Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Give a Girl a Knife
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.amythielen.com/
CITY: Park Rapids
STATE: MN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/profiles/talent/amy-thielen/bio
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2013010396
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2013010396
HEADING: Thielen, Amy
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PERSONAL
Married Aaron Spangler (an artist); children: son.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Macalester College, 1997.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Chef, TV cook, and writer. Food Network, host of Heartland Table, c. 2013-14; Saveur, contributing editor.
AWARDS:James Beard Foundation Award for journalism, 2011; James Beard Book Award for American Cooking, 2014, for The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including People, Food Network magazine, Country Living, Reuters, Boston Globe, Eater National, Esquire, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
SIDELIGHTS
Amy Thielen is a chef, TV cook, and writer who has worked as a contributing editor for Saveur magazine and as host of the Food Network show Heartland Table. She received a prestigious James Beard Foundation Award for journalism, as well as a James Beard Book Award for her cookbook, The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes. Thielen grew up in rural Minnesota, and later lived on a remote homestead with her husband. The pair then moved to New York City, where Thielen worked some of the world’s most famous chefs, including David Bouley and Daniel Boulud. In her memoir, Give a Girl a Knife, Thielen chronicles her journey from Minnesota to New York, as well as her eventual return to her home state. Thielen explains that, after learning all she could in New York, she wanted to return to her roots and focus on her native cuisine. To this end, Thielen explores her Minnesotan food roots, commenting on the dishes and ingredients that have shaped her approach to cooking. The author additionally reflects on her childhood food memories, and she credits her mother as the person who ‘gave a girl a knife.’
Thielen discussed her memoir in a Journal Sentinel Online interview with Kristine M. Kierzek, noting “I think it has three themes that will be universal, and one of those is how to find your motivation. It took me a little while, but I really did find it in cooking. Cooking kind of saved me. . . . I didn’t know how to apply myself or have much self-discipline. I’d accomplished some things, but it wasn’t until I found cooking that I had discipline. The other thread through the book is about Aaron and I and how we negotiated how to be creative types—he’s an artist, I’m a craftsperson—how to live two creative lives and where to do it.” The author added: “The book is also about belief and pursuing your dreams. It takes risk.”
Margaret Quamme praised Give a Girl a Knife in Booklist, and she found that “Thielen is as supple and precise a writer as she is a cook.” Leah Mirakhor, writing in the Los Angeles Times Online, was also impressed, and she announced that “Thielen’s ode to living at the crossroads of culinary high and low offers thoughtful insights into the life of the chef, highlighting that when, ‘you give a girl a knife,’ as her mom did when Amy was young, you pass on a legacy: that she will learn how to use it, and someday ‘consider that knife an extension of her hand, as wedded to her finger as a nail.'” As Mary Ann Grossmann put it in the online Twin Cities Pioneer Press, “If you don’t know what ‘food memoir’ means, you’ll understand when you finish reading Give a Girl a Knife,” which is a “compelling and lyrical account.” Another positive assessment was proffered by Kathryn O’Shea-Evans in the online Los Angeles Review of Books and she found that “when she [Thielen] explains about moving to New York with Spangler to pursue cooking and art, respectively, you can’t help but root for them. She’s got as much mettle as her homesteading ancestors did moving to Minnesota in the first place, talking her way into an internship by strolling into jackets-required restaurant Bouley and asking to speak with the chef.” The critic went on to note “I love that Thielen brings respect to Midwestern regional dishes, largely ignored on the coasts. . . . And the way Thielen dissects their history? It’s the story of immigration in Minnesota itself.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Thielen, Amy, Give a Girl a Knife, Clarkson Potter (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2017, Margaret Quamme, review of Give a Girl a Knife.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Give a Girl a Knife.
ONLINE
Amy Thielen Website, http://www.amythielen.com (February 23, 2018).
City Pages Online, http://www.citypages.com/ (April 7, 2017), review of Give a Girl a Knife.
Journal Sentinel Online, https://www.jsonline.com/ (February 24, 2018), Kristine M. Kierzek, author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (May 20, 2017), Kathryn O’Shea-Evans, review of Give a Girl a Knife.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (June 23, 2017), Leah Mirakhor, review of Give a Girl a Knife.
Twin Cities Pioneer Press, https://www.twincities.com (June 4, 2017), Mary Ann Grossmann, review of Give a Girl a Knife.
Amy Thielen
150613_Saveur_Amy1071
photo, William Hereford
Amy Thielen is a chef, a TV cook, and a two-time James Beard Award-winning writer. She’s the author of The New Midwestern Table (a cookbook) and Give a Girl a Knife (a memoir).
She grew up in Park Rapids, Minnesota, near the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and graduated from Macalester College. For three years she and her husband, visual artist Aaron Spangler, lived in a rustic off-the-grid cabin he built in the Two Inlets State Forest outside of Park Rapids, where she picked up her cooking and gardening afflictions. In 1999, they moved to New York City where she worked for celebrated chefs David Bouley, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Shea Gallante. In 2008, she left the hot line and she and Aaron and their son moved back home to northern Minnesota.
She was the host of the James Beard-nominated Heartland Table on Food Network, an instructional cooking show co-produced by Lidia Bastianich’s Tavola Productions and Random House Studios and filmed in her rural kitchen in northern Minnesota. Her first cookbook, New Midwestern Table, was published by Clarkson Potter in 2013 and won the James Beard Book Award for American Cooking. Her second book, Give a Girl a Knife, was published May, 2017, and was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Reader, and The Toronto Star, among others. She writes about food for newspapers and magazines, including Saveur, where she is a contributing editor, and has appeared in many others, including People, Food Network Magazine, Country Living, Reuters, The Boston Globe, Eater National, Esquire, Oprah Magazine, Parade Magazine, and LA Magazine—in addition to radio and television appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered, The Splendid Table, and various news programs.
Amy lives with her husband, Aaron, their son, his dog, a bunch of chickens, and a huge vegetable garden, in rural Park Rapids, Minnesota, in the house Aaron built years before–now fully hooked up to the 21st Century grid. A recovering professional chef, she now thinks of herself as a home cooking civilian and develops recipes to fit her own small-town limits, sticking with ingredients she can find at the local grocery store, in her garden, and in the woods. Her food is rustic but extravagant, rich with honest fats and vegetables, original, and thrifty; she is not afraid of butter or burnt ends.
