Category: food

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Mitchell’s Gingerbread Architect

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Barb Feilmeier does some of her best dreaming in grocery store snack aisles, envisioning new ways to use cookies, crackers and other foods to decorate her intricate Christmas creations. The Mitchell woman has been building with gingerbread for 50 years, but these are not your ordinary cookie houses. Feilmeier has recreated everything from the Corn Palace to the South Dakota State Capitol.

Feilmeier was at home with four young children when she made her first gingerbread structure, a church, in 1970, based on instructions she found in Family Circle. It’s been part of her holiday routine ever since. Her early efforts were relatively simple, but that changed after she retired from her job as a medical technologist in 2005.”I got carried away,” she says.

A lot of prep work goes into Feilmeier’s most elaborate buildings. First, she chooses a subject, which usually has personal significance. She recreated Ireland’s Kilcolgan Castle after taking a family trip there in 2018 and commemorated her and husband Leon’s 50th anniversary in 2011 by replicating the Church of Saint Mary in Sioux Falls. Feilmeier takes reference photos and plots out the dimensions of each piece to scale. Then she makes a model out of paper to make sure each section fits together perfectly. In 2016, when she made her son-in-law Kelly Kramer’s Chevrolet dealership — complete with fondant people, a candy Lego counter, Life Savers toilet and a baby grand piano fabricated from melba toast — she made multiple passes through the building to understand the layout.”I couldn’t figure it out. I used my kids’ Lego blocks to figure out where it was all supposed to be.”

Once the pattern has been worked out to her satisfaction, the mixing, baking, decorating and assembly begins. These steps come with their own hazards. One year when her children were young, she went to assemble her house, only to discover a section of gingerbread was missing.”Some little darling came along and ate one of the sides,” Feilmeier remembers. (Decades later, the crime remains unsolved.) Then there was the year a wayward nudge sent a fully-decorated section of gingerbread shattering to the floor.”I broke the whole front of St. Peter’s Basilica,” she says.

Feilmeier keeps a detailed scrapbook containing plans and photos of each year’s creations and has given presentations on her gingerbread architecture to local groups, but when the holidays are over, she’s ready to say goodbye to the buildings themselves.”I have no problem getting a garbage bag and smashing them and throwing them out,” she says.”I’m already thinking about what I’m going to do next year.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Barb Feilmeier of Mitchell celebrated her 50th anniversary of making gingerbread houses for Christmas by constructing an 1880s village, incorporating the first pattern she made, a gingerbread church, plus other new additions. The village was displayed at the Carnegie Resource Center in Mitchell in November 2020.
Barb Feilmeier of Mitchell celebrated her 50th anniversary of making gingerbread houses for Christmas by constructing an 1880s village, incorporating the first pattern she made, a gingerbread church, plus other new additions. The village was displayed at the Carnegie Resource Center in Mitchell in November 2020.
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This is Our Family

By Rebecca Johnson

Rosana Jamous helps her daughter Sarah choose from traditional Thanksgiving foods and Middle Eastern fare. Photo by Bill Goehring.

Sioux Falls is South Dakota’s melting pot, with over 120 languages spoken in its schools. Moving to the rural Midwest can be a shock for immigrants trying to learn a new culture and new traditions. Thanks to restaurateur Sanaa Abourezk, the city’s Middle Eastern community has fully embraced one of America’s most loved holidays — Thanksgiving.

Abourezk and her husband James, who served as South Dakota’s U.S. congressman and senator in the 1970s, met while Abourezk was working at the Embassy of Qatar in Washington, D.C. Once married, the couple moved to Rapid City, but Sanaa was lonely so they relocated to Sioux Falls where she quickly befriended other immigrants from her home country of Syria and neighboring countries.

“We used to get together and the kids played,” Abourezk says.”Then it dawned on us that the kids go to school and they hear about Thanksgiving. ‘My grandma made this. My aunt made this.'” So the friends decided to celebrate the quintessential American holiday together to give their children that communal experience.

Farid Kutayli and his wife Salwa hosted the first few gatherings in their home about 15 years ago. But the celebration quickly relocated to the Abourezks’ restaurant, Sanaa’s 8th Street Gourmet, in downtown Sioux Falls.”If we know somebody who moved to town we also invite them because we want them to have Thanksgiving with us as a family,” Abourezk says.”Last year I think we had about 60 adults and we have kids running all over. That’s why no house can fit us anymore.”

Khalil Yousef photographs the growing group each year. “They’re not blood relatives, but for us this is the family,” he says. “That’s really the key. It makes you feel like you belong and that you’re not alone. The good food is a bonus.”

Abourezk made all the food when she first hosted the Thanksgiving party in her restaurant but she was too exhausted to enjoy the party, so now the gathering is potluck. Abourezk still provides the turkeys and American staples like baked breads, mashed potatoes and corn. It is common for platters of green bean casserole and sweet potatoes to sit beside Arabic delicacies like kibbeh (bulgar wheat mixed with beef or lamb, topped with pine nuts), kanafeh (a cheese pastry soaked in sugary syrup) or hashwet ruz (a rice pilaf that the group prefers over bread stuffing).

