Get Thee to the Festival!

The Wisconsin Book Festival is one of those community events you can take pride in—even if you had absolutely nothing to do with its launch or its success. You read. You buy books. You read some more. Of course you’ve contributed to the cultural milieu that could sustain such an enlightened gathering of authors and book worshippers! I, for one, can’t say the same for the Ironman. Swim, bike and run all you want. Make Madison look like the fittest city in the country—at least for one day—and I’ll be proud as punch. But I can’t lay any sort of claim to that remarkable survival of the fittest.

But if you are a book lover then this is your weekend to flex your literary muscles. If you like books and cooks, you might want to come on down to the Dardanelles on Sunday evening, where two of my favorite writers and foodies will be sharing stories and advice on how to ready a recipe for publication. Since I flirt with my microwave far more than my stove, it’s always amused me that the lovely Joan Peterson (see bio on book fest website), author of the terrific Eat Smart series of culinary travel books, has asked me to keynote the event for the last few years. I’m so grateful, though, because I get the chance to listen to and mingle with smart, fascinating people who experience both the joy and the art of eating in their lives.

My friends Terese Allen and Ronnie Hess are headlining the evening, followed by food sampling and conversation with the who’s who in local food writing and publishing. So come on out and join us at six for the talk and 7:15 for the food.

Hey, Ironman: it’s the ideal spot to load up on carbs!

For a primer on the event, I chatted with Terese Allen, who is busy preparing recipes for Sunday’s event, called The Book and the Cook.

What kind of stimulating conversation and delicious flavors we expect at the Book and the Cook? When people think about translating recipes there’s two ways to look at it: the writing of the recipes for publication and the process you go through. We start with the testing process … and how you might have to convert metric measurements from foreign languages or reduce recipes from a large size to a small size. Or it could be a professional chef’s language translated into everyday cooking language, or a language spoken in history with different terms or ingredients.

Ronnie is going to take a couple recipes and demo them. I’m going to take a recipe from each of four categories—professional, historical, café cook, and a home cook—and illustrate the before-and-after and why things need to be worded differently to be recreated in today’s home kitchen.

How is your latest book project coming along? We’re in the galley stage … It’s called The Flavor of Wisconsin, and it’s a revised and expanded second edition of Harva Hachten’s The Flavor of Wisconsin, which came out in 1981. It’s been a generation and everything’s changed…. The Wisconsin Historical Society Press asked me to fill in the historical dots and talk about what’s happened in Wisconsin culinary history. We’ll have 450 recipes with eight essays that take you through Wisconsin’s food and cooking history, both by chronology and by topic. Most of the recipes were in the first edition. This book was researched throughout the 1970s and during that time Harva and her staff were collecting recipes from Wisconsin kitchens. It’s just this really wonderful collection … they narrowed it down from 900 recipes. My job was to round out what possibly could’ve been missing from that and then to include recipes from New American cuisine and Wisconsin’s role in it, which is much bigger than people realize. I also added two chapters that expand greatly on her chapter on food and business.

*Ed’s Note: Harva Hachten (who wrote articles and columns for Madison Magazine) died suddenly in April 2006. “I wish she could’ve seen it but I’m very happy she knew before she died we were in this process,” says Terese.

Cookbooks and culinary writing seems to thrive here. Why? It absolutely does. Madison being the food town that it is, and also Wisconsin in general being such a literary place with lots of writers—a lot highly concentrated in Madison. I don’t think people understand what an epicenter we are, with the local food movement, the farmers’ market, the university, the seasonal cooking restaurants. We’re drawing from so many different interests around here. So the food and cooking comes together. It’s just a wonderful place to be if you’re interested in both… I’m sitting pretty!

When I started writing about regional food back when I was a chef at Ovens of Brittany in the eighties, I didn’t feel quite legitimate. It’s wonderful to look back now and see what’s happened. And it’s become a national phenomenon.

This Just In: I just got a press release reminding me that “October is pizza month! Although it's almost half way over, pizza is a timeless culinary treat you can savor any day of the week. To celebrate, the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board has put together an assortment of delicious recipes, from a traditional Margherite pizza to an innovative Bananas Foster pizza.”

And you thought ham and pineapple was a little weird...

P.S. Joan Peterson, author of the Eat Smart series of culinary travel guides, will also be appearing at the Madison Food & Wine Show this weekend!