In the old days, cooking dinner meant consulting the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook and making the food. Betty Crocker, the putative author of the cookbook, wasn’t even a real person, and the photos (black and white!) were mostly of roasts coming out of the oven.
Now, there are whole shelves of cookbooks that are not just collections of recipes but inspirational, aspirational personal narratives. They celebrate the joys of sourcing food (and whatever else can be managed) extremely locally. They follow that age-old American trope of the city dweller moving to a rural area and undergoing a conversion to a purer, more idealistic life. It goes without saying that the photos of idyllic farmsteads and to-die-for dishes are gorgeous.
Life in a Northern Town: Cooking, Eating and Other Adventures Along Lake Superior by Mary Dougherty (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, $30) follows that roadmap well. The locality in question is Bayfield, Wisconsin, home of apple orchards, fresh whitefish and Big Water Coffee Roasters.
Dougherty, who hails from the Twin Cities, is a chef, blogger, and former co-owner of Good Thyme restaurant in Washburn. She captures the magic of Bayfield, her adopted hometown and a hub for recreational sailors and vacationers, its hills a perfect vantage point for gazing at the Apostle Islands.
In between boat trips and picnics to the various Apostles with her dogs and family, Dougherty highlights such local producers as George and Keith Newago and their 219 maple syrup, Bodin Fisheries and Blue Vista Farm. (The Bayfield area benefits agriculturally from its location on a peninsula that sticks out into Lake Superior.)
Recipes alternate with (and sometimes go hand-in-hand with) scenes of her daily life. Some dishes are simple odes to the simple life — the perfection of snow day waffles, for instance. Some celebrate foraging (the potent wild ramp pesto); others, the varied cultures found in northern Wisconsin. You might expect a wild rice dish — a nod to Native American culture — but not wild rice blueberry buttermilk pancakes. You might not expect the Vietnamese pho or pork vindaloo at all.
Dougherty is at her best when doing basic but well done Bayfield cuisine, like whitefish wrapped in foil and done in campfire coals (don’t forget the white wine and feta cheese) or the corn and smoked trout chowder (use the brown sugar-cured trout from Bodin’s). This walk through a year in a Bayfield kitchen should provide fodder for dreaming until next summer’s vacation.