Raed Sulaiman, a pathologist, dons an apron to carve the turkeys.”My little one is always excited to see it,” says Rosana Jamous, a stay-at-home mom to three daughters.”The kids, their eyes are so big watching.” The bird isn’t unusual to the adults; it’s commonly served on Christmas in Lebanon and on Easter in Syria. A prayer follows the carving, sometimes spoken in Spanish because students study it in high school”and if you say the Thanksgiving prayer in Spanish at your Thanksgiving you get extra credit,” says Alya, Abourezk’s daughter.”Usually we end up doing it in English, especially for the kids because none of us speak Arabic well.”

Christiane Maroun, a pediatrician, recalls introducing herself to a newcomer last year as she waited in line for food.”She was expecting a baby and she said, ‘Oh, I’m so happy that somebody here is from Lebanon so I will be more comfortable bringing my baby to you,'” Maroun says.”She was so relieved she wouldn’t need a translator.”

Riyad Mohama, a cardiologist, and his wife Rima, a pharmacist, moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago. The transition wasn’t easy; they came in January to a lot of snow.”I told my husband, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be staying here for a long time. We should move somewhere else,'” Rima recalls. But she loves Sioux Falls now.”Thanksgiving reminds me of my country because that’s how we live there. It’s very social,” she says.”It’s hard that we don’t have any relatives here, but when we do this, the kids can see that this is our family.”

Vegetable Almond Rice Pilaf

(Hashwet Ruz)

1/2 cup olive oil

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon finely shredded fresh ginger

2 cups basmati rice

1 cup sweet peas, fresh or frozen

1 cup diced carrots, about 1/2-inch cubes, fresh or frozen

1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries

2 tablespoons finely chopped candied orange peels or orange marmalade

1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted

1 teaspoon turmeric

dash of red pepper

sea salt to taste

Heat 1/4 cup olive oil and sautÈ onion for 4 minutes. Add garlic and ginger, then stir for 1 minute. Add 4 1/2 cups water, salt and turmeric and bring to a boil. Add rice and stir, returning mixture to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Then turn off heat and rest on the stove for another 15 minutes.

While rice is resting, heat remaining olive oil on medium heat in a sautÈ pan. Add the vegetables, stirring for 2 minutes. Stir in cranberries and chopped orange peels or marmalade. Season with salt and red pepper, then cook another 2 minutes. Turn off heat and set aside. Spoon rice into deep serving platter, spoon vegetable mixture over the rice and sprinkle toasted almonds on top. Serves 6.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Buzz from Prairie Moon Farm

By Laura Johnson Andrews

The Freemans of Prairie Moon Farm include (from left) Harry, Willa, Elena, Grace and Harrison (not pictured).

Grace Freeman might be one of the calmest people we’ve ever met. Nothing seems to faze the Clay County beekeeper. When a mouse jumps out of the brome at her, she doesn’t blink. If she’s posing for a picture with a chicken and the bird leaves a deposit on her shirt, it doesn’t erase the friendly smile from her face. Put her next to a hive with thousands of stinging insects, and she’s happy as can be.

A Cincinnati native, Freeman fell in love with beekeeping in 1985 through a work-study job with an entomologist at the University of Montana.”We would go and collect bees and study them to see if they had picked up pollutants,” she says. When she and her husband, Harry, moved to Madison, Wisconsin for grad school, Freeman worked for a large-scale beekeeper, managing up to 1,000 colonies. After Harry took a job in the psychology department of the University of South Dakota, the couple settled in a farmhouse on Frog Creek Road, where they have lived for 21 years with their children, Elena, Willa and Harrison.

The Freemans’ home, Prairie Moon Farm, is a back-to-the-lander’s Eden. Chickens and guinea fowl roam freely, a trio of penned-up rescue llamas provide manure to fertilize her garden and scare away deer, and a friendly dog named Saige welcomes visitors. There’s a shed full of kayaks for paddles on the Missouri, a greenhouse and a small but fragrant structure where Freeman creates tinctures and blends herbs for teas she sells at the Vermillion Farmers’ Market.

Freeman’s hives are in a little glade a short walk away from the buildings, past a pond and a stand of honeysuckle bushes. She puts on her veiled beekeeper’s hat and sets the smoker filled with smoldering brown paper scraps and wood chips on the ground. The smoke fools the bees into letting their guard down, making it less likely they will sting.”They think there’s a fire and they have to travel,” Freeman says.”They fill up on honey, and get so full that their stinger goes down.”