When not traveling, speaking, or teaching, she can usually be found in her rural kitchen, standing in the space between the counter and the stove. On the web, she can be found at amythielen.com and on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Amy Thielen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amy Thielen is a chef, food writer, and television personality who focuses on Midwestern cooking and food culture. She is author of the James Beard award-winning cookbook The New Midwestern Table (Clarkson Potter, 2013) ISBN 978-0307954879 and Give a Girl a Knife (Clarkson Potter, 2017) ISBN 978-0307954909. She was also host of Heartland Table, which debuted September 2013 on Food Network; season two premiered March, 2014.[1]
Contents
1 Background and personal life
2 Television show and book
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
Background and personal life
Thielen grew up in rural northern Minnesota and graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN in 1997 with a degree in English. In 1999, she moved to New York City to attend cooking school and cooked professionally for seven years in the kitchens of chefs David Bouley (Danube, Bouley), Jean-Georges Vongerichten (66), Daniel Boulud (DB Bistro Moderne), and Shea Gallante (Cru).[2] In 2008, she and her husband and young son moved from Brooklyn to the countryside near their hometown. Thielen has written for publications such as Men’s Journal and Saveur. Her articles in the Minneapolis Star Tribune won her a James Beard Foundation Award for journalism in 2011. Thielen's recipes have been featured in Food & Wine Magazine, Parade Magazine, People Magazine and on National Public Radio. In spring of 2014 her cookbook won the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Award in American Cooking.[3] Her television show was also nominated for a James Beard Foundation Broadcast and New Media Award in Television Program. [4] Thielen is married to visual artist Aaron Spangler. Her aunt, uncle and cousins own and operate Thielen Meats of Pierz.[5] [6]
Television show and book
According to a Random House press release, "The simultaneous launch of Thielen’s television show, HEARTLAND TABLE and the publication of her first cookbook, THE NEW MIDWESTERN TABLE, marks the first time an author’s cookbook and television show have both been produced internally by Random House."[7] Heartland Table is produced by Random House Studio and Lidia Bastianich’s Tavola Productions. The New Midwestern Table is published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.[8]
See also
Biography portal
icon Food portal
List of chefs
References
"Food Network: Amy Thielen Bio". Retrieved 28 April 2014.
Svitak Dean, Lee (12 September 2013). "Midwest Cooking Gets the Spotlight in New Food Network Series". Minneapolis Star Tribune. Retrieved 28 April 2014.
"2014 JBF Awards Winners" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 May 2014. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
JBF Editors. "The Complete 2014 JBF Award Nominees". James Beard Foundation. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
Weiss, Emily (12 March 2014). "Amy Thielen Brings Rustic Fare to Food Network". Minneapolis City Pages. Archived from the original on 28 April 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
Clark, Melissa (9 October 2002). "Temptation; Bacon with Meat to It". New York Times. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
"Random House Studio, Tavola Productions, Clarkson Potter & Food Network Announce Cookbook & TV Show with Food Writer Amy Thielen for Fall 2013" (PDF). Random House. Retrieved 28 April 2014.
Trachtenberg, Jeffrey (18 August 2013). "Publisher Makes TV Play". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 28 April 2014.
External links
Official website
Food Network biography
Winter's Table with Amy Thielen
Reflecting on a winter's day of cooking in far-north Minnesota, "Heartland Table" star Amy Thielen shares dishes that show why the Midwest will always be home.
Writer: Amy Thielen; Producer: Hannah Agran; Photographer: Blaine Moats
Amy in her sunny kitchen.
Amy in her sunny kitchen.
Sometime around the first of the year, winter comes to stay in northern Minnesota. It stops prancing around the pillow and finally fluffs its duff down on top of us, like a dog taking its sweet time to settle in for the night. The cold casts the world outside in glitter and freezes the spears of wild rice stiff out on the creek behind my house. It immobilizes everything but the compost heap, which becomes a lifeline between my kitchen and the outside world. (The heap’s shrill guardians, the red squirrels, patrol from above as the animal kingdom feasts on my prime leftovers.)
This stillness is winter’s gift to the cook, and one of the reasons I moved back home from New York City: In our house out in the Two Inlets State Forest, the snowdrifts may shape-shift a bit, but few big changes register outside. The kitchen, and the people in it, marks the center of the world, and I find myself with time to plumb the depths of comfort cooking. Every day brings the question: What do I want to make?
At this moment, the bus has left, taking our son, Hank, to school; and my husband, Aaron, has walked across the yard to work in his sculpture studio. The first fire of the morning is dying down in the wood stove in the center of the room, the logs ticking and sinking into their bed of coals. The pop of an exploding ember is the signal I seem to be waiting for. I flip the oven dial to start the oven, not so much caring at which temperature it lands. That roulette swing of the oven knob is a habit left over from many years cooking professionally in Minneapolis and New York; get the thing hot, worry about exact temperature later.
Aaron harvests wood for the stove (and, sometimes, for his artwork) on the 150-acre property
Aaron harvests wood for the stove (and, sometimes, for his artwork) on the 150-acre property
My childhood memories of eating warm baked goods on arctic mornings have stuck with me for years, so I’m baking something to insulate us from the wind, when we do venture out. For this, any brown crust will do. The important thing is to bake it to a strong, deep amber color, the shade of brown that tells me that the butter and flour have mated and that the sweetest parts of both have found each other and caramelized.
For today’s baking project, I settle on morning buns. They’re a new crush for me, a recipe I picked up on a visit to Madison, Wisconsin. I knead the yellow dough until the bonds of gluten begin to engage and hold onto each other, padding the dough with a few extra gobs of butter to ensure a flaky, moist heart. When the soft dough no longer sticks to my hands, I cover it with a towel and set it to rise in the warmest place in the house—the foot of the wood stove.
Morning buns are as rich as a good French brioche, with crusty edges from baking in a muffin cup and a crunchy coating of cinnamon-sugar. Sort of a mash-up of a caramel roll and a sugar-coated doughnut, the morning bun has ruined my previous love for regular old glossy caramel rolls, which I now feel compelled to roll in sparkly sugar, too. When the buns come out, Aaron comes in, hanging his coat for a coffee break.
Pillowy Morning Buns, inspired by the original Brittany Buns from Madison, Wisconsin, need no caramel or pecans. They’re perfect in their buttery, sugar-crusted simplicity. For recipe, see link at end of story.
Pillowy Morning Buns, inspired by the original Brittany Buns from Madison, Wisconsin, need no caramel or pecans. They’re perfect in their buttery, sugar-crusted simplicity. For recipe, see link at end of story.
I decide to take advantage of the already-humming oven and slide in a hotdish for dinner later. We Minnesotans may say a few things wrong (soda instead of pop, OK, fine), but hotdish we get right. Call it a stodgy “casserole” somewhere else. In the upper Midwest, we embrace the heat. A good hotdish is lava-like, more molten than solid, with a brazen, bubbling core that warms you through and through.
Dinner with a cookbook author looks comfortingly like mealtime in any family’s home; Hank takes his noodles plain before racing back to his room to play.
Dinner with a cookbook author looks comfortingly like mealtime in any family’s home; Hank takes his noodles plain before racing back to his room to play.
