8 minute read
at the table katherine larSon
Community read
Books for 2021 event evoke thoughts on food and family
Story and photo by Katherine Larson
When I saw the title of one of the books chosen for this year’s Two Books, Two Communities program, I had to buy it. Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: surely that was right in the wheelhouse of Marquette Monthly’s renascent At the Table column.
Two Books, Two Communities stems from a partnership between Marquette County, Alger County and Northern Michigan University, intended to bring these communities together through shared reading and shared conversations. There are some great events planned; see the list outlined later in this article.
One of the book choices for 2021 is Teacher/Pizza Guy (Wayne State University Press 2019), a collection of autobiographical poems by Jeff Kass — an English teacher and director for an Ann Arbor literary arts program who supplemented his income by delivering pizza. The other book is Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie.
Walleye! We have walleye here, and we fry it. Fresh from Alger County’s St. Mary’s River or Marquette County’s Lake Conway, it’s delectable. And cherry pie! While locally grown cherries are few and far between, we can get some good ones from lower Michigan, and it’s hard to beat a good cherry pie. I settled down to read, mouth watering.
Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie bears the subtitle “Midwestern Writers on Food,” and that’s what the book is — 31 short pieces, many written for this book and some drawn from other sources, all collected and edited by Chicago food writer Peggy Wolff and published in 2013 by the University of Nebraska Press.
I’m glad I read the book. I’m glad because I love the idea of a community read, of sharing a book with so many members of the community I’m so proud to be part of. I’m glad, too, because this book contains joyful moments of what it means to share food in community.
But my gladness was, at first, tempered by a tinge of disappointment. To begin with: where the heck is the fried walleye? I read the book three times to confirm its absence. The closest that any of the articles or stories comes is Wolff’s own engaging description of a Door County fish boil — boiled whitefish, which is neither fried nor walleye.
For that matter, calling the book “Beef” or “Pork” rather than anything fishy might have been more appropriate. When not writing about desserts, the authors skew heavily toward red meat; Stuart Dybek even contributes a difficult-to-read
Two Books, Two Communities Events
These events will take place throughout the fall in Marquette and Alger counties. Centered around both books chosen for this year’s annual read, events will be related to Teacher/Pizza Guy by Jeff Kass, and the anthology Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie.
Cooking Video
Sept. 7 Online at
nmu.edu/onebook/twobooks Cooking video by Inspiring Roots’ Pam Roots, showing her making Anne Dimock’s Rhubarb Kuchen with Almond Meringue from Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie. View at nmu.edu/onebook/twobooks from September 7 onward.
Open Mouth, Open Mic
7 pm, Sept. 29 Ore Dock Brewing Co., Marquette
Open Mouth, Open Mic: share your writings, songs, and thoughts about food at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 29, at the Ore Dock Brewing Company in Marquette.
Battle of the Recipe Box
Submissions accepted from Sept. 2 to Sept. 15 Taste off on Oct. 16 at Munising School Public Library
Battle of the Recipe Box: submit your favorite recipe, along with a paragraph or to about why it’s special, between September 2 and September 15 at nmu.edu/onebook/twobooks. The top five recipes will be voted on and winners announced at a COVID-safe taste-off on October 16 at the Munising School Public Library.
Poetry Reading
6 pm, Sept. 19 East Channel Brewery, Munising 7 pm, Sept. 20 Peter White Public Library, Marquette
Poetry readings by Jeff Kass, author of Teacher/Pizza Guy, on Sunday, September 19 at 6 p.m. at East Channel Brewery in Munising with The Cooking Carberry’s wood-fired pizza; and again on Monday, September 20, at 7 p.m. at the Peter White Public Library Shiras Room in Marquette.
Readings of Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie
7 pm, Oct. 6
Online at nmu.edu/onebook/twobooks
Author readings and panel discussion with Fried Walleye editor and featured authors Bonnie Jo Campbell, Anne Dimock, and Peggy Wolff on Wednesday, October 6, at 7 p.m. The virtual event link will be at nmu.edu/onebook/ twobooks.
Recipe Box Taste Off
11 am, Oct. 16 Munising Public School Library
Battle of the Recipe Box: taste-off and awards on Saturday, October 16, at 11 a.m. at the Munising School Public Library.
description of his grade school field trip to a Chicago slaughterhouse, which is challengingly placed as the second entry in the book. This volume is not vegetarian-friendly.