When working with bees, Freeman recommends wearing white or light-colored clothes.”Bees get angry if you wear dark colors,” she says.”It reminds them of bears.” And be sure to tuck in your clothes.”You don’t want them crawling in your shirt,” she tells us. Some beekeepers wear a protective suit and gloves, but after decades of working with bees, Freeman has developed a more casual style — a long-sleeved white shirt over a tank top and shorts.

Freeman uses Langstroth hives, which consist of a stack of wooden boxes, each of which contains hanging wooden frames upon which the bees build their comb, raise young and store honey. The supers, shallower boxes at the top of the hive, will hold harvestable honey. The queen, the brood and the colony’s food storage all go in the deeper, lower boxes. A metal rack called a queen excluder separates the two portions of the hive. The rack’s slats are big enough to allow worker bees to pass between sections, but keep the larger queen down in the brood cells where she belongs. After all, no one wants bee eggs mixed in with their honey.

Freeman inspects a frame from one of the hive’s supers. She harvests honey in late summer.

The hive’s lid is stuck on tightly with propolis, a gluey yellowish-brown substance that bees make from tree resins and beeswax. Freeman uses a mini crowbar called a hive tool to break through the glue and help manipulate frames as she checks on the bees and their activities.

The queen is the only female in the hive that mates and lays the fertilized eggs that develop into worker bees, so Freeman looks for fresh eggs to make sure the queen bee is doing her job.”Eggs change every day,” she says.”If you can see the one-day-old eggs, then you know you have a viable queen. Even if it’s a two-day-old egg, something could’ve happened to her.”

Bee society is fascinatingly complex and overwhelmingly female. The only males are the drones. They have no stingers and do no gathering — their only job is to be available to mate with a virgin queen bee. After mating, they die. The worker bees, all female, cycle through a series of roles — foraging, building, housekeeping, childcare, attending the queen, guarding the hive. There are even mortuary bees, who haul the colony’s dead away from the hive. With so much to do, it’s no surprise that the life of a worker bee is short. During the busy spring and summer seasons, they might live a brief four to six weeks.

Under most conditions, bees manage themselves, but there are critical points during the year when a beekeeper should pay attention. In spring, Freeman helps the bees get ready for the season, making sure that they have food to last them until the flowers really start blooming and that there’s plenty of space to make new honey. In June, when the clover blooms, she watches for signs of swarming.”If you haven’t provided them with enough room, then they’ll divide,” she says. The bees will create a second queen and fly off in search of a new hive, leaving the old queen with a few guards for protection. A divided colony means less honey, so Freeman destroys any potential new queen cells she spots.

Once the fear of swarming is over, Freeman’s bee work slows down a bit. When the bees fill up the existing frames, she adds supers. Honey is harvested in August.”Then they have time in the fall to put on enough winter weight so you don’t have to feed them so much sugar water,” Freeman says. After that, it’s time to winterize the hive.

Winter and early spring are tricky times for beekeepers. Freeman lost one of her two colonies last spring due to uncertain weather.”I can get them through until March and then the temperature warms up and they start moving more — they get excited,” she says.”Moisture builds up, the temperature drops and they freeze. I have really been trying to figure out how to ventilate and still keep them warm enough.”

In a good year, Freeman harvests 50 to 100 pounds of honey per hive, selling it at the Vermillion Farmers’ Market along with garden plants, culinary and medicinal herbs, teas, tinctures, salves and lip balm made from her own beeswax. When she’s not gardening, marketing or beekeeping, she works as a registered nurse. How does she juggle it all?”Oh, I’m not very good at it,” Freeman says.”We’re always busy. My summers are just nuts.”

But no matter how crazy life gets, the bustle of the hive serves as an oasis. Bee stings hold no fear, and the sounds of the hive have a calming, meditative effect.”For me, it’s very relaxing to have that noise going all around you, all the bees flying,” she says.”It’s very loud, but you’re focusing so hard on looking for those eggs that you don’t even hear them, and it gets very peaceful.”

Meloamak·rona (Honey-dipped Cookies)

Honey is a major component of Greek cooking. Freeman’s husband, Harry, who is half-Greek, makes baklava and meloamak·rona, or honey-dipped cookies, using recipes found in a community cookbook from his mother’s hometown, Seattle.

Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup salad oil

6 tablespoons sugar

1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon fresh
orange juice (divided)

Grated peel of one orange

2 eggs

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3 teaspoons baking powder

6 to 6 1/2 cups sifted flour

Nut Topping

1/2 cup very finely chopped nuts

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon cloves

Honey Syrup

2 cups honey

1/2 cup water

In large bowl of electric mixer, beat butter until light and fluffy. Add oil slowly and continue beating for 10 minutes. Gradually add sugar, 1/2 cup orange juice and peel. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat an additional 5 minutes.

Combine 1 tablespoon orange juice and baking soda; add to butter-oil mixture. Add baking powder and enough flour to make a soft dough. Remove beaters; knead slightly to make a dough that does not stick to hands, adding more flour if necessary.