No matter which hotdish you make (as with pop music, familiarity means a lot), everyone knows that the love is textural. In my favorite chicken and wild rice hotdish, the meat is juicy, its sauce bound up with taupe pearls of wood-parched wild rice—the real kind, smoky and light, harvested from local lakes. As for the topping, after some misguided fancy pants experimentation, I landed right back in the place my mother stood 30 years ago: the cracker aisle in the grocery store in Park Rapids. Fight any all-natural urges you might have; Ritz, in their familiar red box, make a peerless crust that rides like a crest on every bite and never fails to bring me home, no matter how far I’ve ranged.
See Amy's recipes.
Tags: Food, January February 2015 Midwest Living
At Dinner With ‘Heartland Table's' Amy Thielen
Amy-Thielan_Portrait_G
When Amy Thielen hosted a cooking class in the kitchen of her hand-built, hotel room–sized home in the thick Minnesota Northwoods, she didn’t think to mention its lack of electricity and running water to her students. They figured it out for themselves, after testing the shocks on their fancy cars on an undulant half-mile of dirt driveway, only to find Thielen, with oil lamps and a ‘40s vintage propane stove, ready to demo a fabulous French menu plan.
“I’m making duck confit and tarte tatin, throwing dirty dishes behind curtains under the counter because I couldn’t wash them as I went. I didn’t think a thing of it,” she says, laughing. “Some of those women still talk to me about it. They loved it.”
More than a decade later, Thielen filmed the first episodes of Heartland Table, the second season of which premiered on the Food Network earlier this year, in that very kitchen.
Of course, a lot happened in between. Not long after those cooking classes, the year’s first freeze hit, marking the end of Thielen’s third pioneer-style growing season Up North with her then-boyfriend, fellow Park Rapids native Aaron Spangler, an artist who built the place himself with hand tools, lumber from the Two Inlets Mill down the road, and various materials scavenged from neighbors’ barns. That winter, the two traded their rustic, wooded home and its plentiful gardens for a studio apartment in Brooklyn half its size.
Thielen went to culinary school, and then worked 80-hour weeks cooking at some of the top fine-dining restaurants in Manhattan. Spangler worked on his art. From afar, they hired a neighbor to build a studio and an addition, including plumbing and electricity. On return trips to Minnesota, they got married and had a baby they named Hank.
They moved back in 2008 to snuggle into Northwoods life with their infant son, near family and lifelong friends, having established themselves well enough to bring their jobs with them. Spangler shows his large-scale sculptures in New York and internationally. Thielen wrote The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes (Clarkson Potter, 2013), for which she earned her second James Beard Award. (Her first was for a series of Minnesota-centric food articles that ran in the Star Tribune.) The TV show premiered the same month the book came out. She’s under contract for a second book, a food narrative, due out next year.
The family’s single-level home is now triple the size it once was, though at around 1,500 square feet, it’s still far from sprawling. The addition netted them a living room and two modest bedrooms, plus two serious luxuries after years of backwoods and New York City living: a large bathroom with claw-foot tub and a little laundry room.
Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens. Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.Grilled mushroom salad features smoky shiitakes, pan-fried almonds, and baby garden greens.
The connected, original structure is essentially one big, open space. At one end is the dining room, with rugged 14-foot-tall log walls lined in paintings and packed bookshelves, and capped by a tin ceiling (actually the backside of some trailer-home siding). The sliver of a loft that once served as the bedroom, now crammed with cookbooks, creates a beamed ceiling for the kitchen underneath it.
The kitchen has come a long way from the basic little space that held that French cooking class years ago. Beyond electricity and indoor plumbing, it gained a pantry, a five-burner gas Fratelli Onofri stove that’s a dream for canning, and a coat of white paint covering the black circles on the ceiling (evidence of years of oil-lamp lighting). Practicality, however, far outweighs any fanciness. Open upper shelving overflows with mismatched mugs, ingredient-filled Mason jars and thrift-store rosemaled canisters, and that same curtained lower shelving works great for stashing items while filming the show. There’s a dishwasher, yes, but one cozy enough with the butcher-block island that it comes within inches of it when open. Thielen loves it that way.
“It’s not huge, but it’s very convenient. You don’t have to move to get to things,” she says. “To be honest, I don’t need much. I’m more concerned about the feeling of having the oven close to the island than if a drawer closes like a Rolls-Royce.”
The compact workhorse of a space acts as a cooking show set, a processing place for a massive garden’s bounty, and a landing spot for guests—especially during harvest time, which tends to turn into one serial dinner party. Sara Woster, her husband, and their two children, are longtime friends, summer neighbors, and, therefore, frequent guests. “When the invitations come several nights in a row, finally one of the emails will be titled, ‘The Tyranny of Dinner.’
She’ll say, ‘I’m so sorry, but do you want to come over again? I’m cooking up all of my Swiss chard,’” Woster says. “We’re so lucky. Every invite is like a gift.”
Thielen likes to get the “heavy lifting” done beforehand—making and setting out the appetizer, marinating the meat, prepping whatever veggie’s ready to be picked that day—but prefers to save the cooking for after guests have arrived. The open yet intimate space makes the setup effortlessly social. Friends sit at the island as she works, sipping wine, trying the latest dip she’s concocted, and visiting.
When the food is ready, they call the kids off the hammock outside or away from Minecraft to eat in the pine-filtered air off sundry well-loved plates, with an oil lamp at hand for when the sun disappears down into the thick trees. There might be dessert, depending on how heavy the meal is or how many sweet-toothed kids are present. Odds are good that the night will end in Adirondacks around the fire pit.
“I generally keep entertaining easy and approachable,” Thielen says. “I want it to feel rustic, immediate, and intimate. Kind of like my place.”
Rustic & Relaxing
To set a casual-yet-special mood for meals with friends, borrow Amy Thielen’s straightforward, easygoing dinner-party tips.
Mind the Basics
A full tablecloth, good lighting, and music are Thielen’s top three atmospheric musts. (Enter husband Aaron, who lights the oil lamps and keeps the music rolling all night long.)
Set the Tone
Even though, or perhaps because Thielen enjoys cooking while guests mingle about the kitchen, she does like to have the table set to create a relaxed, dinner party–ready mood right upon arrival.
Incorporate the Grill
“We really love to cook something outside over the wood fire, on our grill, because the aroma of the wood smoke and the sight of the flames really gets everyone’s hunger up,” she says. “There’s nothing more appetizing, really.”
By Berit Thorkelson
Photos by TJ Turner
Styling by Alison Hoekstra
Categories
Living • Outdoor Living
Tags
Amy Thielen • Heartland Table
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Returning home to Minnesota, Amy Thielen found her place in the food world
Kristine M. Kierzek, Special to the Journal Sentinel Published 11:00 a.m. CT May 23, 2017
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When Amy Thielen left her small northern Minnesota hometown and made her way to New York, cooking professionally was her dream.
