Chili Changes: Old traditions and new

Old traditions and new mingle in a bowl of spicy comfort food
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
(unpublished so far -- except for on this blog)

Chunks of meat stewed with chili peppers: that’s the essence of traditional chili, a dish with ancient origins in Mexico and points south. Some accounts credit the cattle drivers of the Old West with inventing chili – as the story goes, cowboys pounded together dried beef and chili peppers, then stewed up the mix while on the trail. But as chef and writer Rick Bayless, widely regarded as this nation’s foremost authority on Mexican cuisine, points out in his book “Authentic Mexican,” the idea is farfetched – both ethnocentric and sexist. For millennia, human beings on the American continents have been eating both meat and chili peppers. The first one to put them in a cooking pot together was assuredly not a white male.

Chili does come to us from the Southwest border regions where Mexican and American cultures and cuisines mingle, but its roots go back centuries, through generations of cooks who learned how to soften both the toughness of meat and the chili pepper’s fierce flavor with hours of slow cooking.

History has the demimondaines of old San Antonio dishing out chili from nighttime open air stalls near the Alamo. By the late 19th century, the fiery hash was a Texas specialty, and the state sponsored a chili exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. This became the venue through which chili – like the Ferris wheel, diet soda and Juicy Fruit gum – entered the American mainstream.

Beans, tomatoes and even ground beef are twentieth-century, middle American introductions. Authentic or no, I like beans in my chili. Their starch thickens the broth, and they add a wonderful, creamy flavor. But when there’s time for the additional prep and the slow cooking, the traditional chunks of beef have a lot over ground. Chunks add a rustic quality, and they’re fun to eat and prepare. I enjoy the sensuousness of cutting a big slab of meat into pieces, of seeing how individual and distinct each piece remains, how impossible it is to make them perfectly uniform. Note that you need a good, sharp knife for this to be fun instead of toil. A heavy cleaver is ideal, but a 6" or 8" chef’s knife will work well, too.

[The recipe]
Here’s my favorite chili recipe, a full-flavored stew I’ve tinkered with over the years to incorporate various elements from Mexican cookery. Note the absence of commercially mixed “chili powder”! About the ingredients: Chiles anchos aren’t hot; they add a dark, gentle sweetness to long-cooking dishes. In Mexico, the rich, dusky flavor of cocoa is used in many dishes, not just in sweet desserts; here, it plays against the chiles anchos beautifully. The earthy, faintly tangy herb epazote (available dried from Penzey’s) goes well with beans. Masa harina is a finely ground corn flour. And the red pepper flakes are the only hot ingredient: adjust according to your preference. For me, the amount of heat given here is pleasantly peppery. However, sensitivity to capsaicin, the hot stuff in chili peppers, varies among individuals and through time.

2 pounds beef, cut in 2" cubes. You want a tough, cheap cut, like shank, chuck or brisket, for a slow-cooked, tender stew.
2 Tbs. oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1-2 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 Tbs. epazote, dried and fine
1 Tbs. Mexican oregano
1 Tbs. cumin, ground
1 Tbs. cilantro (fresh or dried)
1 Tbs. cocoa powder (unsweetened)
5 (or one package) dried chile ancho pods, stems removed
2 (15 oz.) cans kidney beans, including juice
2 cans (14 oz) tomatoes (Diced, stewed, whole, or whatever you like)
1 cup hot water

2-4 Tbs. masa harina ( or corn starch) mixed in some cold water (optional)

In a big (six-quart), heavy pot set on medium-high heat, add oil and brown the meat in batches, transferring to a bowl. Reduce heat to medium-low, add onions and garlic and return the meat to the pot. Simmer 10 minutes, covered. Add all other ingredients (except the masa, which is used for thickening at the end). Simmer gently, covered, another 2 to 3 hours, stirring occasionally. When the meat is tender, stir in the masa harina and water and simmer for a couple of minutes. You can garnish the servings with a sprig of fresh cilantro. This is a delicious one-dish meal in itself, but for a super-hearty repast that’ll keep you satisfied for hours, ladle over a wedge of your favorite corn bread.

Mount Horeb, Wisconsin

Norwegian heritage is alive in this magical southwestern Wisconsin town
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Wisconsin Trails, March-April 2002
Gone for the Weekend, Spring/Summer Travel Guide
Photos: Kortney Kaiser

In Norwegian legend, trolls guard hidden treasures. On visiting Mt. Horeb, a tiny hilltop burg perched just within Wisconsin’s rugged Driftless Region, I figured out the secret to its improbably dense cluster of unique attractions: the place is protected by trolls.

How else to explain, for instance, Cave of the Mounds a few miles away? Discovered in 1939 by miners quarrying for gravel, the cave is a miraculous trove of geologic splendors millions of years old. By rights it should’ve been demolished 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age—but the glaciers stopped just short. “Any cave in other parts of Wisconsin would’ve been crushed,” Joe Klimczak, who manages the cave’s tourist operations with his wife, Anne Wescott, tells me. “The glaciers really scoured the earth flat.” Joe lets drop that trolls, celebrated in sign and sculpture everywhere in and around Mt. Horeb, have a special affinity for minerals.

