Our May/June issue includes a feature on Lake Poinsett, where well-known photographer Greg Latza and his family are the newest residents of a lake community that has attracted people to its shore for centuries. Latza sent us several beautiful photos taken the last few summers. We couldn’t use them all, so here are some that didn’t make the magazine.
At South Dakota Magazine we love telling stories about South Dakota, and we also love to tell about our great storytellers. Good literature brings us together as a people and helps us identify what life on the prairie is all about. C.S. Lewis described it best when he said, “We read to know we are not alone.”
In that spirit, what could be better than having all South Dakotans read and reflect on the same book? For 14 years the South Dakota Center for the Book (a part of the Humanities Council) has been selecting a book for the state to enjoy together. The choice is usually relevant to life in South Dakota.
Jane Smiley, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize winner, is the author of this year’s One Book South Dakota. Some Luck is the first of her trilogy that follows an Iowa family, the Langdons, through several generations.
The book takes the reader from 1920 to 1953, beginning as Rosanna and Walter Langdon welcome their firstborn son, Frank. The novel follows the Langdons through important historical events, the Depression and World War II, and highlights how changes on the farm impact family dynamics.
The Humanities Council encourages libraries and book clubs to host One Book discussions. Copies of Some Luck are available on loan for groups, and Humanities Council approved scholars often attend the gatherings to guide conversation.
The highlight of this year’s One Book discussion will come this fall at the Festival of Books when Jane Smiley discusses her story with festivalgoers. This year the event will be held in Brookings for the first time (Sept. 22-26). Smiley will be one of many writers who attend to connect with readers. The festival focuses on many subjects, including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, history, children and tribal writing. My personal favorites are the writer’s support presentation for writers by writers. Our South Dakota Magazine staffers attend the festival each fall and we’re always entertained and surprised by the speakers.
Until then, One Book is a great way to get involved. The concept of a community reading and discussing the very same book was launched in 1998 by Nancy Pearl, a Seattle librarian who believed that having people within a geographic area reflecting on the same book might create connections and enrich the reading experience. Now there are One Book programs across the United States and the world. I wish our magazine staff would have thought of the idea, but we’re happy Nancy did.
Groups interested in hosting a discussion group on Some Luck can apply through the South Dakota Humanities Council.
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| The Vega family includes (from left) Carlos Jr., Carlos, Pepe and Donny. |
Carlos Vega named the three restaurants he owns in eastern South Dakota after the city of his birth — Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. But the feeling you get when you walk into a Guadalajara on a blustery spring day in South Dakota — of having stumbled into a tropical, sunshiny alternate world — is all Tonal·.
The Guadalajaran suburb of Tonal· (pop. 374,000) is a mecca for artists and artisans. Home to the Museo Nacional de la Cer·mica, the city is renowned for its pottery, and has been a center of ceramic arts since pre-Hispanic times. At Thursday and Sunday art markets, visitors can shop for traditional bruÒido, bandera, petatillo and canelo style pottery and other handicrafts.
Over the years, Carlos’ wife Esther has made innumerable trips to Tonal· to curate the unmistakable ambience of a South Dakota Guadalajara — shipping back ornately carved tables, benches and chairs, metal sculpture, pottery and decorative art by the truckload. Almost every object has the cheery gleam of a burnished (bruÒido) urn. To open the door to a Guadalajara is to unleash a Nahuatl sunbeam, which can be a welcome respite from the beige of a long winter. The place hums with an ebullient energy. Even in summer, when the Glacial Lakes glisten and the prairie is a verdant green, Guadalajara just might be the wellspring of color where the cormorants score the emerald in their eyes.
So how does a working class guy from Guadalajara end up a restaurateur in eastern South Dakota? Carlos migrated to Seattle in the late 1980s to work with his brother Pepe at a restaurant owned by Pepe’s father-in-law.
“He started from the bottom,” Pepe (who recently moved from Seattle to manage the Brookings restaurant) says of Carlos, a man of few words. “He worked as a dishwasher…”
Carlos:”Dishwasher, cook, busboy, waiter, manager…”
Pepe:”He went up and up every position. He worked really hard to get to where he is right now.”
