THE COOKBOOK TEST #0043: TRUE NORTH CABIN COOKBOOK

INSTALLMENT #0043 (FREE) THE LAND OF 14,000-SOMETHING LAKES / BEHOLD: BRISKET / A THROWBACK SALAD THAT NEVER GETS OLD

Dear Readers,

Sometimes I think I've spent a lifetime trying to research and describe what makes living in a Great Lakes state special - we don't have the shorthand of Denver (mountains!) or New York City (megalopolis!) or California (beaches!) to make it easy to grasp. The things we do have, by the tens of thousands, are lakes and by the hundreds of millions, trees. Nearly any place in the United States "has lakes and trees" but it's one thing to have them on hand somewhere, and it's another to be swallowed up by them on a daily basis. (There are about 1,000 lakes in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area alone, a fact so mind-boggling that I'm glad I can source it to the sober-minded and extremely quotable Minnesota state DNR.)

Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, I was walking through the woods or hanging out by a lake or both on a daily basis. Working in New York City, I felt, after a year or so, increasingly frantic about how far away the natural world felt. (Rats and roaches, while everpresent, didn't really sate the craving. And Central Park... well, it just felt like an ongoing music festival, technically "outdoors" but so surrounded and infused with teeming humanity that it offered little relief from the city.) Now that I'm back in the Upper Midwest, the profusion of parks and lakes gives me life on a day-to-day basis, and then I occasionally "get away" to parts of the state that are even lakier and woodsier. Sometimes that means a canoe trip through the Boundary Waters; sometimes it's renting a cabin.

For cookbook writer (and fellow Substacker) Stephanie Hansen, cabin time isn't just an occasional long weekend at an AirBnb; it's a way of life on a Minnesotan island called True North, where time is marked by family gatherings, cocktails at sunset, and the occasional marriage proposal. Fires, tornadoes, bears, and raging storms provide the flip side of the good-life-in-the-wilderness coin - it's not all hamburgers and martinis when you live nestled within one of the wildest parts of the country.

I've been a fan and industry colleague of Hansen for years, as she's a veteran voice in the Minnesota food media choir, appearing on radio, television and in print in numerous high-profile outlets. But True North Cabin Cookbook doesn't feel like a product designed to package and delivery recipes to a calculated audience; it's more like a memoir of a marriage and a rural place, told through first-hand recollections, observations about nature, and meals and drinks warmly remembered and recreated.

The recipes are familiar and welcoming, some Julia Child vibes, some Midwestern potluck notes, and some Western campfire favorites mixed up with a little patisserie and a few cocktails, too. The overall sense is cabin hospitality with more than a little good taste, and the recipes we tried succeeded quite well on those terms.

at your service,

James

TRUE NORTH CABIN COOKBOOK
BY STEPHANIE HANSEN
MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS | 2022 | $30

True North Cabin Cookbook is rooted in a sense of geography, in that the cabin is the throughline that introduces and contextualizes every recipe it contains. But it's also sort of timeless and applicable everywhere people are cooking out in an idyllic setting - there are influences from across the United States and around the world in its pages, and it's not particularly hung up on Upper Midwestern recipes or ingredients. The seasonality of the region informs the way the book flows and the recipes are presented, and like last week's subject (the Ithaca Farmers Market Cookbook) the connection to the natural world is front-and-center. 

Recipes tend toward the fairly familiar and straightforward; there aren't a lot of compound recipes or dishes that call for challenging-to-obtain ingredients (which is a balm particularly because many cabins are out of range of anything but pantry staples, and sometimes we don't have the time or presence of mind to pick up the more obscure stuff before we depart for the countryside in a puff of smoke on Friday afternoon.)

SUMMER TIME IS BRISKET TIME

The original recipe for this brisket in True North Cabin Cookbook included a lengthy sub-recipe for homemade barbecue sauce. I skipped it when I made this recipe (and am skipping it here) because I have made numerous scratch barbecue sauces over the years, and never found one that is quite as well-balanced and perfectly suited to general applications as Show Me Sauce from Missouri. So if you want to dig into scratch barbecue sauces, you'll find it rewarding, but if you want to take the easy way out and still eat extremely well, Show Me Sauce is always there for you.