So it was trolls who kept this spectacular cache safe and hidden.

As we walk underground, where it’s a comfy 50 degrees year-round, Joe switches various lights on and off. A stalactite appears, slowly dripping water onto a point of rock. Each back-lit drop explodes into a sparkling pompon of light and color. Joe makes other formations appear and disappear: hollow “soda straws,” a painted waterfall, strips of bacon, coral.

Though not as large as some other tourist-accessible caves, this has more variety of shape and color than most. “It’s remarkably decorated,” Joe tells me. “It looks like an artist painted it—minerals like iron oxide and manganese give the different colors.” Then the former electrical engineer uses a term I’ll hear often around Mt. Horeb: “It’s a magical place.”

Cave of the Mounds is located on the 1828 homestead of Ebenezer Brigham, the first white settler in Dane County. Brigham owned the pair of limestone peaks known as the Blue Mounds. His descendants still own the cave and some surrounding East Mound land. Most of this mound is now Brigham County Park, which offers camping, hiking trails, and scenic views. The West Mound is the site of Blue Mound State Park, home to the state park system’s only Olympic-size swimming pool.

At the park, the splashes and squeals of children slip away as I start along a narrow, hilly path winding among huge, green-patched boulders. The day is hot, but the woods are cool, dark, green. At the top of the mound I leave the solitude of the forest to join the groups of people who’ve driven to the upper parking lot to climb the wooden lookout tower and behold, through this day’s blue haze, a colorful, hilly vista of farms and forests. Thanks to the trolls who protected the Blue Mounds from destruction by glacier, this is the highest point in southern Wisconsin.

In a tiny wooded valley nearby, I explore Little Norway, a living history museum patterned after the outdoor museums of Norway. There a guided tour takes visitors through furnished farm buildings: a storage house on stilts, a sod-roofed cabin, a spring house, more.

Once a Norwegian farmstead, in 1927 Little Norway was purchased as a summer retreat. Isak Dahle, a Chicago businessman who grew up in Mt. Horeb, restored the traditional Norwegian farmhouse buildings on the property. He had the furniture and buildings decorated according to Norwegian custom, with paints and carvings. “He was a third generation Norwegian who felt he’d lost his heritage,” says manager Scott Winner, a great-grand-nephew of Dahle. “He recreated the place for his family, not for public display.”

In 1935, Dahle added the Norway Building. This ornate wooden structure, patterned after ancient Norwegian churches and using Viking motifs, was originally built in Norway for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

News of the farmstead and its treasures spread, and people began showing up to see it. “He’d come to visit, and there’d be people walking in buildings, looking in drawers.” Little Norway officially opened to the public soon after.

“This is a place time has forgotten,” Scott says, “The magic here is really special.” Little Norway’s other name is Nissedahle, or “Valley of the Elves.” And there are trolls here, too: wooden carvings by local artist Mike Feeney dot the landscape, part of the Mt. Horeb “Trollway.”

Most of Feeney’s statues are downtown, along Main Street, where, though it’s only 20 miles southwest of Madison and just off a major highway, Mt. Horeb feels like a remote getaway.

Driving westward on 18-151, I pass the site of the original town center at the intersection with 78. Centered around the meeting spot of several roads, the community was once known as “The Corners.” During the Civil War, Norwegian immigrants began calling the place “Stangjii,” or Liberty Pole. Today, long-established local businesses line what was once a military road to the Mississippi: Yapp’s Antiques in a boxy old brick building, the Danish-modern Karakahl Motor Inn. Cheerfully appointed Victorian manses house gift and antique shops.

Soon I reach “New Town,” the heart of Mt. Horeb’s commercial district. When the railway sited a depot here in 1881, businesses relocated and used the name once given to the post office at the nearby farm of a Methodist Episcopal minister (Mt. Horeb is where Moses saw the burning bush). Downtown is a comfortable jumble of old and new: 19th and early 20th century storefronts—some slickly renovated—and modern structures. Particularly striking, in an offbeat way, is the mid-century Mount Horeb Telephone Company building adorned with giant Viking-themed motifs: a horned cap, a ship. Across the street, Dick’s Market, a homey grocery store seemingly out of a Norwegian spin-off of Mayberry RFD, sells homemade brats, jerky and lefse, a sort of Norwegian potato tortilla. Dick tells me, with a jolly smile, that he ships lefse all over the country at Christmas time. Does he advertise? Does he have a Web site? No. How do people find out about him? “Beats me,” he says with a shrug.

Downtown bustles, but somehow I can always find a parking spot right in front of the shop I’m headed for. I chalk it up to trolls.

Though it’s only 20 miles southwest of Madison, just off a major highway, Mt. Horeb feels like a remote getaway. As well as boasting a fine array of gift shops and eateries, Mt. Horeb is an antique shopper’s paradise, with over 100 dealers represented in its many storefronts and antique malls. Wares range from high-ticket items like jewelry and fine refinished furniture to collectibles like glassware and old kitchen tools.

Also on Main Street is the quirky Mount Horeb Mustard Museum (see related article in this issue's State Talk), which displays antique mustard memorabilia and sells thousands of varieties of mustards from around the world; every one is available for a taste test.