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| Mexican art is everywhere inside the Brookings Guadalajara’s, from the walls to the chairs. |
In the early 1990s, Carlos became intrigued by talk of a land of lakes to the east.”Some customers of Pepe’s had moved to Watertown and they said that it was a nice town for business,” he says.
“They told me, ‘Come to Watertown, they don’t have any Mexican businesses there,'” Pepe adds.
In 1995, Carlos left Seattle to address that situation. The brothers’ hunch about Watertown turned out to be right, at first. The opening year was good. But the winter of 1996 put a deep freeze on many business aspirations throughout the Dakotas and Minnesota, and almost ended Guadalajara.
“Those were really hard years with the snow,” Carlos says.
“The winter was really hard, when you hardly have enough to pay your employees,” Pepe says.”It was very difficult.”
Then the return of American pelicans to Watertown from their wintering grounds — perhaps on the Lago de Chapala — heralded spring. Carlos figured growth could be the antidote to snow. Guadalajara expanded to Madison, where it failed, but then found a footing in Brookings, where a couple of generations of college students have studied the extensive menu. He opened a store, El Tapatio, specializing in Mexican groceries next to the Brookings restaurant. Four years ago, the burgeoning Guadalajara mini-chain expanded to Sioux Falls.
With each new restaurant, Esther’s holistic, straight-from-Tonal· approach to the Guadalajara experience endears a new corps of loyal customers.
So, how’s the food? Your correspondent is not a food critic with the expertise to dive into culinary minutiae, so suffice it to say it’s plentiful and delicious. My finicky 8-month old daughter loved the lengua (so did I), which is all the endorsement I need.
Carlos’ sons, Carlos Jr., and Donny, are both involved in the business now, and the restaurants are established enough to allow Carlos Sr., and Esther to visit Guadalajara three or four times a year, giving Esther plenty of opportunities to scour the art markets. Carlos Jr., says he can see Guadalajara making further inroads into South Dakota in the future. Where? That’s a family secret for now.”Somewhere close to home,” he says.
Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.
Elementary school students in Brookings are learning about the life cycle of bees through a new video game developed by a team of young entrepreneurs.
“Buzz Whizz: Bees” allows children to play the roles of queen and worker bees while learning how the insects survive and benefit the ecosystem.
The game is the 
first project of Mantis Digital Arts, a small game design studio run by Coy Yonce. Kids begin as the queen 
bee digging out of hibernation. They build a hive and slowly transition to worker bees that fly in search of pollen, water and nectar and defend the hive against attackers. The game ends when the queen dies and the life cycle is complete.
Yonce and his staff have relied on input from teachers and parents in Brookings 
to create a game suited for children ages 4 to 10.
“We have people on staff tasked with making sure every part of the game is educational and others who are making sure it’s fun, so kids actually want to play it,” he says.
Yonce is working
 on another game 
with South Dakota State University professor Carter Johnson that shows how Johnson is transitioning a local farm from cropland back to native grasses.
Yonce plans to make the games available through the App Store for Android, iPhone and tablets.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Rachel Roe is a Norwegian in training. Growing up in Cincinnati, Roe never had krumkake, rosettes, kringla and other holiday treats beloved by South Dakota’s Scandinavians. After she moved to Brookings in 2004, her husband Jay’s family brought her up to speed.”The rosettes and the krumkake, I loved right off the bat. Krumkake reminds me a lot of Italian pizzelles, which I’ve had before. I had not ever heard of the rosettes, but was impressed by how flaky and delicate they are,” Roe says.
She hopes to someday teach her young son, Lex, about the food traditions from both sides of his family. To achieve that goal, Roe, who also writes a blog called Trampling Rose, is learning to make rosettes from her mother-in-law, Mary.”They are as fussy as I imagined,” Roe says. It’s not easy to master heating the rosette iron, dipping it in the thin batter and prying off the fragile cooked rosette with a fork, but the fuss is worth it.”You can’t go wrong with fried batter covered in sugar,” she says.
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2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup milk
Combine all ingredients and blend until smooth. Pour batter into a bread pan or other high-sided dish.