Now, for the brisket. We ended up quite liking this recipe - it calls for an overnight marinade and involves a long cook, but other than that it's fairly straightforward and it produced a really delicious barbecue beef sandwich that served a small crowd (and would scale up easily with the addition of more meat.) It's a homey taste of summer hospitality and would absolutely be a hit at just about any cabin or picnic gathering.

I made two adjustments to this recipe. The first was to delete a called-for 2 tsp of liquid smoke; I loathe the taste of that stuff for being too insistent and acrid, and any good classic barbecue sauce will cover similar flavor bases (sometimes with liquid smoke, in fact) and make additional liquid smoke redundant or overkill.

The second was to move it from a gas grill to the oven, since the meat cooks in the gas grill in a covered roasting pan at 300 degrees for 3-4 hours. Can this work in a gas grill? Yes. But is an oven probably an easier and more economical way to maintain a 300-degree baking environment for most of an afternoon? I would argue: also yes. You're not going to lose any smoke or carbon since the meat isn't coming into contact with the grill anyway.

DOLORES'S BARBECUE BRISKET

1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tsp celery seed
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
1 (4 pound) beef brisket, trimmed of visible fat

In a small bowl, mix the brown sugar, celery seed, paprika, black pepper, salt, garlic powder, and crushed red pepper. Rub the mixture all over the brisket and place the meat in a zip-top back in the refrigerator overnight.

One hour before cooking, take the brisket out of the refrigerator. Heat your oven or grill to 300 degrees, place the brisket in a roasting pan covered with aluminum foil, and bake for 45 minutes per pound of brisket, approximately 3 1/2 hours for a 4-pound roast.

Remove from grill and allow to cool. An hour before serving, remove the juices from the pan and reserve. Slice the brisket against the grain into thin, diagonal slices and arrange in a roasting pan. In a small bowl, mix up to 1 cup pan juices with 1 1/2 cups barbecue sauce and pour over the sliced brisket.

Heat oven or grill to 325 degrees, and cook the brisket slices (in a roasting pan, covered with foil) for 45 minutes until meat is fork-tender. Serve with rolls or bread and remaining sauce on the side.

A THROWBACK SALAD WITH STAYING POWER

Most salads do a dance between being too ephemeral (a green misty cloud of leaves, oil, and vinegar) and too substantial (more meat and cheese than vegetable matter, plus a thick, syrupy dressing). The best salads, like this one, walk the line. Feta, beets, and nuts ground this salad and give it substance, blueberries, lemon juice, balsamic, and spring mix lettuce make it light and refreshing.

My only change was to sub out a cup of roasted walnut pieces for a cup of chopped honey-roasted pecans.

And as the author notes: If you can use fresh-picked blueberries, it elevates the whole salad considerably.

ROASTED BEET SALAD WITH BLUEBERRIES AND BALSAMIC DRESSING

Dressing

1/2 cup blueberries, mashed
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 Tbsp honey or maple syrup
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
pinch each of kosher salt and black pepper

Salad

2 large or 3 medium beets, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp kosher salt
6 cups spring mix lettuce or spinach
1 cup blueberries
1 cup crumbled feta
1 cup roasted and/or honey-roasted pecans or walnuts

Shake dressing ingredients in mason jar or puree in blender. 

Preheat oven to 400 F. Toss beets with olive oil and salt, and roast for about 30 minutes on a sheet pan until they’re tender. Set aside to cool. Assemble salad: greens first, then blueberries and beets, then sprinkle feta and nuts, and drizzle with dressing.

THE VERDICT ON TRUE NORTH CABIN COOKBOOK
(***BUY IT*** / BORROW IT / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)

One of the best things a cookbook can offer is a real sense of voice, which means that only its author could have written it, because the story is as much about their world and their times as it is about the collected recipes. Hansen does a terrific job of infusing True North Cabin Cookbook with her own distinctive voice and the recipes with the specific flavors of north woods entertaining; if you're a cabin person, friends with a cabin person, or aspiring to be a cabin person, it's absolutely a solid purchase.