Roll a heaping teaspoonful of dough into an oval-shaped cookie, tapering the ends slightly. Press the melomak·rona lengthwise with fork tines to make indentations to hold the nut topping. Bake at 375 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Remove cookies from baking sheet and cool on wire racks.

Mix ingredients for nut topping and set aside.

When cookies have cooled, bring honey and water to a boil. Dip melomak·rona into honey syrup, being certain to thoroughly soak the cookies. Sprinkle tops with nut topping.

From Greek Cooking in an American Kitchen (Makes about 5 dozen)

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Pizza at Kate’s Cottage

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Guests at Kate’s Cottage of rural Beresford enjoy good conversation and homemade pizza, courtesy of hosts Gaylan and Gale Gors and their wood-fired pizza oven.

Guests at Kate’s Cottage, a cozy bed and breakfast southwest of Beresford, enjoy a tranquil setting, a menagerie of animals and, if they’re lucky, wood-fired pizza baked in a handmade outdoor oven.”It’s a great way to eat,” says owner Gale Gors.”You eat much more slowly, you drink a beer and you talk. Twenty minutes later you have another one.”

Gale and her husband Gaylan first encountered an outdoor pizza oven while on a surprise trip to Santa Fe for Gaylan’s 60th birthday.”I looked at it and said, ‘I can build one,'” Gaylan remembers. He, Gale and Gale’s son Alex Monson worked together, doing research, drawing plans and laying brick. Monson, who operates AMC Concrete, formed the domed interior of the oven using refractory concrete containing perlite, which acts as an insulator. The DIY effort was not without its trials; on the oven’s inaugural firing, the chimney melted.”We just stood there and watched it droop,” Gaylan says.

The oven is built into an old grove on the Peterson farm, which has been in Gale’s family for almost 130 years. On pleasant summer nights, the Gorses invite visitors to join them at a table made from the grove’s wood to indulge in fresh pizza and easygoing conversation.

Kate’s Cottage was built in the 1930s, but stood empty for decades after Gale’s aunt, Verna Peterson, died in the early 1960s. Gale planned to tear it down, but in the end, she just couldn’t.”I took off one piece of trim and thought, ‘This is stupid.'” Restoring the tiny one-bedroom home was a three-year process, done in stages as Gale saved money from her work at Integrative Wellness, a mental health counseling service in Sioux Falls. The first guests arrived in 2015.

The peaceful farm getaway is made livelier by the menagerie — inquisitive Flo the dog; unpredictable Bat Cat; Earle, Charlie and Pete the goats; and a flock of Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds presided over by an obstinate Crested Polish rooster named The Bouncer.

Depending on wind and weather, it can take 30 to 60 minutes to heat the oven to Gaylan’s preferred pizza-baking temperature of 600 to 650 degrees. The oven is fueled with pine, which burns hot, smells nice and doesn’t affect the flavor. Sauces and dough are all homemade, and topping possibilities are endless. They’ve tried taco pizza, pulled pork and artichokes, and clams and white sauce, but the favorite might be the classic margherita.”A good white sauce, fresh basil and fresh tomatoes — you just can’t beat that,” Gale says.

A classic margherita is a favorite of the Gorses.

Basic New York-Style Pizza Dough

from http://www.SeriousEats.com

22.5 ounces (about 4 1/2 cups) bread flour, plus more for dusting

0.5 ounces (about 1 1/2 tablespoons) sugar

0.35 ounces (about 1 tablespoon) kosher salt

0.35 ounces (about 2 teaspoons) instant yeast

1.125 ounces (about 3 tablespoons) extra-virgin olive oil

15 ounces lukewarm water

Combine flour, sugar, salt and yeast in bowl of food processor. Pulse 3–4 times until incorporated. Add olive oil and water. Run food processor until mixture forms ball that rides around the bowl above the blade, about 15 seconds. Continue processing 15 seconds longer.

Transfer dough ball to a lightly floured surface and knead once or twice by hand until a smooth ball is formed. Divide dough evenly into three parts and place each in a covered quart-sized container or a zipper-lock freezer bag. Place in refrigerator and allow to rise at least one day, and up to five. Remove from refrigerator, shape into balls and allow to rest at room temperature for at least two hours before baking.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Woodfired Pizza at Kate’s Cottage in rural Beresford, South Dakota, taken May 2, 2020 by Laura Andrews
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Blessed Sacramints

By Laura Johnson Andrews

When I was growing up, no special occasion was complete without platters full of cream cheese mints, arranged in dainty pastel patterns and placed right next to a bowl of mixed nuts. They helped mark the sanctity of marriages and were as mandatory at high school and college graduations as the diploma holder’s cap and gown.

Everything I know about mints I learned from my mother, who has been mixing and molding them since the 1950s. She was a little girl when her mother started making them for Mother’s Day teas in Viborg. In their large family, there were always extra hands around to fill cookie sheets with these candies in almost no time at all.