Pour 3 inches of vegetable oil in a Dutch oven or electric wok and heat to 350-400 degrees. Place rosette iron in to heat.
Remove iron when thoroughly heated, letting extra oil drain before dipping it into the batter. (The batter should sizzle and bubble.) Do not let batter cover the top of the iron. Place batter-covered iron back into the oil and cook until the rosette is crisp and golden brown. Remove rosette from iron and drain on newsprint or paper towels. Roll cooled rosettes in vanilla sugar before serving.
Editor’s Note: This is revised from a larger feature on holiday food traditions that appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
Cookies and Cream always cracks the Top 10 in popular ice cream flavor surveys, but the concoction didn’t even exist when South Dakota State University dairy science professor Shirley Seas embarked on a dairy judging trip to Atlantic City, N.J., in the mid-1970s. As he sat in a local restaurant, he noticed the staff crumbling Oreo cookies into vanilla ice cream. Seas sampled the concoction and was impressed. When he returned to Brookings, his students made a batch to test in a campus cafeteria.
“We have never heard so many compliments on a product,” Seas wrote of the experiment.”The fame of Oreo-flavored ice cream spread like a fire going through a dry grass field.”
Today there’s uncertainty over who gets credit for creating the flavor. Some people believe Cookies and Cream was invented at an ice cream shop in an Oregon mall. Others think it originated in Massachusetts. But students and faculty at SDSU take pride in their piece of Cookies and Cream history.
The flavor is just one of 60 varieties of ice cream and sherbet made on campus. SDSU’s dairy plant processes 10,000 pounds of raw milk every week. It is trucked from the dairy research and training facility a mile and a half north of campus, where 130 Holstein and Brown Swiss cows are milked three times a day. Students produce cheese, butter and milk, but Cookies and Cream ice cream remains a favorite. In 2012, they churned 4,750 gallons of their signature creation.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
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| Jan Sanderson has been raising rhubarb in his gardens outside of Aurora for over 35 years. |
“Everyone who has a rhubarb plant has a story about it,” says Jan Sanderson, the Rhubarb King of Brookings County. He runs Sanderson Gardens, a fruit and vegetable oasis bordered by corn and soybean fields.
Sanderson is always searching for new rhubarb to transplant, and he takes a notebook with him to record the histories of each plant.”If you could follow their history far back enough,” Sanderson says,”you would find all of our rhubarb came from England or the Nordic countries.”
The English used the vegetable as a food about 200 years ago, calling it pie plant. But for thousands of years before that, Chinese would grind rhubarb root as medicine, most commonly as a laxative, diuretic, astringent and detoxifier. The name rhubarb comes from the ancient Romans who knew that the plant was used by barbarians near the Rha River. The word is a combination of the words rha (an ancient name for the Volga River in Russia) and the Greek word barbarus meaning barbarians.
Rhubarb is enjoying a renaissance, Sanderson says. He can hardly keep up with demand, especially from local wineries. Rhubarb’s tart flavor and rich coloring make it a popular ingredient. Sanderson’s rhubarb has both, thanks to years of hunting for the best varieties.
“Genetics are the secret to great rhubarb,” he says. He likes plants with pretty color and few seed stalks. He clones his favorites by digging up the crown, the part of the rhubarb that is above the roots but below the ground. The crown contains the meristem, which is like the plant’s stem cell system. He cuts the crown into several chunks and replants them. The new rhubarb will be an identical copy of the parent plant.
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| It seems nearly every yard has a patch of rhubarb, and all of it can be traced to England or the Nordic countries in Europe. |
Sanderson began his rhubarb crop over 30 years ago with two rows of Valentine and Canada Red varieties from his parents’ garden. He advertised in local papers that he would remove or trim plants for people, and he would search for plants he liked. Through the years he’s developed a variety he calls Sanderson Red. At one time he had eight acres devoted to the tart vegetable.
Rhubarb is a strong plant, says Sanderson. Once it takes root, it keeps getting bigger and bigger. A deep root system helped plants survive the Great Depression, and the toxic leaves protect against chewing insects. Sanderson has even made an organic insecticide from the leaves.