And after working in kitchens with David Bouley, Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, she could have stayed in the world of haute cuisine. Instead, she found her way back to Minnesota and to the house in the woods that her husband had built with his own hands.
Thielen chronicles her journey, showing how she found balance and came to embrace her Midwestern food roots, in her memoir, “Give a Girl a Knife” (Clarkson Potter, $26).
Beginning with her first moments in a professional kitchen, Thielen faced the realities of finding her place within haute cuisine and New York City while never quite leaving Minnesota behind. Eventually, she comes to believe that place of origin and one’s food roots just may be the most powerful tool in any chef’s kitchen.
Thielen, who hosted Food Network’s “Heartland Table,” won a James Beard Award for her first cookbook, “The New Midwestern Table.” She will be at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., at 7 p.m. June 8 in conversation with Wisconsin Foodie host Kyle Cherek. The tour continues with stops June 9 at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison, and June 10 at Read It and Eat in Chicago.
Q. How did you go from cooking at home to New York and back to Minnesota?
A. I grew up in Park Rapids in northern Minnesota, where I live again. My mom was a great home cook, and after college I began my obsession with cooking. Something had to happen. I had to turn pro, because I just cooked all the time.
We were living in a house my husband, Aaron, had built: no amenities, no running water or electricity, way out in the woods. The first year, we didn’t even have a phone. I cooked a lot of old-fashioned things and Midwestern stuff my grandmother had made. I was in a setting that was appropriate.
Kind of abruptly in 1999, Aaron and I decided to move. We moved to Brooklyn and I went to culinary school. He’s a sculptor and worked with a gallery, showing work. I got an internship at David Bouley’s Danube, and that’s where the book starts.
Amy Thielen wrote about her journey to New York and
Amy Thielen wrote about her journey to New York and back again in this memoir. (Photo: "Give a Girl a Knife")
I didn’t know where I was, which was good, because it keeps you from being afraid. I’m glad I started there. It was a hard kitchen, but beautiful food.
Q. You don’t include anything about your first cookbook or the television show you did with Lidia Bastianich.
A. The book is about homecoming and why. It didn’t make the most sense in the world for Aaron and I to return to Minnesota. It is not really where we work from, but it is home. I wanted to find out for myself, why did we return?
But I didn’t want to end with a TV show and all that stuff. It was about the homecoming, so I stopped the book in 2009, on the cusp of figuring out I wanted to dive into Midwestern food.
Q. What do you want people to take from the book?
A. I think it has three themes that will be universal, and one of those is how to find your motivation. It took me a little while, but I really did find it in cooking. Cooking kind of saved me.
The book begins with “Everything takes five minutes.” I didn’t know how to apply myself or have much self-discipline. I’d accomplished some things, but it wasn’t until I found cooking that I had discipline.
The other thread through the book is about Aaron and I and how we negotiated how to be creative types — he’s an artist, I’m a craftsperson — how to live two creative lives and where to do it. He had this unfailing belief I could make money as a cook and writer and he could make money as an artist from this place (in Minnesota).
The book is also about belief and pursuing your dreams. It takes risk.
Q. How do you approach failure and mistakes?
A. Cooking is really a challenge for me. I wasn’t good at first. It took me a long time to be proficient and it was hard. My failure moment, I guess, it is the end of the book where we come back here and there are times I’m a little undone about it. I hadn’t gotten to the point professionally where I want to be.
Then the recession hit, but I find so much hope and possibility in this place, the food here, and my family. I know it will all be OK. I’ll just keep cooking.
Q. Tell us about the book tour and must-stops.
A. I’m excited to do a road trip in the Midwest. In the book, there’s the ’73 Buick Centurion. My dream was to get that to use and road trip for the book promotion. That wasn’t the most practical idea, so we are renting a car and doing some Amtrak because our son is a real rail fan.
Q. Your first book (“The New Midwestern Table”) was all about recipes and their roots. Was there any consideration of including recipes in this book?
A. Originally it was going to have recipes, and then I didn’t want it to be a superfluous add-on. Some of the things that I talk so much about are just simple things, like popcorn.
Q. Is there one ingredient or recipe that represents your particular place?
A. I’m a huge advocate for natural wild rice, that’s something that is ridiculous. We’re in the epicenter of wild rice production in Park Rapids.
The black stuff is another sub-species, harvested totally differently. It takes 20 minutes longer to cook.
I see quinoa everywhere, and I hate quinoa. You can quote me. When you’re looking for something like protein, use natural wild rice. It shouldn’t be black. It should be taupe or light brown.
MY THIELEN
ICE Alumni Amy Thielen TV Host on Food Network, Cookbook Author
Culinary Arts 2000
Amy Thielen was living in a cabin in the woods of Minnesota, “growing a garden, canning and working part-time as a breakfast cook at a diner," when she realized she wanted to go to culinary school. For her, ICE was a good fit for a number of reasons: the cost was reasonable, the New York City setting was appealing and she just felt at ease in the school.
After being hired from her externship at David Bouley’s (now-closed) Austrian restaurant Danube—which received 3-stars from the New York Times—Amy went on to work on a number of projects, including recipe testing for Bouley’s cookbook, East of Paris, as well as cooking in some of New York City’s top kitchens, including db Bistro Modern, Jean Georges Vongerichten’s Chinese restaurant, 66, and Cru. When she became pregnant with her son, Amy began to pursue freelance work in test kitchens, developing recipes for magazines like Country Living.
Amy then took a step back from city life, relocating to her cabin in the woods of Minnesota with her husband and newborn son. It was then that she began to put pen to paper for the proposal of her cookbook, The New Midwestern Table (Clarkson Potter), which was published in 2013. It was widely celebrated, winning the 2014 James Beard award for best book on American cooking—not Amy’s first JBFA; she won a journalism award in 2011—and has since helped usher in a new era of interest in the culinary traditions of the Midwest.
The New Midwestern Table also caught the attention of another cookbook author: celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich. Lidia’s production company, Tavola, wanted to produce a television show loosely based on the book, and soon Food Network came knocking. Two seasons of Heartland Table—filmed at Amy’s Minnesota cabin—have aired so far.
Amy is currently working on a food memoir, and posts regular updates to her blog.
Print Marked Items
Give a Girl a Knife
Margaret Quamme
Booklist.
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p6+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Give a Girl a Knife.
By Amy Thielen.
May 2017. 304p. Clarkson Potter, $26 (9780307954909). 641.5092.