When I was old enough, I helped, too — though Mom had to keep an eye on me to make sure that more mints ended up on the pan than in my mouth. To tell the truth, she still has to do that. There’s something about the play of textures in these little candies — that crunch of granulated sugar coating the creamy dough — that just begs you to eat another and another.

But the sweetest part of this tradition is the togetherness. Ideally, mint making is a group activity. Depending on the molds you choose, a single batch of dough can make around 200 mints. If you’re doing it alone, that can be a slog, but with a group, conversation and laughter make the task fast and fun.

I realized that anew when a bunch of South Dakota Magazine staffers got together to help me make mints using the recipe my grandmother, Maridell Mark, first stirred up over six decades ago. The stories and smiles we shared will stay in my memory for a long time. I was the only one in the group with experience, but my first-timers took to it easily. If you need help making mints, I highly recommend you give them a call.

You don’t want me. I’ll just eat them all.

When marking rites of passage, sweetened cream cheese candies are a must.

Cream Cheese Mints

from Maridell Mark

2 pounds powdered sugar

8 ounces of cream cheese, softened

A few drops of candy oil flavoring, to taste (spearmint is best)

Paste food coloring

Granulated sugar, for rolling

Rubber mint molds

Beat cream cheese and powdered sugar together, adding sugar a bit at a time so you don’t end up with a powdery white kitchen. Add flavoring oil to taste but be careful. The flavor can intensify as the mints set. Six drops of oil are usually enough.

Dip a toothpick into a jar of paste food coloring, wipe the color off onto a ball of dough, and knead it in, adding more dabs of color if needed, until the coloring is evenly distributed, and the dough reaches the desired shade.

Cover a cookie sheet with waxed paper. Add granulated sugar to a small bowl and dust your mold with sugar. Form dough into small balls, roll them in sugar and press them into the mint mold, swiping the excess away with a thumb. To release, tap the mold into your hand or onto the cookie sheet.

Let mints dry for a day, turning them over after half a day. Stack mints in an airtight container, separating each layer with waxed paper. Mints may be refrigerated, frozen or consumed immediately.

Mint Tips

Making mints is simple enough that a small child can help, but here are a few tricks to make it even easier.

  • Use paste food coloring. It is more intense than the liquid food coloring typically used for baking. Liquid coloring can add a bitter flavor.
  • Go light on color. Bold hued mints just end up dyeing your guests’ teeth and tongues.
  • If you would like to make more than one color or flavor of mints, divide the dough or make multiple batches.
  • Mint molds come in many shapes. Use whatever you like but be aware that the more ornate the mold is, the harder the mints will be to unmold. Our family has found that roses, simple leaves and diplomas are easiest to manage.
  • The size of dough ball you need will depend greatly on the mold you are using. By rolling the dough consistently into the right-sized ball for your mold, you’ll produce more mints in less time and find unmolding easier. Use a small melon baller if you need to.
  • If you are struggling to get the mints to unmold, dust your mold in a little granulated sugar.
  • Do not be afraid to give the mold a good whack. They are made of rubber, so you’re not going to break anything.
  • The drying step is important. It allows the mints to set up enough so that you can stack them in layers and store them until the big day.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Jelly for Scrimpers

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Corncob jelly is a curiosity of old cookbooks, something that conjures visions of pioneer households and frugal living. It takes a real scrimper to look at a bare cob destined for the cookstove or outhouse and think,”Gosh, I wish I could get one more use out of that.”

In lieu of actual evidence, we tend to assume that all foods were invented via the accidental collision method made famous in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercials of the 1970s and’80s. Can’t you imagine two pioneer women bumping into each other on the prairie, saying,”You got your corncobs in my pot of boiling hot sugar water!””Oh yeah, well you got YOUR sugar water on MY corncobs!” before they realize that the resulting mÈlange is delicious?

Maybe, maybe not. In the early days of Dakota homesteading, salting, drying or storing food in the root cellar were more common methods of food preservation than canning. Oh, canning existed — a French cook, Nicholas Appert, won 12,000 francs off Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810 for developing a food-storage system that would help keep the French army fed and in fighting condition. Appert’s approach involved putting food in jars, corking them and sealing them with wax. The jars were then wrapped in canvas and boiled. In 1858, Philadelphia tinsmith John Landis Mason patented the Mason jar and accompanying zinc screw-on lid. The Ball brothers and others ran with the concept after Mason’s patent ran out in 1879. Lightning jars (glass canning jars with glass lids) came along in the early 1900s, and it wasn’t until 1915 that Alexander Kerr came up with the two-piece lid that home canners use today.

Settlers were certainly canning in Dakota Territory by 1875. Jellies, pickles and preserves went on display at the first territorial fair, held in Yankton on September 29-30 of that year. Corncob jelly didn’t make an appearance, but pear preserves, cherry and peach pickles and jarred plums all won awards. (Mrs. A. J. Faulk, wife of the former territorial governor, won a prize for her chokecherry jelly, but considering that her daughter, wife of prominent territorial politician/crook Walter Burleigh, was one of the judges … well, perhaps you’ll pardon our cynicism.)