Sanderson started growing produce in 1977 on his parents’ farm 4 miles east of Brookings along Highway 14. The season kicks off each spring with the sprouting of rhubarb and strawberries. Next come sweet corn, raspberries and pumpkins. Barbarians are few and far between in Brookings County, but there are lots of people there who appreciate the summer bounty of Sanderson Gardens.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
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When Sanderson was a boy growing up near Sisseton, he and his seven siblings would eat rhubarb stalks raw, dipped in sugar. Although the raw rhubarb was a treat, Sanderson’s all-time favorite recipe is from his ex-wife, Liz. He recommends eating it hot with vanilla ice cream.
Mix 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/4 cup flour, (Liz uses whole wheat) 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, and dash salt. Add 3 beaten eggs; beat smooth. Stir in 4 cups 1-inch slices rhubarb.
Prepare pastry for 9-inch lattice-top pie. Line 9-inch pie plate with pastry. Fill with rhubarb mixture. Adjust lattice top; seal. Bake at 375 degrees for 50 minutes.
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| Sheriff E.E. Sherman (center) displayed whiskey-making equipment on the steps of the Union County Courthouse after a raid in the 1920s. |
South Dakota jumped the gun on prohibition, passing a”dry” law more than two years before the 18th Amendment bottled up the nation’s booze business in 1920. What followed the 1917 South Dakota law and the later federal mandate uncorked a lengthy cat and mouse game. Moonshiners (the manufacturers) and bootleggers (retailers in Model As) became skilled at hiding stills and stashes from state and federal agents and the local law who worked night and day sniffing out the illegal white mule, as many called the homemade brew.
Nearly every South Dakota county and community had its covert booze operations, and most citizens with an occasional or unremitting itch for John Barleycorn knew where to find it. When the South Dakota constitution was drafted in Sioux Falls for a citizen vote in 1889, some wanted prohibition included. Fearful the emotional issue would influence the constitution vote, delegates wrote a prohibition amendment as a stand-alone ballot question.
Both the constitution and prohibition passed, and the 1890 South Dakota legislature framed a law making manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol illegal.
Five years later, citizens had a change of heart and voted prohibition out. Swinging doors were oiled, shot glasses washed, brass rails polished and the state’s often vilified saloons were back in business.
But by 1916, better-organized dry factions – the Anti-Saloon League, churches and the Women’s Christian Temperance League headed for decades by Flora Mitchell of Brookings – succeeded in getting another vote that hoisted South Dakotans back up on the prohibition wagon. After considering a state-run liquor business in which state liquor agents would keep names and amounts purchased, legislative reason prevailed. Liquids sold as beverages could have zero percent alcohol. The edict was christened the”bone-dry” law.
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| In 1917, Gov. Peter Norbeck signed a law creating the office of State Sheriff to more vigorously enforce federal prohibition laws. Lawmakers appropriated $3,000 to fund the effort. |
To enforce the law, the legislature created the Office of State Sheriff. Later, the 18th Amendment was passed and federal agents were assigned to the state. Even with these units, law enforcement could hardly keep up with the growing number of stills whose operators were merrily churning out and hiding liquor of varying quantity and quality.
Stills steamed away in caves, isolated shacks, cornfields, timber stands, sandy river islands and on isolated farms. Stashes of booze were found in post holes, automobile spare tires, souped-up cars, straw stacks, potato piles, seeder boxes, and even hollow cemetery grave markers.
Hiding the bottled booze was a challenge. Interestingly, post hole digging tools made cool, camouflaged repositories slightly larger than the round alcohol bottles, and post holes could be sunk in the least likely of places, like chicken houses. Weedy road culverts were handy. The augers of idle threshing machines made passable liquor cabinets.
Another clever hiding place was discovered in Brookings County. The county road grader operator discovered more than a dozen one gallon jugs of booze buried up to their corked necks among roadside weeds near Bruce. Opposite each buried bottle, a piece of white cloth was tied to the fence as a subtle marker.
Newspapers were splashed with stories of still or stash discoveries. In 1923, Meade County Deputy Sheriff Fred Westgate said illegal stills were so prevalent in West River country”one can hardly put his foot down without stepping on one.”