A few blocks off Main Street. I visit the house where Isak Dahle, Little Norway’s founder, grew up. Built in 1908 by his father, U.S. Congressman Herman B. Dahle, this graceful Victorian home with unusual neoclassical and mission-style elements is soon to enter the National Register of Historic Places, thanks to the efforts of its newest owners, Don and Peggy Donaldson from Naperville, Ill. In 2001, they renovated the house and opened it for business as the Arbor Rose Bed & Breakfast. Fortunately, Peggy says, the Dahle house was treated well through the years. “Every piece of hardware matches—doorknobs, window pulls, everything. We feel so privileged to be here. It’s not just our house—it belongs to the whole community.”

Before giving me a tour of the rose-themed B&B rooms upstairs—cozy antique-furnished rooms, a step-up 4-poster canopy bed, a shady upstairs porch—the Donaldsons ply me with homemade sweet treats and coffee. Peggy tells me about her trademark apricot-glazed Arbor Rose rolls, which rise overnight in a fruity almond sauce. “They’re gooey, but good,” Peggy says. “I usually share recipes, but this one, I’m keeping secret.”

A winding ride from the center of town through Stewart County Park takes me to another B&B: Othala Valley Inn, a cozy, Norwegian-style limestone lodge on an 80-acre organic farm. Farmer/innkeepers Linda Derrickson and Mark Kessenich set out a mini smorgasbord, all grown on the premises or crafted by neighboring artisans. Dane County Farmers Market fans will recognize these names: Bleu Mont cheese, Cress Springs Bakery bread, Gentle Breeze honey. “We produce what we can here, and support local growers,” says Linda. The sausages are made from the hardy Highland cattle that Linda and Mark raise. Mark gives me a tour of the farm, and I get to meet chickens, ducks, and a small flock of Jacob sheep.

Linda explains how they chose this dappled, four-horned breed, which look much like goats to the neophyte (me): “We wanted delicious meat and great fleece. Plus, we like the horns.” They’re attractively curved, and, says Linda, “Horns act like antennae—they bring in good energy.”

At dawn, I watch from my enormous bed as the valley slowly fills with light. The birches light up first: glowing, dappled white rods. Rocks poke out in places from the impossibly steep hillside. I remember Linda’s telephone description of the valley: “It’s magic here.”

Many of Othala’s furnishings are Norwegian antiques. “We collected these for years, not knowing what we’d ever do with them,” says Linda. In the living room near the huge fireplace, she shows me a print hanging prominently among the books and games. “I put this up on a whim at first,” she says. “Didn’t really think about it. But one of our guests was all excited when she saw it. Seems it’s a real find.”

I take a look. Long, bushy tails, four fingers on each hand, big, warty noses, patched clothes: it’s a family of trolls.

Vesna Vuynovich Kovach is editor in chief of Erickson Publishing, a Madison-based company which produces niche publications and events celebrating the people and places of Wisconsin.

WHERE TO STAY
ARBOR ROSE BED & BREAKFAST—$85-$125. (608) 437-1108 or ArborRoseBandB@aol.com.

OTHALA VALLEY INN B&B—$65-$120. 3192 County Hwy JG, Mt. Horeb. (608) 437-2141 or www.othalavalley.com.

WHERE TO DINE
SCHUBERT’S OLD FASHIONED CAFE AND BAKERY—[Now defunct -VVK, 2006] Step back in time in this retro luncheonette with its classic soda fountain. Try the delicately seasoned Norwegian meatballs. Bakery specialties include lefse, rosettes and Swedish rye bread with a lovely, light, even texture. 126 E. Main St. (608) 437-3393.

THE GRUMPY TROLL BREWPUB—Great burgers, excellent beers in a former Swiss cheese factory. Try the five-beer sampler for $3.75. Troll’s Beer & Cheese soup is delightful. 105 S. Second St. (608) 437-BREW or www.grumpytroll.com.

MT. HOREB MAIN STREET PUB AND GRILL—Official pub of the Mustard Museum; ask for the free sampler basket. Famous burgers, meat fresh ground daily at Dick’s Market across the street. Wisconsin beers on tap. Friday fish fry, Saturday prime rib. Sugar River Euchre League, in its 75th year, meets Saturdays, 6 a.m. More euchre Saturday evenings. 120 E. Main St. (608) 437-5733.

WHAT TO DO
GENERAL INFORMATION—The Mt. Horeb Area Chamber of Commerce can provide maps, event listings and guides to antique dealers. (608) 437-5914, 1-88-TROLLWAY (1-888-765-5929) or www.trollway.com.

LITTLE NORWAY—$8. Open May through October. Cave of the Mounds Road exit from State Highway 18-151. (608) 437-8211 or littlenorway.com.

CAVE OF THE MOUNDS—Adults $12; children 5-12 $3. Open daily March through Nov. 15, weekends Nov. 15 through March 15. . Cave of the Mounds Road exit from State Highway 18-151. (608) 437-3038 or caveofthemounds.com.

MT. HOREB MUSTARD MUSEUM—Open daily. 100 E. Main St. (608) 438-6878 or www.mustardmuseum.com.