All politics aside, we can all appreciate the fact that corncob jelly never was the first jar of preserves our grandmothers set out when company came, and they probably chose flashier recipes to submit to the church cookbook. However, we did locate a modern-day corncob jelly aficionado at Colome, where Fran Hill writes a food blog (my-plate.blogspot.com) and also finds time to make jams and jellies with all sorts of South Dakota blessings — from wild grapes to apples, beets and chokecherries.

“One of the first cookbooks that I owned as a newlywed contained a heritage recipe for corncob jelly,” Hill says.”It called for dried red corncobs from field corn used to feed livestock. The cobs were weighted down in a large pot of water and boiled to create a rosy-colored stock from which the jelly was made. The entry claimed it would taste like apple, and I was immediately curious.”

Hill begged her farmer-husband, Brad, for dried corncobs, but he patiently explained that cobs went out of fashion with yesterday’s corn pickers. Modern grain combines chew up and spit out the cobs, leaving them fit for little more than compost.

We grow 5 million acres of corn in South Dakota. That’s nearly a billion bushels, and yet cobs are hard to collect for many canners.

However, years later the ever-resourceful Hill began to strip her garden sweet corn for freezing and soon found herself ankle-deep in good cobs.”Now I had the Internet on my side when I searched for corncob jelly,” she says.”I tested a few recipes and found a method that suited me. It does somewhat taste like apple jelly, although not nearly as tart.”

For jelly with a little kick, she adds finely diced jalapeÒo to simmer with the corn stock before adding the sugar. Cloves, cinnamon sticks, star anise, cardamom pods, or a combination of any or all could be simmered with the corncobs when making the stock for a different kind of spice.

“The recipe is as adaptable as the homesteaders that created the concept of corncob jelly,” Hill says. Here is her recipe.

Corncob Jelly

12 ears sweet corn

water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

3 1/2 cups sugar

1 box (1.75 ounce) pectin

Before making the jelly, prepare the canner, jars and lids. Fill the canner with water, bring it to a boil, sterilize the jars and heat the lids according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Cut the corn kernels from the cobs. Set the corn aside for supper; it isn’t needed for this recipe.

Put the corncobs into a large, heavy pot. Add enough water to cover. Bring to a boil. After the corn stock has cooked for 1 hour, measure out 3 1/2 cups of liquid. At this point, you can strain out the bits of stray corn that loosened from the cobs, but I don’t. I like the added texture and interest.

In a smaller, heavy pot, bring the 3 1/2 cups of corn stock and lemon juice to a boil. Stir in the sugar. When sugar has dissolved and the mixture returns to a boil, add the pectin. Return to a hard boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

Ladle into sterilized jars, leaving a 1/2-inch headspace, and seal. Process for 10 minutes in the water bath canner. (Yield: 3 pints … I use 1/2 and 1/4-pint jars.)

Note: If you are unsure of the canning process, there are many informative websites that can help.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Raclette: A Toasty Alpine Delicacy

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Marc and Sonja Hoffmann of Sioux Falls serve a traditional Swiss delicacy called raclette as part of Sonja’s online business, Raclette Corner.

Perhaps you’ve seen the Facebook videos in which half-wheels of creamy cheese are heated until the top layer is melted, bubbly and slightly browned, then scraped off onto a waiting dish of food. That gooey cascade of cheese is a Swiss treat called raclette, and a Sioux Falls woman named Sonja Hoffmann promotes its deliciousness as part of her online business, Raclette Corner.

The daughter of a Swiss mother, Hoffmann grew up in Germany, but her husband Marc’s career as a software consultant brought their family to Sioux Falls in 1998. She started selling European cookware online a few years later.”I decided that as much as I love my children, I needed something a little bit extra,” she says. Hoffmann was the first U.S. distributor for raclette grills, tabletop cheese melters that are common in Swiss, French and German households but were almost unheard of in America. Gradually, her cheesy product lines garnered more attention. In 2007, she started RacletteCorner.com, and by 2018, decided it was time to shutter the original cookware site.”I just decided to focus on raclette because it’s fun,” she says.

The word raclette comes from the French racler, “to scrape,” pointing to the cheese’s origins in the French-speaking Valais region of Switzerland, where the dish was created due to nomadic necessity. For thousands of years, Alpine herdsmen have driven livestock from their winter valley homes to high-altitude summer pastures in a seasonal migration called transhumance. When herds went into the mountains, the herdsmen carried hearty peasant provisions with good keeping qualities, like cheese and potatoes. Add in a fire, and sooner or later, somebody was going to put the three elements together, toasting the cheese over the flames and sliding it onto the boiled potatoes. Racletting references have been found in medieval manuscripts dating back to the 13th century.