From her childhood in a rural town north of Minneapolis, through years homesteading with the artist who
would become her husband, on to New York's hottest restaurants, and then back to rural Minnesota with a
new baby, chef, Food Network host, and cookbook author (The New Midwestern Table, 2013) Thielen
sensuously traces a life laced together by food and its preparation. The author credits her outspoken mother
with handing her a knife at a young age, trusting her to cut apples for pan dowdy without cutting herself,
and setting her on the path that would lead her to work as one of the few women in the kitchens of chefs
David Bouley and Daniel Boulud. Thielen is as supple and precise a writer as she is a cook, whether she's
talking about fries "as crispy and light as balsa wood" or the "cool fleshiness" of Medjool dates. Her writing
is as earthy as a plate of her grandma's sauerkraut hot dish, and her life as intriguingly complex and varied
as a tasting menu.--Margaret Quamme
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Quamme, Margaret. "Give a Girl a Knife." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 6+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491487808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d0828544.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487808
Thielen, Amy: GIVE A GIRL A KNIFE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Thielen, Amy GIVE A GIRL A KNIFE Clarkson Potter (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-0-307-
95490-9
A Saveur contributing editor and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author reflects on her Midwestern
upbringing as inspiration for her culinary pursuits.The frenzied, behind-the-scenes activity within New
York's leading restaurant kitchens has been well-documented in numerous cooking memoirs of recent years.
Massive egos running rampant, razor-sharp precision and timing demanded at every moment, 80-hour work
weeks--Thielen (The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes, 2013), who hosts a Food Network
show, delivers plenty of these now-familiar revelations in her debut memoir. The author's journey begins in
the late 1990s, when, freshly arrived from Minnesota with her boyfriend (and future husband), Aaron, she
landed a job as a line chef at David Bouley's famed Danube. She later rose to more prominent positions
under such notables as Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud. For several years, the author and
Aaron shuttled back and forth between New York and their home in a deeply rural section of Minnesota,
where they live largely off the land. As Thielen contemplated how her future in the industry would unfold,
her objectives stretched beyond the predictable aspirations of opening a restaurant or even continuing in
New York. She reflects on the values of family and community bonds and recalls how her culinary instincts
were instilled by her mother's less pretentious skills as a home cook: "Her caramels, her bacon-fried rice,
and her Cesar salad (trademarked with a burning amount of garlic) made her a minor star in our
neighborhood circle, and in our lives." Thielen's narrative journey evolves somewhat passively, and she
offers few fresh insights into the food industry or the high-end restaurant scene, yet her musings on
ingredients and flavors are engaging: "The joy of lemon cannot stand alone; it needs sugar or olive oil,
something to bring it back to earth. Vinegar literally cries out for fat. Fat falls flat without salt or sugar.
Chile heat sings with brown sugar. And bitterness, well, that needs it all." A warm, mildly immersive
memoir documenting how Thielen found her calling by embracing her down-home influences.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Thielen, Amy: GIVE A GIRL A KNIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105139/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2dd458d0.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105139
Chef Amy Thielen explains her love for rural and urban, highflung and lowdown in 'Give A Girl A Knife'
By LEAH MIRAKHOR
JUN 23, 2017 | 12:45 PM
Chef Amy Thielen explains her love for rural and urban, highflung and lowdown in 'Give A Girl A Knife'
Chef Amy Thielen left New York's most prestigious kitchens and returned to rural Minnesota. (TJ Turner)
Just before leaving Bouley, one of New York City's famed haute cuisine kitchens that Amy Thielen cycled through during her seven-year journey as a line cook, Chef David Bouley remarked, "Amy's like a little bird, flitting from place to place." This, she confesses, is true: "The most manic, improvisational, restless chef in New York was calling me out as an itinerant flake, and he wasn't wrong. I had to admit: I was a bird. A snowbird. A returning swan. I was always on migration."
Thielen's memoir "Give a Girl a Knife" tracks her migration between her non-electric home outside of Two Inlets, Minn., where she and her artist husband, Aaron, grow tomato varietals in the summer, and her stints as a line cook in some of Manhattan's most acclaimed kitchens (Danube, db, 66, Cru).
Drawn to idiosyncratic crossroads — "between rural and urban, high-flung and low-down, garbage juice and black truffle juice" — Thielen thrives on the intensity, carnality and artistry required of cooks in fine dining. In these kitchens, the food is always "beaming in the eye of the storm" and cooks have to learn to trust their sensations enough to "hit the outer edge of perfection … enough to color right on top of the lines, not inside them."
Thielen's culinary education takes place cooking alongside the culinary world's maestros (David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Shea Gallante) where she pulls grueling 80-hour weeks amid high-octane testosterone and glamorous ingredients. Like most women in these kitchens, she's rarely allowed to be in charge in the meat station, relegated almost always to the vegetables.
The most important aspect of what Thielen learns as a chef is how to apply masterful techniques with something less tangible: seduction. Watching Bouley cook and plate in a dress shirt and cuff links, Thielen observes the way he concocts sauces that "seemed to have been devised by plumbing the depths of the color itself," Thielen writes. "The mango-curry-saffron mixed far-flung flavors, but tasted like a totally natural fusing of the elements that make yellow. Ocean herbal sauce — composed of three herb oils as well as fennel, celery, and garlic purees — mined the color green."
His sauces, she notices, "were so vivid they were almost libidinous — virile and romantic at the same time, like him." Bouley's artistry as a chef relies on a fundamentally elemental, instinctual confidence to cook food that sweeps you off your feet by making you nostalgic for something familiar. Bouley's mantra, "Don't give me what I ask for. Give me what I want," is one that reverberates throughout her narrative.
Amy Thielen
Amy Thielen (Matt Taylor-Gross)
Where the first half of the memoir delves into her professional influence, the second is devoted to reclaiming her Midwestern roots, primarily through her mother and grandmother's homemade dishes and "housewifely arts." Their cooking hands served as "the turning motors for our minds," and what Thielen inherits from them is a "compulsion" no matter how arduous the tasks involved. This, alongside the ability to keep a countertop clean (85% of what she says it takes to be a line cook), is the backbone to her ability to succeed in fine dining kitchens.
Thielen also recovers the ways her Midwestern ethos — although not laced with truffle oil cooked in veal sauce— became increasingly pivotal to her understanding of feeding people. Growing up, recycled plastic gallon ice cream buckets were containers for a garden variety of potato salads and a memorable "crushed-ramen-mock-crab-almond salad" shared at potlucks. But more than anything else, the buckets were cultural symbols. The insistence on modesty and a refusal to Instagram filter one's work marked a different attitude: one where feeding the community presided over hailing the chef.
"Many of the traditional Midwestern favorites require a lot of time and effort to make but no one would ever want to say so," she writes. "A neighbor lady might make potato salad by the gallon, spending an hour dicing potatoes into baby-bite-size cubes, but then, with consummate modesty, as if to say 'No big deal,' she would carry it around in some junky, old reused plastic tub. If people sometimes wonder why Midwestern food hasn't gotten the respect it deserves, I want to say that it's not the food, which is generally quite good; it's the ... self-deprecating plastic storage vessels."