A Sisseton farmer sold his powerful homemade”medication” at a rheumatism clinic he founded. A remarkable number of Roberts County men were soon afflicted and sought treatment until the law intervened.
By the 1930s Hank Kempel of Sioux Falls had brought together a group of young toughs to distribute illegal booze trucked in from Al Capone’s Chicago monopoly, and local police were soon dealing with what they called”the Kempel Gang.”
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| Verne Miller was a Beadle County sheriff who turned to bootlegging and organized crime. |
Dempster Mayor John DeWall cracked a wry smile in 1931 and appointed a committee to review applications from the five different bootleggers active in Hamlin County for a local distribution franchise. Committee members played along, but wanted samples.
The annual reports of the state sheriff show the extent of the problem. The 1923-24 report cites the arrest of 178 still operators. Concurrently, federal agents, county sheriffs and U.S. marshals were also barging in and breaking up bubbling sites.
After state deputy sheriffs raided the Schwenk farm in Yankton County on Dec. 7, 1921, two trucks hauled away a plethora of beer making gear, including”three testers, 800 quart cans of canned malt, 100 gallons of malt in barrels, twelve quarts Primo, nine cases hops, two bales of hops, three dozen packages of hops, twenty-one capping machines, one can sealer, one box hose holders, two gross cans, seven dozen packages gelatin, 800 pounds of bottle caps, fifteen packages of labels, 78 packages of rubber stoppers, two boxes of siphon hose and 100 pounds of shot.” The pellets were used to help clean particularly dirty beer bottles for reuse.
Later that year at a farm in Hutchinson County, officers arrested L. T. Kleinsasser, W. T. Warne and Peter Hofer, and seized one stove and feed cooker, two sacks of bottles, 300 gallons of mash, one sack of rye, one cooler coil, six barrels, one milk can, one bushel basket and more. Firearms, knives and brass knuckles were often found among the moonshiners’ assets. In a 1923 raid near Sisseton, the outraged moonshiner hurled a barbed fish spear at an officer, but missed.
As agents became more proficient at finding stills, moonshiners became more adroit at hiding them. Near Elk Point in late 1924, agents found a 10-by-40-foot cave in a cornfield covered with boards and dirt. The dugout held a 100-gallon capacity still to process 40 awaiting barrels of fermenting mash. Agents also found a six-burner kerosene stove, supplies of sugar, rye and yeast, and an impressive inside water well.
To enter a suspected moonshine cave near the town appropriately named Rumford in Fall River County in 1931, agents climbed down a ladder inside a well and squeezed through a wall opening where they found a 100-gallon still.
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| Law officers often posed for news photographers with firearms and liquor confiscated in raids. This 1918 photo was taken in Brookings. |
More squalid still locations were hidden under hog houses, barn stalls and manure piles. At the Hamandberg farm north of Harrisburg agents found a trap door under a resting cow in a barn stall leading to an underground still. Caves under hog pens were particularly filthy. The dripping effluent percolating from above mixed with the mash, but these”mixed drinks,” did not deter sales. Another common secret ingredient was poison caused by lead from corrosive evaporation coils.
Agents often found mash with drowned mice, bugs and birds floating on top. And in some cases officers had to shoo chickens off mash barrel roosts, but most moonshiners didn’t operate this way. They considered their product among the finest available, such as the alcohol made the old-world way by Adolph Schelske of Parkston. His daughter Leona Pietz describes her father’s still in a book, Memories of a Bootlegger’s Daughter. Leona’s daily chore was to carefully stir the fermenting, bubbling mash.
The used mash from Schelske’s barrels was discarded through a pipe draining to a nearby stream where, Pietz wrote, the mash attracted and nourished happy fish that were later caught and eaten.
Moonshiner Bert Miller of Hill City was described as a”master distiller” by Carl West, the Minneapolis Prohibition Enforcement Department’s chief chemist in 1924. Moonshiners Miller and Schelske were just two of many South Dakotans who sought to perfect their brew.
As prohibition nationally and eventually in South Dakota was ending, federal and state agents raided two”super stills,” one in northern Clay County and another west of Sioux Falls. Both expertly engineered, leading officials to suspect Al Capone’s operation in Chicago may have provided financing.