Raclette is a semi-hard cows’ milk cheese that has been washed in brine, giving it an edible rind and a somewhat powerful aroma.”It doesn’t necessarily taste that good when you eat it raw,” Hoffmann says, but melting helps tame the cheese’s flavor.”It loses that extreme taste, and it’s just nice and creamy.” Traditionally, the cheese tops a plate of new potatoes, cornichons and salad, but the Hoffmanns enjoy racletting a diverse array of foods, including hamburgers, pork chops, red peppers, mushrooms, pears and shrimp. After all, what doesn’t taste better with a little melted cheese on top?

In addition to online sales, Hoffmann offers raclette melter rentals and caters small raclette parties in the Sioux Falls area. A few years ago, she brought the culinary experience to Sioux Falls Germanfest and a few other special events. And while it’s sometimes difficult to get Midwesterners to try something new, once they have that first taste, they tend to want more, as Hoffmann discovered while serving ham and raclette cheese sandwiches at the Sioux Empire Arts and Crafts Show.”We had one lady who came back, and she was yelling, ‘I have to have a second one of these. This is the best food I ever had!'” Hoffmann remembers.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Bison, Anyone?

By Bernie Hunhoff

Bison meat is gaining popularity at restaurants in the Black Hills and western South Dakota. Sandi McLain, longtime proprietor of Big Thunder Gold Mine in Keystone, says visitors from around the globe are eager to try the legendary food staple of the western prairies.

“We run more of a quick-food-style place,” says McLain. After panning for gold in the actual 1890s Big Thunder mine, parents and kids develop quite an appetite so hearty buffalo burgers are often a hit. Some hungry and adventurous”miners” even try McLain’s Rattlesnake & Pheasant Sausage.

McLain believes buffalo and wild game of all types are gaining popularity in the Hills. Just in Keystone, she says her fellow restaurateurs the Front Porch, Ruby House and Powder House Lodge all now have wild game on the menu.

Unfortunately, most of Keystone’s eateries are closed for the winter but McLain shared a buffalo meatloaf recipe that may someday end up on her Big Thunder menu.

Big Thunder Buffalo Meatloaf

(Makes approximately 6 servings)

2 pounds ground bison
1 carrot, cubed
1 red bell pepper, chopped
4 button mushrooms chopped
3 cloves garlic
1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 yellow onion, chopped
2 cups fresh breadcrumbs
1/4 cup milk
1 egg
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon steak sauce
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 pinch cayenne pepper

Use food processor to pulse onion, carrot, celery, bell pepper, mushrooms and garlic until finely chopped. Add vegetable mixture and rosemary in skillet and cook and stir for about 5 minutes until vegetables soften. Mix vegetable mixture, bread crumbs and milk in bowl, then cool to room temperature. Stir egg, salt, steak sauce and peppers into vegetable mixture. Add buffalo meat and mix with your hands until blended.

Lay in baking dish. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake for about 30 minutes. Glaze if you wish (perhaps brown sugar with ketchup or mustard). Then bake another 30 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes, slice and serve.

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A Time-Traveled Treat

By Katie Hunhoff

Ashley Frerichs brought her family’s kringle tradition from North Dakota. She and her husband, Jason, live on a farm near Wilmot with their daughter, Elizabeth.

When Ashley Vangsness, of Kindred, North Dakota, fell in love with Jason Frerichs, she knew he wasn’t going to leave his South Dakota farm. So after they married she packed up her clothes and keepsakes and moved to South Dakota. She also brought her mom’s Swedish kringle recipe.

Kringle, it seems, has a tradition of traveling from place to place. In fact, the Scandinavian treat might be one of the best traveled delicacies in the world. Although often considered to be a Danish creation that spread throughout Scandinavia, kringle’s origins can be traced back to a baker’s mistake in Paris 375 years ago.

A French baking apprentice named Claudius Gelee forgot to add butter to his bread dough. He decided to layer the butter into the dough later, and the result was a light and flaky pastry.

In 1622, Gelee opened his own cafe to serve his newfound pastry, which the French began calling”a thousand leaves.” He next introduced the dough in Florence, Italy, where the technique was copied by Italian bakers, who called it”folded pastry.” The Italians took the recipe to Austria, where it was again a success. Austrian bakers called the pastry”wienerbr¯d,” which means Viennese bread.

The recipe kept traveling. In 1850, a baker’s strike in Denmark caused an influx of Austrian bakers. They brought wienerbr¯d, which spread throughout Scandinavia, including Sweden.

Kringle is an Old Norse word meaning circle. Depending on local traditions, it is shaped into a pretzel, oval or circle. And can be either sweet or salty. The base is a variation of wienerbr¯d; sometimes several variations have been passed down in the same family.

Frerichs learned how to make her family’s kringle, a sweet recipe with almond filling and frosting, from her mother in North Dakota.”I started quite young, helping add the ingredients and slowly progressed to making it on my own. Most often, we made it for Christmas or special occasions throughout the year,” she says.