More fundamentally than the absence of fried walleye, I needed to rethink my expectations of the book, which actually has very little to do with Yooper-style food. The point of the Community Read, I remembered, was not to read about the community but to read in community, in fellowship with neighbors.
So I put aside my indignant list (eight articles about Chicago and a total of 10 about Indiana and Iowa and Kansas and Missouri and Nebraska, but only three measly pieces about Michigan — two near Kalamazoo and one in Ann Arbor!) and thought: okay, taking this book on its own terms, what does it offer?
A lot. A strong thread of family tradition runs through these stories, with a number of writers meditating on their grandparents’ lives and the food that fueled them.
Bonnie Jo Campbell — one of the participants in the October 6 panel discussion involving Fried Walleye authors — tastes a disappointing bite of commercial fudge and spends the next dozen years perfecting a home-made version that rivals her grandmother’s; if your stirring arm is strong enough, her lovingly detailed description invites you to join in too.
Anne Dimock — another panelist — buys a Minnesota home that comes with 30 rhubarb plants, and she learns to love them, channeling her own German heritage with rhubarb kuchen and her husband’s Swedish background with rhubarb kram. A video of Inspiring Roots’ Pam Roose cooking that kuchen will be available on the Two Books, Two Communities website starting on September 1.
There’s humor as well, including Michael Stern (of Roadfood fame) on the subject of Chicago’s Italian beef sandwiches and Peter Sagal (of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”) on Chicago’s now-abandoned effort to ban foie gras.
History plays an important role in this book, including an evocative essay about the Creole memories that author Donna Pierce’s mother brought with her to Missouri as part of the Black migration in quest of integration. Tony Bascom contributes one of my favorite pieces, a moving essay set in Kansas on the United States’ bicentennial of July 4, 1976, as the then-15-year-old boy contemplates realities of American history, a mission to Ethiopia his family is poised to embark on, and peach cobbler.
Religion appears, as Jeremy Jackson writes about the dichotomy between being “a boy sitting in the pews, listening to sermons that made it quite clear that I was a pretty darn bad person” and then hustling down to the church basement for the joyfully lavish potluck featuring his grandmother’s lemon meringue pie: “implicit messages about food and family and community that were at the literal foundation of the church.”
County fair culture recurs repeatedly, redolent with grease, in stomach-churning variety. So do endless fields of corn and cream by the gallon. Among the dozen or so recipes scattered through Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie, we are offered kuchen, chocolate pistachio cake, fudge cake, buttermilk doughnuts, corn bread…
But just when it seems like every imaginable cliché about Midwestern food has been covered (looking at you, deep-fried Twinkies!), the book offers a bit of corrective. How about goat cheese panna cotta with caramelized figs? Clearly those figs had to be flown in from somewhere far away, but a good local goat cheese — that one from Indiana — is hard to beat. Or a more complicated dish: tamales made with beef brisket, sour cherry compote and jalapeño cheese? Both these recipes reflect Chicago’s cosmopolitanism; the Midwest includes sophisticated cities as well as endless fields.
Here in the UP, we fry our local fish, we stew our local rhubarb, we roast our local potatoes, we gobble our local berries, but we share humanity with all the Midwesterners in Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie. Some of us, like the writers who
owned an Ann Arbor hot dog stand and a Greek diner in Chicago, sell cooked food; some of us, like the many farmers featured in the book either as themselves or as memories, grow food to cook; each and every one of us eats food.
And all of us eat food that is wrapped up in emotion — the complex memories of complex people, good and bad; the idealized memories of some golden moment in time; the painful memories of loss or revulsion or fear — emotion that is so deeply entwined in how we experience food that we may not even be aware, for example, of why one of us loathes bananas and another thrills to the sweet-tart pucker of rhubarb torte.
Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie gets the reader thinking about food and emotions. The food may not be what you enjoy; the emotions may not be the same as yours; but the intertwining of the two is quintessentially human. If we read thoughtfully, we can plumb our own human depths and then reach out to our community in shared humanity. Maybe over a piece of pie.
Editor’s Note: For Katherine Larson, good things come in threes: three daughters, three grandchildren, and three careers. Lawyering and teaching were fun, but food writing is the most fun of all. She loves food justice, food history, and all things delicious.
