Food, like art, involves process and exploration—and both often come with stories. There’s nothing better to stretch your creative culinary muscles than trying recipes from your favorite restaurant or chef (or great grandma!).
Not every dish will interest all those around the table (saying this as a mom of a seven-year-old), but it’ll surely delight a few. We’ve put together a little list of cookbooks with Midwest roots to guide your food journey and excite your taste buds!
The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
Sean Sherman, famously known as “The Sioux Chef,” owns and operates the award-winning Owamni—a Native American restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In his namesake cookbook, “Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy,” according to the publisher Birchbark Books. From braised bison and wild rice cakes, to three sisters salad and roasted corn sorbet, he “dispels outdated notions of Native American fare.”
Home Is Where The Eggs Are
Molly Yeh’s journey from the east coast to a sugar beet farm in Northern Minnesota has been captured in her cookbooks and on her popular Food Network show, Girl Meets Farm. Yeh wrote this cookbook after having her first child. “They’re cozy recipes to make on busy days or on weekends that you can prep and have throughout the week,” she shares on her website. Some of her favorites? “Turkey spinach meatballs, hot dog chopped salad, and the family sugar cookie.”
Wisconsin Supper Club Cookbook
Mary Bergin shares more than 60 recipes from 40 landmark eateries in Wisconsin. Supper clubs are a Midwestern tradition from Michigan to the Dakotas—with over 250 in Wisconsin alone. You’ll find everything from arugula and beet salad with goat cheese to beer battered fish in the Supper Club cookbook. “… it’s always been rare for a supper club to fit a cookie-cutter definition,” writes Bergin in her introduction to the book. “What we have today is a mix of culinary ingenuity, fluid business practices, and pride in upholding traditions, heritage, and community connections.”
Vegetarian Heartland
Indiana-based food photographer Shelly Westerhausen Worcel presents “heartland dishes we all love made vegetarian” in this plant-based cookbook. Three years in the making, she wrote, developed recipes, and photographed the process for this 272-page book with over 100 recipes. “You’ll find anything from quick and portable road trip fare to campfire cooking meals to in-depth snowed in recipes,” she shared in her food blog.
Midwest Pie
“This recipe collection aims to introduce you to several pies unique to the Midwest region and to reintroduce you to classic favorites with a unique twist or shortcut,” writes Meredith Pangrace, the editor of this dessert cookbook. It’s a “historical tour of Midwestern pies” that include the “navy bean pie,” the “Illinois Pumpkin Pie” (its official state pie), the Indiana sugar cream pie (a “desperation” pie—one you could make when money was tight), and the chokecherry pie. “… don’t be afraid to make pie. The generations before us made them without fancy tool, ice cold kitchens, or pages of detailed instructions,” she writes.