Last year, Frerichs made the treat as a fun way to announce her pregnancy to co-workers at Valley Queen Cheese in Milbank, decorating the plate with pink and blue almond frosting (since they didn’t know the baby’s sex). Since then, Ashley and Jason have welcomed a baby girl, Elizabeth. Ashley already plans on teaching her the family’s kringle tradition.

“Baking foods related to our heritage is important because it is tied to who you are as a person,” she says.”For me, Swedish kringle represents special memories, including baking with my mom and sister, along with enjoying a delicious treat. It is a way to bring home a little closer.”

Swedish Kringle

Ingredients

Crust:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 tablespoon water

Topping:

1 cup water

1/2 cup butter

1 cup (rounded) flour

3 eggs

1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring

Frosting:

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 cup butter, melted

1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring

cream as needed

Directions

Crust: Combine all ingredients with pastry blender. Pat two long strips, 3 inches wide, on a cookie sheet.

Topping: Heat together water and butter. When butter is melted, add flour all at once; immediately remove from heat. Stir until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in flavoring. Spread onto the unbaked crusts. Bake 45 minutes to 1 hour at 350 degrees.

Frosting: Combine powdered sugar and batter. Blend in almond flavoring. Add enough cream to make a good spreading consistency. Frost kringle while slightly warm.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Hunting Charles Mix Plums

By Janine Kern

Janine Kern’s family plum-making heritage is a sweet respite from her professional service on the South Dakota Supreme Court. She became the 49th justice in state history in November 2014.

As a 16-year-old living in Lake Andes I was only mildly interested in the conversations between my grandmother and my great aunts about the status of ripening plums on the river bottom in late August. There was much discussion about sending out my father to look for plum patches and whether various relatives should help in the hunt. In my teenage view this level of excitement wasn’t warranted for plum jam or any canning project for that matter.

Many years later I married a man named Greg and one of his many interests was canning. Once he traced a recipe for a jar of pickles he purchased at a roadside stand to the cook who was residing in a nursing home in western South Dakota. She was delighted to share the recipe.

Greg’s zest for canning turned my thoughts back to the beautiful plums available in shelterbelts, ditches, ravines and on the Missouri River bottom in Charles Mix County. So just as my grandmother had done 40 years earlier, I asked my father, Paul Kern, an avid outdoorsman, to scout for plum patches for future harvests.

Several years later talk turned to action, and we harvested a number of plum bushes in a shelterbelt on my parents’ land. We also scoured the ditches and river bottom looking for ripened plums while being mindful of the sharp branches on the bushes and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes. I know several industrious souls who have no qualms about picking and canning a pickup-full, but we settled for two 5-gallon pails of the biggest, juiciest plums we could find.

Over the years I discovered that conditions must be perfect for a plentiful plum harvest — namely a gentle spring without hard frosts and rain throughout the summer. These conditions are hard to come by in southeastern South Dakota, which causes me to ration plum jam throughout the year, never knowing if there will be another crop of plums. Fortunately, my father noted, it is easier to find plums now than it was when he was growing up because fewer people are harvesting them.

I took the two 5-gallon buckets of plums back to our home in Rapid City to prepare the fruit. Although there are other methods, such as boiling the whole plum and removing the pits after, I enjoy pitting the plums one at a time with a paring knife then putting them on to boil. We wear cloth garden gloves to protect our hands and arms from the splattering plum sauce. The aroma of the boiling plums is almost intoxicating.

Depending on individual preferences one can make jelly, syrup or jam with the desired consistency. We prefer jam over jelly because we like to see pieces of the plum when spread on hot buttered toast on a cold winter morning.

I am a novice canner and greatly admire those who fill their pantries with the bounty of their gardens. The colorful glass jars provide not only nutrition but also the fond memory of summer. Canning recipes passed down through generations are part of our heritage as South Dakotans. Hopefully the younger generations can be drawn into the wonderful world of canning without a 30-year delay like my own.

Janine’s Family Jam

Pick large beautiful plums if you can find them. Pit one at a time. Refrigerate fruit if it won’t be immediately canned. Sprinkle stored fruit with lemon juice and stir. Can last three days in the refrigerator until you are ready to tackle the project.

When ready to can use a food processor to chop plums to desired consistency. Place 13 cups of plums in a large canning pot. Mix 1/2 cup sugar and 2 boxes of low sugar pectin in a separate bowl and then add to plums. Bring to a full boil. Add 8 1/2 cups sugar a few cups at a time while stirring. Return to a full rolling boil for exactly 1 minute. Remove plum mixture from heat.

In a large processing pot have your jars preheating. In a small saucepan simmer jar lids and rings in water. Fill jars to 1/8 inch from top with plum mixture. Return to processing pot and boil 10 minutes. Remove the jam and place on the counter to cool. Listen to the jar lids pop, assuring you have a good seal. Serves as a powerful pick me up on a cold winter day. Makes 8 pints.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.