Minnesotans love their cabins. Unquestionably. And there is that Minnesota cabin lifestyle too: flannel shirts, hot coffee in the morning, sunsets, and the most important part, the food!
Stephanie Hansen is taking on that cabin food culture in a new book, True North Cabin Cookbook. The book tells the stories of how recipes shared with family and friends came to be at their family cabin near Ely, MN.
Hansen spent some time with DeRusha Eats with Jason DeRusha this week, and talked about where the cookbook came from and why she wanted to share these stories.
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Jason DeRusha: Why don't you tell your story first? How did you get into food?
Stephanie Hansen: Media was the start. And then I started a business and I was actually the small business woman of the year once, which was very exciting. So I went from being an entrepreneur to, I got a radio show about food simply because I was fired from a daytime show. They fired my partner and they didn't know what to do with me. And they were like, ‘so what do you want to do?’ I think a food show would be really fun. So they're like, okay. And I think they were just so relieved that I was exiting gracefully.
But from there, you know, and it's taken me a long time to get to this place, mostly internally, where I'm just an eater. I'm not an expert. I'm not a professional chef, necessarily. And it's a weird space because in the beginning we lauded the chef culture, and you really like had to be something to have an opinion.
DeRusha: People always ask anyone who writes about food, are you a cook? And I always say do you ask like the Vikings reporter if he was a quarterback? It's just a weird question. But they do expect food journalists to have been in that space.
Hansen: And I think it is important to have some context and some chops, but you know, if anything during COVID, no one was going out to restaurants. No one was following along with these fancy chefs because they weren't cooking. What we were doing was trying to figure out what we're going to do with the rice and the beans in our pantry.
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DeRusha: Is that what led you to putting some of these thoughts down for a cookbook?
Hansen: Yeah, it did because all of a sudden all the projects I was working on dried up and I was bored. And my husband had just published a book, he's a fiction writer, and he said, “Well, you should write a cookbook.” And I'd always thought about putting together the stories and the recipes of this very unique place on Burntside Lake in Ely, Minnesota. That's my second home. And it just felt like the time to do it. So I pitched it. I'm also, I'm kind of lazy unless I like have a deadline or a reason I don't do it. I pitched the idea to the Minnesota Historical Press and they said yes. And then I was like, oh no I have do it!
DeRusha: The cookbook is called True North Cabin Cookbook. What was your goal when you were figuring out what types of recipes, and what kind of things you wanted in this book?
Hansen: My goal was to not make hotdish, necessarily. To not have everything in a cast iron skillet and to make it really representative of truly the types of food that we eat at the cabin when entertaining. I'm all about hot dogs and hamburgers. But that's not really how I eat when I'm at my cabin because it's my time to like relax and enjoy cooking. And so I take more time. The recipes are not hard. A lot of them, I cook a lot with my 91-year old mother-in-law and I cook a lot with my daughter who's now 24. So there're things that when people come to the cabin, they say, “Are you going to make Curt’s ribs, or are you going to make Janice's potato salad? We have these things that every year people come and they want. And I wanted to create a collection of sorts for my daughter and my nieces and nephews to hand it down to say, “Here's all the things you've loved from the time you've spent with me.”
DeRusha: What was that like the first time somebody came back and requested something that you had made before?
Hansen: It was pretty exciting. I never thought I was a great cook and my mom has been dead for 15 years, so we didn't spend a lot of time cooking together. But my mother-in-law is a great cook and has taught me a lot about cooking. And even just like, she could make a gourmet meal from literally a can of beans and a can of tuna and a handful of overdue lettuce. She was just really great at putting food together. And the cabin is on an island. So the grocery store isn't just handy. You kind of have to be resourceful. And that was really good inspiration for me to just create more recipes of my own and really kind of hone what my style is. Again, I am not a fussy cook, but I want things to taste great. I like cooking for a large group, so I'm always making tons of food.
DeRusha: You bring up the way people really eat at the cabin. And I think that's so interesting because there's something about cabin culture. I moved here from Chicago and in Chicago we had cottages. My family had a cottage, but our cottage was very unique. We moved to a camp of cottages, and we moved there over the summer.
Hansen: That sounds like Dirty Dancing.
DeRusha: It very much was. Friday night you'd go down to the Rathskeller, and you'd have like Friday fish fry, and your parents would be buying 25 cent Miller Light or Old Style. And then the kids would all go back to the cottage and go to bed and the adults would dance and they'd have bands and stuff down there.
Hansen: Just you telling that story is exactly how I feel about my place and I think how people feel that come. Burntside Lake is historic. Burntside Lodge has been there since the early 1900s. It was a lake that was logged by the lumber barons.
DeRusha: It's the sharing of stories. The food is always a part of it, but often it's your night to cook on Friday, and then your brother cooks on Saturday and there's always a group. And so it does lend itself to a different style of recipe. And you wouldn't want a local chef, for example, to probably write this book? It’s just different.
Hansen: That's all I wanted. The stories too. So I'm a good storyteller. I'm a personality. I do a lot of weird, fun stuff. So I wanted that to kind of come through too, so that when you read my recipe for Janice's potato salad as an example, you learned a little bit about who Janice was and why it's unique.
DeRusha: What makes Janice's potato salad unique?
Hansen: There are two potato salad recipes in the book. Janice's is limey. And it's based less in egg and less in mustard, and it's fresher and more herb forward. Whereas my mom's potato salad, which is also good, you soak it overnight in Thousand Island dressing. And then you cut everything into these very precise cubes. So my mom's looks like a deli salad that you buy at the counter when it's all done. But Janice is way more rustic and everyone, even people who don't like potato salad, like Janice’s. It's pretty famous for Janice. Janice is 96.
The book is True North Cabin Cookbook from Minnesota Historical Society Press.
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