MT. HOREB AREA MUSEUM—A first-rate presentation of ethnic evolution. Highlights include a restored grocery store. Gift shop. Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5p.m., Sundays 12:30-5 p.m. Free. 100 S. Second St., Mt. Horeb. (608) 437-6486 or www.mounthoreb.org/museum.htm.

MILITARY RIDGE STATE TRAIL—This 40-mile biking and hiking converted rail bed connecting Fitchburg to Dodgeville runs right through Mt. Horeb. Buy bike trail passes in town or stop here for a bite. Camping near trail in Blue Mound State Park. (608) 437-7393.

TYROL BASIN SKI AREA—Mountain bike trails through woods and hayfields. Summer Snow-Fest draws snowboarders and freestyle skiers from around the country. June 1-2 (weather permitting). 3487 Bohn Road, Mt. Horeb. (608) 437-4135 or www.tyrolbasin.com.

Wheels of life

Eco-aware cheese making in America’s dairyland By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach In Madison Magazine
March 2002 Column: Table Talk

“To make great cheese, you’ve got to have great milk. And great milk does not come from factory farms,” says Willi Lehner, a maker of fine cheeses in Dane County. A Dane County Farmers’ Market favorite since 1988 (in the off season, it’s available at Star Liquor or by calling 767-2875), Lehner’s Bleu Mont Dairy is one of Wisconsin’s many small-scale operations dedicated to producing cheeses that are worlds beyond ordinary, commercial fare.

Lehner is especially excited about a new cheddar he’s introducing at the Farmers’ Market this spring: “Last summer I hooked up with a farmer who does rotational grazing. I made cheese from the milk of his Jersey cows.” Jersey cows are renowned for their sweet, delicious milk. But because they’re not the biggest producers, they’re now rarely used by the mainstream dairy industry.

“This cheese – oh!” he sighs. “It’s complex and rich, with more depth of flavor.” The cows’ natural, fresh diet results in a high carotene content in the milk, which lends the cheddar a golden hue. “It almost looks like we added coloring to it,” says Lehner. Traditionally, cheddars made with the richest, most delicious milk were yellowish, so cheese makers began the practice of adding color, he explains. If you want to magnify this cheese’s qualities even more, Lehner says you can age it at home. “If the package is hermetically sealed, cheese will age gracefully in the fridge. You can easily age it for a year or two or three.” Won’t it go bad? Lehner says not. “The expiration date on cheese is kind of a joke, except for high-moisture ones like camembert and brie.”

Another feature of the spring cheddar: “It’s made with raw [unpasteurized] milk, which makes the most flavorful cheeses.” Pasteurizing destroys the naturally occurring enzymes that produce the intricate, enigmatic tastes of traditional cheeses. “Up until 50 years ago, almost all cheese was made from raw milk,” Lehner says. In recent years the USDA has been trying to ban raw milk cheese entirely.

The movement against raw milk is just one aspect of industrialized dairying that bothers Lehner, and his feelings are common among artisanal cheese makers: “I have a huge problem with the way the industry is headed. Cows are injected with rBGH to maximize production, and they burn out after a few years. My father visited a place in California where they had 3000 cows in the herd. They were milking them three times a day, making them stand on concrete.

“At the Farmers’ Market, I try to educate people about this – where do they buy their food? If they buy from small scale producers, they’re supporting farmers who’ve made a commitment to sustainable agriculture, who treat animals humanely.”

For thousands of years cheese was a highly individualized signature item, different at each farmstead. Modern technology has transformed it into a uniform product suitable for mass marketing. But the 1980s saw a renaissance of small scale cheese making. Today, Wisconsin is one of a handful of states that abounds in cheese offerings like Bleu Mont’s, each a one-of-a-kind treasure lovingly made in limited quantities by conscientious craftspeople who seek a balance between humans, animals, food and the land. What makes their products distinctive varies: some use certified organic milk, some use raw milk, some use the milk of animals other than cows.

At Lovetree Farms in northwestern Wisconsin, Dave and Mary Falk age their raw milk sheep’s cheese in a fresh-air cave they dug themselves, where the wild yeasts of the Northwoods can inoculate the cheese with their unique flavors. Consequently, no cheese in the world is quite like their fruity and nutty Trade Lake Cedar.

Upland Cheese Company near Dodgeville is one of only a few cheese makers that use the milk of their own cows. These cows graze in pastures of thick, soft grasses and wildflowers from early spring through fall, instead of subsisting on barn-fed silage year-round. Their award-winning cheese, Pleasant Ridge Reserve, is available at only a few outlets, including Whole Foods in Madison and a few cheese boutiques in Manhattan.

Many cheese makers favor goats’ milk for its velvety, vanilla-like flavor – and because goats have a lighter impact on the environment than cows. Wisconsin has more goat dairies than any other state.

As the country’s top cheese producer, Wisconsin makes 2 billion pounds of cheese each year, or one-third the national total. It’s nice to know that it’s not all about quantity.

Cheese lover Vesna Vuynovich Kovach is a contributing writer to Madison Magazine.

