Minnesota locavore chef committed to helping people eat locally and sustainably with the seasons.
James Beard award-winning author Beth Dooley has added a 10th cookbook to her growing collection! In The Perennial Kitchen: Simple Recipes for a Healthy Future, she explains and explores the concept of environmental eating. “Local food can be confused as yuppie food,” Beth said in a recent conversation. With that confusion in mind, she wrote this book to help frame eating as an environmental act, one that can be simple, delicious, and approachable for everyone.
The book names and describes elements of what she dubs the “perennial pantry,” grains such as Kernza®, beans, flour, cooking oils, vinegars, nuts, and sweets. An opening section introduces these ingredients and how they reflect better farming, and this information continues throughout the cookbook in recipe notes and ingredient profiles. This thread, she hopes, will encourage people to cook in a way that reshapes our foodshed by supporting farming practices that provide habitat for wildlife and pollinators, protect waters, and help reverse rural poverty.
The Perennial Kitchen represents a natural progression of Beth’s intersections with food. Her memoir In Winter’s Kitchen, published in 2015, is a record of how she found her footing in the Midwest food scene when she moved to Minneapolis from New Jersey. Her other cookbooks, including The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen—written alongside Sean Sherman—present food as a project of people and place.
Over the last 40 years, as she’s gotten to know this place she now calls home through a love for local food, grains came on her radar. She explored the Indigenous terroir of wild rice and heritage varieties of corn, the Turkey Red wheat that German Mennonites brought to this and other parts of America, and the influence of C.C. Washburn and the Pillsbury family in developing Minneapolis mills. She learned how Norman Borlaug, University of Minnesota graduate and professor, crossed short straw Japanese wheat with American varieties, creating grains more receptive to heavy fertilizer application, and therefore higher yielding.
In learning of agricultural research with perennial wheat at The Land Institute and University of Minnesota’s Forever Green Initiative, she began to understand how grains can be a part of environmental solutions, and not just demonized because they were central to the Green Revolution. She is currently a senior fellow, endowed chair in agricultural systems with Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA) at the University of MN College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Sciences, the role through which she undertook this latest book project.
“The challenge is trying to grow grains in a way that doesn’t destroy us or the land,” she notes, expressing excitement about the research and progress with Kernza®, now available for the public to purchase through MN-based mill, distributor, and AGC member Perennial Pantry.
The book does not come across as ideological or serve up guilt; instead, the recipes are geared to help us all face change in food the best ways possible—through flavor—and they are delicious. “Play with your food, enjoy its stories; meals should be fun!” she advises. In her view, eating is supposed to be celebratory first.
Within AGC, Beth’s work is key to our Grains to Institution project with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS). Through Beth’s experience on the board of The Good Acre, a St. Paul-based food hub and teaching center, she’s developed an expertise in writing recipes for institutional audiences, and we’re grateful she’s bringing those skills to this project.
Everything our members do contributes to the momentum we’re building, and this new book is a great tool for the changes we seek for our regional food and farming systems. Join Beth on Monday, May 17 at 6pm CT for a free virtual book launch by registering here. We are looking forward to it, and hope you will join us! You can also preorder the new book, which will be available on May 18.
Follow her at the links below.