The coming of the automobile was a bootlegger’s dream, expanding his territory and his carrying capacity. The largest auto liquor cargo ever found in South Dakota was on July 11, 1932, west of Huron. Officers counted 228 one-gallon tins of booze in Bernard”Bud” Bruns’ re-vamped 1932 Buick five-passenger coupe. They also confiscated his .45 caliber pistol and two glass jars filled with roofing nails to throw out and disable police cars during a chase.
Violence was a by-product of the business. Flandreau bootlegger Ira Dawson shot it out with two deputies in White, a small Brookings County town, in May of 1928. Dawson died en route to the Brookings Hospital. At the Chrisman farm near Redfield, bootlegger Chrisman ambushed and killed two agents.
Most state and federal agents were straight arrows, but bad apples did succumb to the lure of payoff money. Verne Miller, a personable, handsome World War I hero from White Lake, became Beadle County Sheriff in 1920, but soon turned south and became a hired killer for eastern mobsters. His killings put him on the FBI’s most wanted list, but his underworld enemies found him first.
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| Edward Senn was a newspaperman and a crusader for prohibition in South Dakota. |
The superstar of dry agents in South Dakota was Edward L. Senn, the crusading Deadwood Daily Telegram newspaper editor-publisher who became federal prohibition administrator in 1925 and served until national prohibition ended in 1933. He was tireless and often led raids by agents the press called”Senn’s Raiders.”
Senn’s heart must have been broken when national prohibition ended in 1933. South Dakota and its bone-dry law continued for nearly two more years, much to the chagrin of wets.
The state became an island in a sea of sloshing liquor in surrounding states. Calling a special legislative session to end the bone dry law was made more complicated because Governor Tom Berry feared a just-passed gross income tax vote might crop up in a special session along with the prohibition question.
The wets finally won out in April of 1935, and the state’s journey astride the white mule was over.
Editor’s Note: Chuck Cecil is a longtime South Dakota author and newspaperman. These stories are condensed from his book Astride the White Mule, the only book ever written about the state’s prohibition years. The 200 pp. softcover is available for $15, plus $3 shipping/taxes, from Books, P.O. Box 608, Volga, S.D. 57071. This article is revised from the July/August 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
A young lady from South Dakota is the modern-day”Marlin Perkins” for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Earlier this week I had a chance to get acquainted with her when she spoke at a meeting of South Dakota’s retired teachers in Pierre.
Stephanie Arne breaks all the molds. She was a high-achiever at Riggs High School in Pierre, and enjoyed her years as a biology student at South Dakota State University.
But she’s not the 9-5 type, so as soon as she got her degree in Brookings she took to the road — working for any wildlife organization that had an opening. It hardly seemed like a great career path. She took low wage jobs with the country’s finest zoos in Omaha, San Diego and Honolulu. Good experiences if you love critters, and she does. Not a good way to save for your first mortgage.
Even zoos couldn’t hold her back. She eventually traveled the world for a decade, finding ways to work with animals in Thailand, Japan and Africa. She showed up in Australia without a clue as to how she was going to make ends meet, and soon she was giving wildlife tours on day charters.
She became known as a wildlife ambassador — a person passionate about birds and animals and the challenges they face on an fast-changing planet.”You should have a show,” friends kept saying.
And then she heard about a job opening with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, one of the most respected wildlife shows in the history of broadcasting. She and about 500 others applied. Upon meeting her, it’s no surprise that she won the position once held by renowned naturalists Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler.
She acknowledged that while she always had the support of her parents and teachers, they probably didn’t figure she was on a great professional trajectory while earning barely sustainable wages, sometimes for scooping pelican poop. We expect our youth to be more responsible: stay safe, earn your way and fit the mold of today’s demanding workplace. Be a square peg in a square hole.
Fortunately, Stephanie followed her heart. She did what she loved, what she thought was important. By those important standards, she was a success even before she was chosen to host Wild Kingdom.
Steph strongly credits her South Dakota upbringing and education, and is proud to always call this home. Several of her teachers were in the audience as she spoke. Buttons were busting off their jackets as she spoke about the importance of a great teacher.