Minoqua: Born to be beautiful

Minocqua, Woodruff and Arbor Vitae have been delighting vacationers longer than you might think
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
in Minocqua-Woodruff-Arbor Vitae Area Visitor Guide
2002

Into a lake once called Kawaguesaga, a fist of land reached southward, knuckles nearly brushing the opposite shore. Norway pines and white pines—80 to 100 feet tall, three to five feet across their trunks—towered over the land for miles around. The wigwams of a Chippewa village gathered near the west shore of this odd-shaped peninsula, so much like an island, connected to the mainland by a narrow, swampy wrist.

Through the waters of the lake rowed a little fishing boat. It had come from a logging region some thirty miles to the east, and it held Minocqua’s first summer tourists. The year was 1886.

Lore has it that Minocqua and Woodruff, both founded in the 1880s, began life as logging towns. When the timber ran out some thirty years later, so the story goes, locals turned to tourism to keep the towns alive. But the story isn’t true. Minocqua and Woodruff were never industrial centers. From the earliest days of settlement, this corner of the Northwoods was a destination for recreation and commerce—just as it is today.

Minocqua and Woodruff each had a sawmill, but not on the scale of the great logging centers nearby. Still, the logging industry was key to their growth. Loggers visited these towns for trade and for fun. Summer was the off season for logging, and a good time to enjoy the natural beauty of the Northwoods. When logging opened up the forest floor to the sun, the acidic soil grew wild with all sorts of berries—strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries—which Native Americans would pick and bring into town, for sale to merchants who would sell them as far afield as Chicago. And for decades, Minocqua was home to the only bank and the only hospital for miles around.

In the latter half of the 19th century, railroads and lumber companies worked together to speed the harvest of northern Wisconsin’s virgin forests. A railroad company would build a railway to an agreed-upon spot. Once the track arrived, the lumber company could set to work putting in a sawmill and workers’ housing.

As early as the summer of 1886, guides brought fishers from logging towns like these to the area that later became Minocqua. An early tourist, John Mann, returned in the fall of that year to build Minocqua’s first permanent building: a fishing resort on the mainland overlooking the “island” (then as now, this is how the peninsula is usually described). Here loggers and others from nearby communities could while away peaceful summer days fishing for muskellunge and pike (walleye) in the quiet of the Northwoods. This building, the earliest in Minocqua, survived until sometime in the early 1940s; no one is sure when, why or how it was finally destroyed. In 1887 the railway came to Minocqua. It passed just a few yards from Mann’s year-old resort. The following year, Mann sold out his interest in the resort and moved farther north. It’s said he left because he felt Minocqua was becoming too crowded.

It wasn’t easy bringing the railroad across the moist earth of the Lakeland region, as workers on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway discovered. The extension from Merrill to a point some miles north of Minocqua was expected to be finished by late summer. But sinkholes, swamps and marshes defied the efforts of construction crews. Laborers quit, plagued by flies and mosquitoes. Worst of all was a half-mile stretch of swamp and marsh near the present day Kawaga Road, not far from Minocqua. Winter was approaching as the men built one trestle after another across the marsh, only to watch them sink into the dark 90-foot depths. They tried stretching a log road across the marsh. The marsh swallowed the road, along with twelve oxen, six horses and 13 railroad sand cars. It wasn’t until January that the first locomotive chugged across Lake Minocqua onto the island. Today, the tracks leading into Minocqua are gone, and the hard-won rail bed has been converted to a bicycle trail, the 18-mile Bearskin State Park Trail.

By the spring of 1888, the island had been logged off and the town platted. Hopes were high for the spot’s recreation potential. “It will be a fine summer resort,” predicted the Lincoln County Advocate. “The town will be beautifully situated and right in the center of the best hunting and fishing districts in Northern Wisconsin,” remarked the Northern Wisconsin News. The town grew steadily: by 1891, Minocqua, population 200, boasted six hotels and ten saloons. Whole families rode the train from Merrill, Wausau, and points south for fishing parties. Resorts and summer cottages sprang up along the shores of the region’s lakes. A headline in the Rhinelander Vindicator proclaimed Minocqua “The Queen of Summer Resorts.”

For seven years, Minocqua was at the terminus of its rail line. The St. Paul Railway promoted the town as a tourist destination. For the area’s many logging camps, it was an important supply point.

Meanwhile, a competing railroad company, the Lake Shore Railway, planned to connect Rhinelander to Hurley, several miles to the northwest. Where the railway passed just north of Minocqua, the town of Woodruff was born.

Woodruff’s 1888 origin is something of a mystery. Lakeland towns are typically situated right along a body of water or a waterway, but Woodruff is not. For a village located in the heart of the world’s most dense concentration of lakes, this is a puzzle in its own right. Another unusual feature: Woodruff’s main street was sited several blocks away from the railroad junction that would be the central feature in a waterless town. And, Woodruff was founded years before the junction even came to be. No one may ever solve the riddle of Woodruff: no written records from its settlers survive, and the 1888-1889 issues of the newspapers most likely to have recorded its early days are all missing.

In fact, the town foundered in its early years. But in 1893, the economy got the boost it needed. Overnight, Woodruff became a popular destination for the hard-working loggers in a new lumber town just to its northeast: Arbor Vitae, a company town where the sale of liquor was not allowed.