Whatever the container or cultural setting, what underpins every chef's passion behind their craft are their roots — whose twin pillars are ingredients and people. On a trip to the French countryside to visit the famed three Michelin star Michel Bras, Thielen recalls, "all of the butter in France was richer than any I've ever known, but this one tasted of sunburned grass and of time left to sit out and absorb the local humors and moods. Real cultured butter tastes like culture."
After seven years in haute cuisine, Thielen decides to return to rural Minnesota. As she confesses, "I was a proud Midwesterner, and yet here I was, making purees instead of stews; I never made anything that called up my personal history." The best chefs weren't just mastering technique, they were drawing inspiration from their taste memories — and it was time for her to return to parsnips, potatoes and onions.
Since moving back to Minnesota, Thielen has established herself as one of the Midwest's most important culinary voices, but her memoir doesn't delve into this. I wish Thielen included how re-planting herself back home after years of insisting on the benefits of living a peripatetic life help establish her career as a cookbook writer ("The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes" won a James Beard award in 2014) and Food Network host ("Heartland Table") that highlights the regional Midwestern cuisine.
Overall however, Thielen's ode to living at the crossroads of culinary high and low offers thoughtful insights into the life of the chef, highlighting that when, "you give a girl a knife," as her mom did when Amy was young, you pass on a legacy: that she will learn how to use it, and someday "consider that knife an extension of her hand, as wedded to her finger as a nail."
Mirakhor is a writer and professor.
"Give a Girl A Knife" by Amy Thielen
"Give a Girl A Knife" by Amy Thielen (Clarkson Potter)
"Give a Girl a Knife"
Amy Thielen
Clarkson Potter: 320 pp., $26
Foodie Amy Thielen’s memoir ‘Give a Girl a Knife’ is a cut above the rest
Amy Thielen (Courtesy photo)
Amy Thielen (Courtesy photo)
By MARY ANN GROSSMANN | mgrossmann@pioneerpress.com | Pioneer Press
June 4, 2017 at 6:30 pm
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If you don’t know what “food memoir” means, you’ll understand when you finish reading “Give a Girl a Knife” (Clarkson Potter, $26), Amy Thielen’s compelling and lyrical account of cooking in some of New York’s finest dining establishments, interspersed with her experiences during the summers when she cooked in a little house in the woods, 20 miles north of Park Rapids, Minn.
170604bks_giveGirlKnifeThe house, which at first had no electricity or running water, was built by her husband, visual artist Aaron Spangler. Both of them grew up in the area.
Thielen is now a nationally known foodie, host of “Heartland Table” on the Food Network and author of the cookbook “The New Midwestern Table.”
The first part of the book begins with her longing to cook with the vegetables just picked from her garden and how she learned to cook by watching her mother and grandmother: “I wanted to cook like my Midwestern great-grandma had, with the feeling of scantness at my back. … I wanted to pick a bowl of peas in the afternoon and bathe them in butter a few hours later, because I’d read tall tales of their fleeting sweetness.” (Butter is so prevalent in her cooking it’s almost a character in the book.)
Thielen’s story is as much about family as food, or rather it’s family and food: “My mom hand raised me to revere food. Food was beyond pretension,” she writes. “My cooking bug, which had begun innocently enough as a way to stave off the agony of writing papers throughout my college years, was growing into a serious habit.”
A graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Thielen describes herself as a “young, nerdy, clean-cut girl” when she was cooking in the kitchens of David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, learning the secrets of exquisite sauces and perfect garnishes while not scorning Minnesota chicken-mushroom soup hotdish.
Her struggles and triumphs in the hot kitchens of trendy restaurants in New York are eye-opening for someone who knows nothing about how food goes from uncooked to beautifully plated. She worked in mostly all-male environments, and in most kitchens, the staff bonded as they worked 80-hour weeks. She writes about Chinese cooks who ate chicken feet and her relationship (mostly good) with chefs and restaurant owners.
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Thielen’s writing about food is a marvel of description: “Crisp balls of pale green kohlrabi … dunes of homemade bread crumbs as mottled and cool to the touch as beach sand … the seared golden-crowned scallops and the sliced pink duck breasts and the dark lobs of venison split open to reveal their savage red interiors … light poufs of olive-oil-passion-fruit curd … a moist-looking plug of fleshy cake yeast.”
After seven years of moving back and forth between Brooklyn and Park Rapids and the birth of their son, Amy and Aaron returned to their house in the woods for good.
“It was becoming increasingly obvious to me,” she writes, “that place of origin was the primary tool in any chef’s toolbox.”
So the couple set about making long-term changes in their land. They planted horseradish, chives and tarragon, as well as rhubarb, crabapple trees and lilacs, which Thielen accurately calls “the classic triumvirate of the Midwestern farm yard.”
Her descriptions of customs surrounding Minnesota food are touching, especially when she writes of how women use ice cream pails to bring food to events.
Thielen’s need to cook like pioneers when she was in Minnesota (where the little house was eventually expanded and electricity put in), led her to attempt complicated things like making head cheese when she was three months from her due date. She began by boiling an entire pig’s head, sawing off the snout because the pot was too small. The butcher warned her about how the feet and ears would smell, but she didn’t realize how bad the odor was until her husband stacked the two pots on top of one another and threw the contents outside.
Musing about having lived in New York and Minnesota alternately for years, then deciding to stay, Thielen writes:
“My return has isolated the variables of my life in a valuable, almost scientific way. Standing in the same geographical spot, nearly twenty years later, I look at the landscape with new eyes. Only by freezing myself in place, I think, can I take an accurate measure.
“It doesn’t escape me that only a native Minnesotan would think this.”
Amy Thielen will discuss her book at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 6, at Barnes & Noble, 3230 Galleria, Edina.
Stay Hungry
By Kathryn O’Shea-Evans
532 0 0
MAY 20, 2017
IF I’VE GOTTEN FAT — as plump as a November turkey — I can safely blame Amy Thielen’s new memoir, Give a Girl a Knife. The book chronicles the Food Network star’s ascent through the storied kitchens of New York City’s fine dining restaurants (Daniel Boulud’s db bistro moderne, David Bouley’s Bouley, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s now-shuttered Chinese restaurant 66, among others). But it also delineates her Minnesota upbringing and the dishes and ingredients she was reared on and has since returned to: “chokecherries would come on the branch in early August and sugar would erase their woolly mouthfeel”; “the wild rice growing on the creek — right in our front yard —would ripen around the time that summer came to a close.” The story line is cinematic, yes, but also highly caloric. I found myself putting it down only to run into my kitchen and attempt to cobble together, in some part, some of the dishes she describes, especially the ones her mother made — the “chicken marsala with mushrooms and spaetzle in brown butter; grilled pork chops served still a little pink in the middle and cloaked with horseradish sour cream.” And like her mother — who set two sticks into the butter dish every morning and used them entirely by nightfall — I didn’t skimp on fat. (The word “butter” appears 99 times in the book. You’ve been warned.)