Now she’s teaching the world about the nature. She’s known as the wildlife ambassador, but she’s also a fine ambassador for Pierre and Brookings and our entire South Dakota. And for young people brave enough to resist the normal patterns of society.
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| Delicate white sugar cookies are a holiday tradition for Staci Perry and countless other South Dakota families. |
My grandma Janet Moe has always arrived at Christmas dinners carrying a bucket delicately packed with thin, white cookies twinkling with fine sugar. A few years ago, we allowed ourselves to accept that grandma would not be the white cookie matriarch forever. She humbly shared the recipe with us, which is particularly light on instruction, and said,”I don’t do anything special to them.” I knew it was time for me to learn how to make her signature cookies.
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| Staci Perry and her grandmother, Janet Moe. |
As we baked that day, I pictured my grandpa, his hands the size of little league gloves, grabbing a handful of grandma’s white cookies and steeping them into his steaming coffee until soggy crumbs floated to the top. It was one of his favorite cookies. But that’s no surprise. His mother gave the white cookie recipe to his lovely bride, and his father made the richly-marbled apple wood rolling pin that grandma still uses.
After almost 70 years of warmly saturating her home with the sweet scent of homemade goodies, grandma’s baking sheets have become almost too heavy for one oven mitt to hold, the dough is getting harder for aged hands to stir, and her kitchen counters have mysteriously gotten taller.
Although my first crack at baking grandma’s cookies taught me that it would take practice before they look perfect like hers, my kids devoured them when I got home. And grandma asked me to come back and make them again. To me, that’s what baking and sharing is all about.
Now it’s my turn to give grandma a tall, plastic bucket overflowing with family tradition and sweet memories that will spread farther than a handful of flour tossed into the South Dakota wind.
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2 cups white sugar
1 cup vegetable shortening (not butter-flavored)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sour cream, room temperature
1 teaspoon baking soda
6 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
White sugar to sprinkle on top of the cookies
Flour for rolling out the cookies
Prep: Bring the eggs to room temperature, approximately 30 minutes. At the same time, measure 1 cup of sour cream into a medium bowl and stir in 1 teaspoon of baking soda. The sour cream will swell as the soda dissolves.
Make the dough: In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat white sugar and shortening together until creamy.
In a separate bowl, vigorously stir eggs with a table fork or small whisk until well beaten. Add to the sugar mixture and beat on medium-high until combined.
Spoon sour cream into the batter and add vanilla. Beat on medium-high for 3 minutes, turning off the mixer a few times to scrape down the sides of the bowl.
Into a separate large bowl, dump 6 1/2 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder, stirring so the powder is dispersed throughout. Add the flour to the cookie batter 1 cup at a time, beating on medium-low speed after each addition until all the flour is incorporated and the dough is stiff. If it’s not firming, sprinkle in more flour until stiff. Depending on the mixer’s power, you may need a thick wooden or heavy metal spoon to stir in the last few cups of flour by hand.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least two hours or overnight. The batter is ready when it’s firm and doesn’t stick on your finger. If the dough remains sticky, add a little more flour.
Roll out and bake cookies: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. On a heavily floured surface, roll a handful of cookie dough into a flattened 1/8-inch thick sheet, dusting with flour to prevent sticking.
Cut the cookies using a lightly floured 2- or 3-inch round biscuit or cookie cutter, turning the cutter slightly as you lift it off the dough. Slide a lightly floured spatula under each cookie to ease it from the surface and transfer to a cookie sheet, lining cookies 1 inch part. (If the cookie sticks to the counter, there wasn’t enough flour on the rolling surface so add more next round.)
Scatter sugar onto the tops of the cookies. Bake 7-8 minutes. The cookies go from white to golden brown in a matter of seconds so watch closely in the last minute. The whiter the cookies, the softer they are in the middle. For a crisper cookie, bake 8-10 minutes, removing from oven as they turn darker brown.
Transfer to cooling rack. Repeat in batches until the dough is gone. Makes approximately seven dozen cookies.
Staci Perry blogs at www.RandomSweetnessBaking.wordpress.com. She is also the corporate communications manager for Daktronics in Brookings.