For over 100 years, Woodruff and Minocqua have successfully built their economies on recreation and commerce. Compared to the booming logging towns, Minocqua and Woodruff grew relatively slowly. But when the trees were gone, Minocqua and Woodruff didn’t experience the economic crashes that many other Northwoods towns suffered.

In contrast to Minocqua and Woodruff, Arbor Vitae was a company town, built around the Brooks & Ross Lumber Company’s massive sawmill. In 1914, when the virgin wood was gone, the lumber company pulled out—and took the town with it. The company dismantled the mill and the homes, packed up what they could on the train, and rode out, leaving behind a Northwoods ghost town. Today, a single building remains of old Arbor Vitae. An out-of-the-way, abandoned little white structure with a glass storefront and a faded sign, “Mykleby’s Store,” is all that remains of the building that once housed a company store. Here Jacob Mykleby and his son, Albert, opened their own general store the year the lumber company left town. Nearby, at Big Arbor Vitae Lake, where a sawmill roared and lumberjacks toiled, cheerful summer housekeeping cottage rentals, condominiums and homes are woven along the shore among shady trees.

The giant virgin pines of the Northwoods are, sadly, gone, but new forests have grown in their stead, cared for by today’s stewards of the area’s natural resources. Today, more than a century after their birth, Minocqua, Woodruff and Arbor Vitae carry on a tradition of hospitality that continues to nurture and refresh those who come to enjoy the serenity of the woods, the amusements of the lakes, and the beauty that is Wisconsin.


Minocqua Historical Museum
416 E. Chicago Avenue
(715) 356-7666

Step inside the Minocqua Historical Museum and travel back to the community’s early days. Each year, the museum showcases artifacts from a different pioneering Minocqua family. “We keep it in sequence as to when they came into the area,” says Mary LeFrenier of the Minocqua Historical Society. The Karl Witt family, featured in 2002, arrived in 1892. The Witts farmed a plot of land southwest of the island in Riversmeet, named for the confluence of the Tomahawk and Squirrel rivers. The Witt descendants have since dispersed around the country, but, says Mrs. LeFrenier, the family still owns the original homestead, and members “come up for reunions every year.”

While at the museum, be sure to obtain a copy of “Strolling Back in Time,” a guide to the 1.25 mile historical walking tour of Minocqua. With this 24-page booklet in hand, you can trace the town’s development. Find the oldest surviving building in town, which was the home of Bolger Brothers’ General Store from 1896 until the early 1920s. The current establishment, T. Murtaugh’s Pub and Eatery, is named after one of the Bolgers, who lived upstairs with his family. Formerly on Front Street, Minocqua’s first commercial strip, the Bolger building was moved to the corner of Oneida Street and Milwaukee Street in 1904. The move saved the building from Minocqua’s fire of 1912, which destroyed half the town’s commercial district.

Dr. Kate: A true pioneer

Charismatic caregiver left an enduring legacy
by Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Minocqua-Woodruff-Arbor Vitae Area Visitor Guide
2002

Why is a country doctor who passed away nearly half a century ago the hero of Woodruff? You’ll understand when you see the video at the Dr. Kate Museum.

Kate Pelham Newcomb, M.D. (1885-1956), affectionately known as Dr. Kate., was the daughter of Thomas Pelham, president of Gilette Razor Company. Against his wishes, she attended the University of Buffalo Medical School, earning her degree in 1917. She practiced medicine in Detroit until she and her husband, William Newcomb, moved to the clean air of Wisconsin’s Northwoods for his health in 1922.

She believed her brief medical career was over. She was wrong. In 1931, Minocqua’s beloved, aging, Dr. Thomas Torpy (Torpy Park is named after him), the area’s only practicing doctor, convinced her to head out on snowshoes to answer an emergency call. From then on, Dr. Kate was in active practice, driving 100 miles a day to logging camps, remote farms and far-flung towns. She earned the title “Angel on Snowshoes” for her heroic treks to snowbound homesteads. In 25 years of practice, she delivered about 4,000 babies.

For years, Dr. Kate worked to build a hospital in the region. But by 1952, the partially completed Lakeland Memorial Hospital was a stalled dream. There simply wasn’t enough money. Then a group of Woodruff-Arbor Vitae High School students rallied with a penny drive that garnered international attention in newspapers and magazines and raised the needed money for the building. A 15-foot penny, on public display near the Dr. Kate Museum, memorializes the Million Penny Parade.

The story might have ended here, but for an episode of the wildly popular TV show named “This Is Your Life.” Thinking she was in Los Angeles for a medical convention in 1954, Dr. Kate found herself in the live audience of a show she knew nothing about—there weren’t many TV sets in the Lakeland. When host Ralph Edwards proclaimed, “Dr. Kate Newcomb, this is your life!” the 68-year-old physician was stunned.

The audience may have been familiar with the show’s format, but Dr. Kate was not. Girlhood friends materialized. Grateful homesteaders told how Dr. Kate had rescued their loved ones in trying circumstances. An elderly man, Sam Williams, appeared; he’d saved the doctor’s life once when she was dazed and lost in the snow. These moving tales, told in the broad, honest accents of the Wisconsin Northwoods, struck the heart of the nation.

