THE FLAVOR OF WISCONSIN CLOCKS A PEOPLE and culture in motion. I’m tempted to say that recent generations have accelerated the pace of change, but it only seems that way. Food journalist Harva Hachten’s original edition of this volume, published in 1981, made clear that the region’s foodways have been in flux since well before the Ojibwe started trading with the Europeans. Of course, down on the ground level some beloved Wisconsin foods have managed to stay the same, like sweet corn, morels, and pickled dilly beans. But what has changed dramatically in recent decades is the local access and quality of the food grown here.
More than mere cookbook or culinary history, The Flavor of Wisconsin presents a recipe collection through the prism of the state’s storied eating traditions. I get a sense that Hachten’s ability to take a long and wide view of the past also gave her the wisdom to not try to stake a premature claim on the sum of the recipes she painstakingly gathered. Such a comprehensive collection would have tempted a less patient soul to summarize, but Harva resisted the urge to present the state’s mix of immigrant and indigenous foodways as one unholy amalgamation called “Midwestern Cuisine.” Instead, she threaded her carefully chosen recipes into a sort of culinary DNA of the region and left the possibility of a definitive “taste of this place” for the farmers and eaters of the future to determine.
For the new Flavor of Wisconsin, Terese Allen, herself an artful contributor and keen observer of the state’s culinary customs, is uniquely qualified to pick up Hachten’s threads and weave them to the present. Allen connects the historical dots of the state’s magnificently rich food history and widens the lens to show how economic forces, immigration, and sustainable agriculture continue to flavor Wisconsin’s foodways. This expanded focus infuses the region’s ingredients with additional dimensions of meaning and consequence.
While many of the contributors to this book’s first edition, including Harva Hachten herself, have since left us, these recipes come to life when we cook them—even more so when we connect them to the stories of culture and agriculture that nourish their roots. Terese Allen beautifully understands this. Knowing that ecology is one of the most important stories of our time, she adds significantly to document contemporary approaches to sustainable agriculture. While Wisconsin is a widely known and highly regarded leader in high tech agricultural research and applications, Allen makes sure we also see the vital contributions from the state’s other agricultural innovators: the vegetable growers, grazers, orchardists, beekeepers, watermen, and cheesemakers whose collective efforts have come to be called sustainable agriculture. The small communities throughout Wisconsin where all these innovators have settled have begun to revive as well. Allen shows us the regionally reliant distribution networks that have resulted, linking city and country, institutions and nutritionists, chefs and markets, and all kinds of cooks to their creativity.
It is a delicious result of this synergy between Wisconsin’s farmers and eaters that there are more kinds and better tasting ingredients inspiring us to go to our stoves. Maybe a regional cuisine will emerge yet. As I write, certain cheeses produced in the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin and a herd of sheep uniquely adapted to northern Wisconsin are being branded to their specific place of origin. Speculation on a regional cuisine aside, agriculture is a vital engine of culture, and how we grow, distribute, and value our food directly affects the culture of eating that grows up around it.
In reading The Flavor of Wisconsin I am reminded of how much has changed, how far the pendulum has already swung back toward better aspects of our culinary past. In 1976 when I opened my restaurant L’Etoile across the street from the State Capitol, I couldn’t obtain adequate quantities of ingredients that were once icons of the region—and L’Etoile had only fifty seats! Getting fresh tart red cherries down to southern parts of the state from the canning factories of Door County was fruitless, as was finding a farmer who raised chickens on pasture, or a cheesemaker who had learned to work with wild yeasts, or a herdsman who offered fresh pork, lamb, and beef from animals that grazed outside, or a dairy that sold cultured fresh dairy products that were 100 percent from milk. I know I wasn’t the only cook in Wisconsin who dreamed of an end to our unnecessary dependence on produce trucked in from afar. Under-ripe, over-irrigated, sealed in plastic, and factory farmed; what a nightmare! Now, only a few decades later, The Flavor of Wisconsin provides ample evidence that we have begun to “re-value” regional ingredients and food traditions.
It is so important to remember the hows and whys of beloved ingredients and recipes, why they come to be claimed by us and how they travel with us in time. At the heart of such cooking is a back-story, folded in with the swirl of tastes, textures, lessons, and tales that is our collective culinary intuition. Every time we take up a good recipe and renew its story, we tap into a perennial source of good cooking for generations to come. The new Flavor of Wisconsin shows us that developments in Wisconsin ensure that the state’s treasured recipes, old and new, will have a future.