Plenty of overworked New Yorkers dream about chucking it all and moving to the backwoods — but Thielen moves to New York from the backwoods. She begins her book by describing her life in a cabin without electricity or running water, in Minnesota’s North Country, built by her boyfriend (now husband), the sculptor Aaron Spangler. “At the house in the woods, we pumped water by hand from our own sand point well and hauled it into the kitchen in plastic jugs,” she writes. Their housekeeping strategies might have been published in Carla Emery’s 1994 Encyclopedia of Country Living, if it were written in the 19th century:
We kept our meat cold on blocks of ice, lit oil lamps for light when the sun went down, and showered outside in the breeze. On the hill jutting out into a swollen creek, home to a crew of honking swans and a natural stand of wild rice and a community of honking swans that separated us from neighbors for miles, we basically lived on an island of the 1880s within a sea of the late 1990s.
Thielen knew — certainly every time she crawled away to the outhouse, if not as she was lighting their propane-powered, circa 1940 Roper stove — that the lifestyle she was leading was precarious. “I liked to think of it as our own private epoch, but looking back, I’d say we pretty much lived in our heads.”
Why would someone raised in total suburban comfort put up with all that? It wasn’t solely for love of Spangler. Thielen writes that she had “effectively driven myself two generations back in time to find the only things that my buttery, voluptuous, well-fed Midwestern childhood had lacked: baby greens and deprivation.” As her boyfriend carved sculptures out of cast-off wood from the local sawmill, she dove into antique recipe books and journals of pioneer homesteading women she’d found in the historical records of Becker County. She writes:
I wanted to cook like my Midwestern great-grandma had, with the feeling of scantness at my back. I wanted to pick a bowl of peas in the afternoon and bathe them in butter a few hours later to fully capture their fleeting sweetness. If I had refrigerated them (if I’d had refrigeration), their sugars would begin to turn to starch, like any old grocery store pea. My cooking bug, which had begun innocently enough as a way to stave off the agony of writing papers throughout my college years, was growing into a serious habit. Or as Aaron described his own art practice: It was becoming an affliction.
Born and bred just 25 minutes away in the comparatively booming town of Park Rapids — population 3,903 — food was one salve against the winter cold (in 2016, the coldest January day in Park Rapids bottomed out at negative 30), and the summer cold too:
On cold evenings, not unheard of even at the height of a Minnesota summer, we made what we called pudgie pies for dinner right in the open hearth, layering white bread and ham and cheese into the pie iron, then carefully cracking an egg in the middle before locking the two sides together and holding the iron in the fire to cook it all into a buttery, turtle-shaped pie.
¤
As a food-obsessive who grew up in Portland, Oregon, I never made more over the fire than s’mores and Jiffy Pop. What Thielen encountered even in childhood was sophisticated cooking, and it likely grew her into the chef she is today. Back to those pudgie pies: “For this totally blind cooking process, the pudgie-pie cook had to rely on her instincts,” she writes. “I liked my bread almost burned and my yolk soft, so I bravely held my iron down in the orange-and-silver coals and pulled it out only when tiny droplets of butter and melted cheese liquid dripped from iron.”
And when she explains about moving to New York with Spangler to pursue cooking and art, respectively, you can’t help but root for them. She’s got as much mettle as her homesteading ancestors did moving to Minnesota in the first place, talking her way into an internship by strolling into jackets-required restaurant Bouley and asking to speak with the chef. Once she had the job, she worked her ass off. “I was moving — physically moving — and working far harder than I’d ever worked before,” she tells us:
Eighty-hour weeks, and the hours flew by. By the time I’d finished my first month interning in a real kitchen in Manhattan, I felt like I had finally activated the entirety of my DNA. Maybe I was a fair mixture of my parents after all: the workaholic businessman dad meets the sauce-simmering, stove-bound mom.
Her parents approved of her new life, but rising through a star-studded scene wasn’t encouraged by her hometown. Of Park Rapids, she says:
The people were tough. The “norm” was good enough. The weather, along with some leftover prairie practicality from the homesteading era, colluded to place bets against the dreamers.
Still, one could argue that growing up in a place that “bets against the dreamers” makes you dream even harder, and dream she did, though with feet firmly planted. Thielen’s book proves that making it in the seemingly glamorous food world is not always glamorous. She worked 13-hour days, six-day weeks at one restaurant, and dodged roaches “running like hoodlums” at another. And though this account is no Sweetbitter — Stephanie Danler’s 2016 novel about coming-of-age in New York restaurants — Thielen does expose some of the biting sexism women experience in restaurant kitchens. Such as the jokes (a colleague dangling an entire horseradish root from his fly, for example) and the delegation of labor (“for some reason, you rarely saw chefs assign women to cook the main protein, even if that woman was a sous chef. Sometimes the fish, but never the meat.”)
According to the Bureau of Labor statistics’s survey from 2016, only 21.4 percent of chefs and head cooks are female, while a majority — 58.2 percent — of the lower strata of “food preparation workers” are. Seventy percent of waitstaff are female, and a whopping 80.8 percent of hosts. For anyone who is tracking the gender of “star chefs” with actual restaurants, the Batali’s and the Colicchio’s, the figure of female chefs (21.4 percent) should surprise no one, even if it nears the proportion of female clergy (17.6 percent).
Thielen doesn’t let the numbers get her down, even as the industry’s inherent sexism — from both men and women — garnishes her wages. Hired to be a sous chef at a restaurant in Tribeca, she effectively gets demoted, for no reason. “When I met with Catherine (not her real name) in management she dropped my title to junior sous,” she writes, “reducing my modest salary even more and marking yet another time that the women were meaner than the men.”
But what Thielen did next — nothing — was, I’d wager, more typical of women than men, when they are wronged. For her part, Thielen seems to simply shrug it off: “At this point, I had to laugh. Sexism was so predictable.” I can’t help wishing she’d summoned up a little of that homesteader grit and said something.