But most striking of all was Dr. Kate herself, an obscure figure from a remote wilderness, suddenly cast into the spotlight. As it turned out, she was enthralling. Her pure surprise was deeply touching. Her courage was impressive. And her quick, lingering smile—it was like the sun bursting apart a snowstorm. Her grandmotherly warmth was like an early spring compelling mayapples and wood violets to life. Viewers fell in love with her.

No one, not even the show’s producers, could have known what the episode would trigger: Money for the hospital would flood into the town from all over the world, and Dr. Kate would become famous, an international celebrity whose biography made the New York Times bestseller list. Twenty years later, Lakeland Memorial Hospital would receive $20 million from an art dealer, S. Howard Young, that would transform the tiny facility into the multi-faceted, ever-growing Howard Young Health Center.

In 1988, the Dr. Kate Museum was founded. There, the star exhibit is a video of the captivating 48-year-old TV show, which delights visitors of all ages, and continues to bring alive Dr. Kate’s powerfully engaging personality to new generations.


Dr. Kate Museum
923 2nd Avenue
Woodruff, Wis.
(715) 356-6896 or (715) 356-9421
Hours: Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Second Monday in June through Labor Day
Other times available by appointment

Food for Thought: A culinary celebration downtown

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

In Madison Magazine, Sept. 2001
Column: Table Talk

Here’s some food for thought: U.S. food travels 1300 miles on average from farm to plate, with 90% of our nation’s fresh vegetable crop grown in a single state, California.

The cost of fuel is just one reason to question a food system based on trucking and flying everything across the country (and around the world). There’s also the social justice factor: do you really want to raise your kids on tomatoes from a field where day laborers toil, exposed to pesticides, for $2.50 a day? There’s the environment: agricultural runoff from the Mississippi and its tributaries creates a summer-long dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, more than 5,000 square miles devoid of marine life. And, there’s the economics: 79 out of every 100 consumer food dollars pays not for growing the food, but for marketing-related activities: transportation, advertising, packaging.

Concerns over such issues have put Madison at the forefront of a movement towards more sustainable food practices. On September 8, you can experience the fruits of sustainability, and learn more about it. Enjoy yummy samples from local farmers and grocers. Get cooking lessons from Rick Bayless, one of America’s foremost chefs and cookbook writers, whose celebrated Frontera Grill restaurant in Chicago buys much of its produce from small-scale Wisconsin farmers. Hear from author Ruth Ozeki, whose provocative novel “My Year of Meats” explores the shady side of the American meat industry. All while enjoying music in the long rays of the harvest sun.

It’s the third annual Food For Thought Festival, where over 60 diverse groups will celebrate environmentally friendly agriculture, family farming, fair trade, and delicious, healthy dining. Last year, the mix of participants included Mifflin Street and Willy Street Co-ops, L’Etoile, the American Farmland Trust, Progressive Dane, UW Greens, the Wisconsin Home Garden Project, Q106 FM and the Gray Panthers. The festival will take place just off the Square, during the Dane County Farmers’ Market (a fitting venue—it’s one of the nation’s largest farmers’ markets, circulating a quarter of a million dollars of revenue through the local economy weekly).

On display will be the oversized trompe-l’oeil potato sculptures of local artist Mark Harmon. Stilt-walkers and other wandering performers will set a festive tone. Folk singer Ken Lonnquist will share some of his favorite songs about food. The Milwaukee-based band Leahy’s Luck will perform upbeat Irish music. For kids, there’ll be face painting, farm animals, and a veggie jewelry-making booth—carrot rings and radish circles make smart pendants, dontcha know.

Food For Thought isn’t about convincing people to “give up everything and live on nuts and berries,” says Jack Kloppenburg, a professor of rural sociology at UW-Madison; rather, its aim is “to present the alternatives, to show how fun and doable they are.” Kloppenburg is on the steering committee of Dane County REAP (Research, Action, Education & Policy on Food), the group organizing the event. REAP is a independent grassroots organization made up of, as its Web site says, “concerned citizen-eaters.”

Besides the festival, REAP’s biggest project right now is assembling a comprehensive “Farm Fresh Guide” to Dane County and surrounding areas. “It’ll list farmers’ markets, U-pick orchards, CSAs [community supported agriculture, where a subscriber buys a share of a single farm’s produce, a season at a time], direct producers who market right at their farms, everything,” explains Kloppenburg. The highly regarded Wisconsin Cartographers’ Guild will draw up the guide’s maps, he adds: “We hope to have a mockup of it at the festival.”

The festival’s motive is simple, says Kloppenburg: “We want to get people to think about what they put in their mouths.”

Sidebar
3rd annual Food For Thought Festival
September 7-8, 2001
Friday, Sept. 7, 7:30 pm, 272 Bascom Hall: Food For Thought Forum. Talk by author Ruth Ozeki, panel discussion with Ozeki and chef Rick Bayless.
Saturday, Sept. 8, just off the Capitol Square in downtown Madison: Food for Thought Festival takes place during the Farmers’ Market on the Square.

Brown rice, good and easy – long version

This is a lightly edited early draft of a much shorter article that was ultimately published as my Table Talk column in Madison Magazine in the summer or fall of 2001. Although it's not as polished as the published version, this draft contains a lot of info that didn't make it to press. I came upon it when posting the Table Talk column to this archive blog, and thought it was worth dusting off to post alongside. In truth, the need to abbreviate so severely for mainstream publication has been, for me, one of the most painful things about freelance writing.

