered Potato Soup to an Old-Fashioned Christmas Smörgåsbord with Dip-in-the-Kettle Soup and Norwegian Cream Pudding, to a sumptuous Midsummer’s Day Buffet with Salmon-in-a-Crust and Fruit-Juice Glögg. A good Scandinavian cook has a flair for color, texture, shape, and simplicity in creating the food that these menus show off to perfection. Beatrice Ojakangas describes her experiences gathering recipes at the tables of friends on her visits to Scandinavia and the beautifully crafted tools and tableware that will help to make the Scandinavian dishes you prepare authentic.

The definitive word on sumptuous Scandinavian cooking, now in paperback!

Drawing upon her rich knowledge of Scandinavian cuisine and culture, expert chef and veteran writer Beatrice Ojakangas presents a multitude of delicious yet remarkably simple recipes in this cookbook classic, available in paperback for the first time. Scandinavian Feasts features the cuisine of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and it includes menus made up of a bounty of appetizers, drinks, smorgasbord, meats, fish, soups, vegetables, desserts, and breads. Easily as engaging as the dishes themselves, each recipe comes with an introduction that explains the cultural importance of the feast and details its seasonal significance.

During the long, dark Scandinavian winter, the meals tend to be hearty and substantial. In Sweden and western Finland, a traditional Thursday lunch consists of pea soup and pancakes. A typical winter dinner might include Danish crackling roast pork with sugar-browned potatoes topped off with an irresistible ice cream cake. Christmastime gatherings, in particular, are often a chance to celebrate with a cup of hot glogg or Swedish punch. When the winter is finally over, the seemingly endless summer days are savored along with the fresh fruits and vegetables that are hard to find after the short growing season. During the white nights of Sweden and Norway, it is customary to serve a midnight supper after a concert or the theater, while a special occasion such as a baptism or anniversary might call for a feast of dill-stuffed whole salmon followed by kransekake, a beautiful towering ring cake of ground almonds.No matter what your level of expertise as a cook, the recipes are easy to use. The ingredients are commonly found in most grocery stores. Scandinavian Feasts is sure to delight enthusiasts of Scandinavian culture and lovers of fine food everywhere.Beatrice Ojakangas is the author of two dozen cookbooks, including The Great Scandinavian Baking Book (1999), also published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her articles have been published in Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Cooking Light, Cuisine, and Redbook, and she has appeared on television’s Baking with Julia Child and Martha Stewart’s Living. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Seasons of Plenty provides colorful descriptions, folk stories, appealing photgraphs and illustrations, excerpts from journals and ledgers, recipes for good food like savory dumpling soup, mashed potatoes with browned bread crumbs, Sauerbraten, and feather light apple fritters.

Southern food is America’s quintessential cuisine. From creamy grits to simmering pots of beans and greens, we think we know how these classic foods should taste. Yet the southern food we eat today tastes almost nothing like the dishes our ancestors enjoyed, because the varied crops and livestock that originally defined this cuisine have largely disappeared. Now a growing movement of chefs and farmers is seeking to change that by recovering the rich flavor and diversity of southern food. At the center of that movement is historian David S. Shields, who has spent over a decade researching early American agricultural and cooking practices.  In Southern Provisions, he reveals how the true ingredients of southern cooking have been all but forgotten and how the lessons of its current restoration and recultivation can be applied to other regional foodways.

Shields’s turf is the southern Lowcountry, from the peanut patches of Wilmington, North Carolina to the sugarcane fields of the Georgia Sea Islands and the citrus groves of Amelia Island, Florida. He takes us on a historical excursion to this region, drawing connections among plants, farms, growers, seed brokers, vendors, cooks, and consumers over time. Shields begins by looking at how professional chefs during the nineteenth century set standards of taste that elevated southern cooking to the level of cuisine. He then turns to the role of food markets in creating demand for ingredients and enabling conversation between producers and preparers. Next, his focus shifts to the field, showing how the key ingredients—rice, sugarcane, sorghum, benne, cottonseed, peanuts, and citrus—emerged and went on to play a significant role in commerce and consumption. Shields concludes with a look at the challenges of reclaiming both farming and cooking traditions.

From Carolina Gold rice to white flint corn, the ingredients of authentic southern cooking are returning to fields and dinner plates, and with Shields as our guide, we can satisfy our hunger both for the most flavorful regional dishes and their history.
 

Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods
 

The Steger Homestead Kitchen is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of the Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in the north woods near Ely, Minnesota. Founded in 1988, the Steger Wilderness Center was established to model viable carbon-neutral solutions, teach ecological stewardship, and address climate change. In her role as the Homestead’s chef, Will’s niece Rita Mae creates delicious and hearty meals that become a cornerstone experience for visitors from all over the world, nourishing them as they learn and share their visions for a healthy and abundant future. 

Now, with this new book, home chefs can make Rita Mae’s simple, hearty meals to share around their own homestead tables. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for generous breakfasts (Almond Berry Griddlecakes), warming lunches (Northwoods Mushroom Wild Rice Soup), elegant dinners (Spatchcock Chicken with Blueberry Maple Glaze), desserts (Very Carrot Cake), and snacks (Steger Wilderness Bars)—are Will Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote and endangered regions.

The Steger Homestead Kitchen opens up the Wilderness Center’s hospitality, its heart and hearth, providing the practical advice and inspiration to cook up a good life in harmony with nature.

Africa’s art of cooking is a key part of its history. All too often Africa is associated with famine, but in Stirring the Pot, James C. McCann describes how the ingredients, the practices, and the varied tastes of African cuisine comprise a body of historically gendered knowledge practiced and perfected in households across diverse human and ecological landscape. McCann reveals how tastes and culinary practices are integral to the understanding of history and more generally to the new literature on food as social history.

Stirring the Pot offers a chronology of African cuisine beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing from Africa’s original edible endowments to its globalization. McCann traces cooks’ use of new crops, spices, and tastes, including New World imports like maize, hot peppers, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts, as well as plantain, sugarcane, spices, Asian rice, and other ingredients from the Indian Ocean world. He analyzes recipes, not as fixed ahistorical documents,but as lively and living records of historical change in women’s knowledge and farmers’ experiments. A final chapter describes in sensuous detail the direct connections of African cooking to New Orleans jambalaya, Cuban rice and beans, and the cooking of African Americans’ “soul food.”

Stirring the Pot breaks new ground and makes clear the relationship between food and the culture, history, and national identity of Africans.

Gus Flesor came to the United States from Greece in 1901. His journey led him to Tuscola, Illinois, where he learned the confectioner's trade and opened a business that still stands on Main Street. Sweet Greeks sets the story of Gus Flesor's life as an immigrant in a small town within the larger history of Greek migration to the Midwest.

Ann Flesor Beck's charming personal account recreates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business.

An engaging blend of family memoir and Midwest history, Sweet Greeks tells how Greeks became candy makers to the nation, one shop at a time.