Still, she learns a lot in these kitchens, knowledge that I devoured, too, for my own personal use. To resuscitate tired shrimp, the expat cooks at 66 ran water over them for hours. “The Chinese dishes held clues to a past rooted in deprivation and resourcefulness,” Thielen notes. “Like a Midwestern farmhouse cook and her April sack of storage carrots, they could wring sauce from stones.” She discovers that when cooking, “everything takes five minutes,” from caramelizing onions to making red wine syrup. Much earlier, she acquired other skills. The book hopscotches back and forth between New York and Minnesota, where she lives today, having returned there with her husband and son. In one of my favorite scenes, she recalls the exact moment her mother, who divorced her father when Thielen was in high school, taught her how to use a paring knife. She was in fifth grade:
I took the knife — an old one whose short blade had been sharpened over the years into the shape of a bird’s beak — and tried to copy the way she sliced apples for the pandowdy for the church bake sale. Never once did she tell me to be careful. “Cut it like this” is what she said … steering the apple quarter this way and that, cutting quickly. Shiff shiff shiff, pyramid-shaped pieces fell into the bowl.
So early on, Thielen understood the value of apprenticeship. About her mother, she tells us, “She worked from memory, with a knowledge that was housed in her hands. It was kind of like watching a veteran carpenter build a house.”
I love that Thielen brings respect to Midwestern regional dishes, largely ignored on the coasts. (Danny Meyer has made Southern classics haute at Manhattan’s Blue Smoke, and Eater lists 21 fancy Maine lobster rolls to try in Los Angeles, but rare is the East or West Coast chef willing to resurrect the hotdish.) In my salad days as a magazine editor, I recall a former snob-in-chief mercilessly cackling and eye-rolling over the very idea of hotdishes, as if a sauerkraut casserole were equivalent to eating Spam from the can. It’s not. My mother was raised in Litchfield, Minnesota, and you can knock lutefisk all you want, but you can’t taste a homemade Special K bar (peanut butter, chocolate, and butterscotch are key ingredients) without eating two or 10 more. This is a part of the country that gets so cold that Thielen and Spangler once celebrated the temperature’s rise to zero by driving with the car windows open, so its foodstuffs are nothing if not comforting. And the way Thielen dissects their history? It’s the story of immigration in Minnesota itself. Even their coffee cake recipes are a tell, defining who they are and what they like:
We mixed-European-breed Midwestern mongrels are always outed by our coffee cake. Sour cream — probably Polish. Cardamom with icing — had to be from some part of Scandinavia. Our poppy-seed streusel pointed us to origins somewhere east of Germany. Between the poppy seeds and the stiff lace-edged potato pancakes and the fortune telling, my best guess was that we hailed from a place somewhere between old Transylvania and the hometown of the Brothers Grimm.
Which brings me to my one complaint about this book: I wish Thielen had studded it with recipes, or perhaps stocked them at the end in an extra chapter, like a digestif. As is, the book served to whet my tongue (as well as my knives) — now, if I can just find somebody to show me how to make that cardamom coffee cake.
Amy Thielen’s 'Give a Girl a Knife' is a love letter to Minnesota cooking
Friday, April 7, 2017 by Mecca Bos in Food & Drink
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Amy Thielen has been a superhero in my mind since she released her cookbook The New Midwestern Table in 2013.
In it, she accomplished what sometimes seems like the impossible: legitimizing Minnesota cooking within the canon of regional cuisine.
What is Minnesota cooking, anyway? The chef and food writer answers that sometimes-difficult question with as much style and intellectualism as anyone has before or since. In that book, and in her new memoir Give a Girl a Knife (out May 17), Thielen manages to tease apart the puzzle of the Midwestern kitchen -- eloquently, lightheartedly, genuinely.
Minnesotans tend toward self-effacement that can verge on paralysis. We truck along, work hard, indulge in the full gamut of human endeavor, and do little in the way of self-reflection or pause to accept accolades, for goodness' sakes.
Thielen knows a thing or two about hard work, having spent nearly a decade of winters working in high-end New York City restaurant kitchens as a line cook, then in the warm-weather months living off the grid in a rural Minnesota log cabin she and her husband built by hand.
They lived seasonally this way until she gave birth to their son, but not until taking one last season in New York, heavily pregnant, at the professional stoves.
The book weaves a tale of a young rural Minnesota-born couple who choose Minnesota over all other places, making some extreme but exciting sacrifices to defend and hold their dream of a "living off the land" existence in the north woods.
There, Thielen and her husband, Aaron Spangler, began growing their own food, hauling water from a well that they built themselves, and devoting entire days to the endeavor of three square meals for their tiny family in a tiny kitchen with no running water.
It’s where Thielen really, truly learned to cook and to honor the root of why she wanted to cook in the first place.
Her writing is quietly lovely, Minnesotan through and through, with little showboating but respectable doses of confident stoicism. In certain passages, a Minnesotan can all but place herself in Thielen’s very shoes:
“I see myself waiting for the bus with my brothers and the neighborhood kids, standing on a beaten-down pad of glittering snow and sugar, wearing thin canvas shoes. The hair nearest to my head is still damp, my bangs are curled into a frothing surf, and the cold finds the moisture at my scalp. The air is sharp and crystalline, minty. The winter light comes at us from every direction, refracted in diamond cut every place it lands, until it appears that we are the lone humans standing in a white landscape and all of the world’s spotlights are trained right on us, a stiff clump of kids in the middle of nowhere.”
Who among us has not experienced that particular bus stop experience, the cold so keen it’s “minty"?And still, we cull beauty out of it because, well, what choice do we have?
More important, Thielen is an astute food writer, and her countrymen and women will recognize themselves acutely in the pages when she’s tasting the things of home:
“Just like the fermented pickles I remember from childhood, where the tartness shot straight to my spine and plucked my nerves like guitar strings, where it played me. I remember my mom watching me clink my fork around the cloudy brine in the jar of fermented pickles, and not finding any, tip up the jar for a shot of the fizzy juice instead. The acidity shook through my body like a seizure, and when I came up for air she laughed and gave me a knowing smile. Good? The taste fairy had chosen rightly. I was no sweet tooth.”
The best thing about Thielen’s writing is that she never tries to sugarcoat what we have here, and what we haven’t. The true lover of Minnesota and Minnesota cooking has to embrace the depth of our seasons, and look for the impossible-to-find diamonds in the extreme rough.
It takes her half a lifetime, but she concludes her journey not with beautiful tangles of freshly gathered snap peas, or in the French technique she gathered under some of the world’s great chefs. Instead, it’s in the cooking wisdom that her own mother knew: how to make a good meal in winter with groceries gathered at the local hometown big-box grocery store.
After overthinking it for too long, she throws a head of lime-green plastic-wrapped celery into her cart, along with a brick of ground beef.
“. . . I can almost hear a crack of lightning sounding in the meat aisle as I am promptly returned back to earth.”
Thielen’s earthiness is the thing that makes her one of our very own, and what makes us recognize ourselves. She makes no apology for celery and ground beef, but instead knows deep down into her toes the singular beauty that can come from them with the right amounts of effort and embrace.
amythielen.com
Give a Girl a Knife will be available May 16 wherever fine books are sold.