To read a version of the rice article closer to the published version, click here.

– VVK, October 1, 2009

It's easy to make a perfect pot of brown rice, fluffy and appealing as a bed or side dish for just about any main course. What's not so easy is finding out how.

You wouldn’t expect this to be so. Brown rice is practically a symbol of the whole natural foods movement. It’s available everywhere, from the tiniest co-op to the slickest supermarket. Yet, I can’t count the times that friends – good cooks, whole foods enthusiasts – have told me that brown rice just won’t cook up right for them. It always seems to end up mushy, or scorched, or underdone, or somehow otherwise yucky. “I hate brown rice!” cried a vegetarian friend. Why? Because it always comes out just awful.

Really, this is as much as can be expected. Many published directions for plain brown rice – even those printed right on the packages, strangely enough – are literally recipes for disaster. As an experiment, instead of preparing rice the way I usually do, I tried following the instructions on the bag of Tsuru Mai California Brown Rice, my usual brand. Sure enough, I wound up with a insipid, soupy, crunchy, unpalatable mess.

I did some more investigating, and I was appalled at what I found. Most of the recipes I checked out include at least one feature guaranteed to wreck the rice. Like, they don't include salt – which you need to bring out brown rice=s marvelous, but mild, flavor. Or they have you turn down the heat to the lowest possible simmer – thereby guaranteeing a pot of pulpy sop. Or they have you cooking a single cup of rice in an enormous pot or pressure cooker.

Sometimes there's simply not enough information. For instance, one recipe, which doesn’t even tell how much rice to use, just stipulates “enough water to cover the middle finger to the middle of the second joint as the fingertip rests lightly on the top of the rice.” No wonder some people decide, after a few bouts with it, that brown rice is for the birds.

Why are the instructions so often so wrong? I can't even guess. But after about twenty years of practice, I do know how to make brown rice so that it's: tender (not mushy), moist (not soggy), and agreeably firm to the bite (without aggravating little hard spots). And so can you.

Brown rice is a little trickier to cook than white rice. But you can learn the tricks. And it's worth it.

Brown rice makes a hearty, tasty foundation for any high-fiber, low-fat, whole foods diet. [Author’s note, 2009: I no longer follow, espouse, or believe there are any benefits to a low-fat diet. Nor do I believe anymore that grain is an optimal foundation for a human diet. See this manifesto on lowcarbarama.com, my low-carb site, for a more current representation of my views on the matter.] It’s got two to four times the fiber of white rice, and is a richer source of naturally-occurring B vitamins (white rice is usually enriched artificially), Vitamin E, essential oils, and minerals like magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium and zinc.

Rice naturally has a loose, tough, inedible hull which is easily cracked and winnowed away, even with a hand tool like a wooden pestle. What=s left is the whole grain that we call brown rice – though depending on the variety, it can be brown, red, or even white. More pounding with a pestle will shatter off the edible, nutritious layer of rice bran, leaving only a white core consisting mainly of carbohydrates. This remaining core of white rice can be stored longer – important in low technology societies without modern packaging and storage – and cooks faster – important when fuel is dearly obtained. Also, although rice is not a high-protein food, research shows that what it has is more available when the rice is polished – important when protein is scarce. All these reasons put together may be why white rice became the predominant way of preparing rice the world over.

Ironically, then, brown rice seems to be a true modern health food, rather than the iconic back-to-nature fare it seems to represent. California's Lundberg Family Farms introduced brown rice to an American market in the late 1960s, in response to requests from the blossoming natural foods community. In this light, perhaps it's not so unusual, after all, that we're still figuring out how to get it right.

So what’s the secret to perfect brown rice? It all comes to combining a few ingredients in a suitable container, applying heat for an appropriate length of time – and otherwise leaving it all alone.

Stripped to the essentials, here's how to do it, followed by what you need to know to make it as easy as it should be.

Brown Rice
1 cup short grain brown rice
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 teaspoon salt

Rinse rice. Combine all ingredients in a one- to two-quart saucepan (smaller is better), Bring to boiling.
Reduce heat, cover, and cook 40 minutes at a high simmer/low boil. Do not stir.
Remove from heat and let sit at least fifteen minutes before serving.
Yield: about 3 cups cooked brown rice.

Use short grain brown rice, at least to start. Long grain is trickier to pull off; it=s more likely to become mushy. Look for the chubby little grains of short grain brown rice. They stay firm and delicious for days after cooking.

The best pot for this job is a thick-walled, two-quart saucepan. I use a clear glass Corning Visions pot. You can see right through it, without lifting the lid, to check how hard the water is boiling. The bottom is clear, too, so I can look through the bottom of the pot to check for scorching. Newer Visions pots, though, have opaque nonstick linings on the bottoms, so they don't feature the bottom view. The uncoated ones do turn up often at places like Goodwill – that's where I got mine.

If you don't have a glass pot, try stainless steel, enameled iron (with no chips), or some other nonreactive surface. That way, you can store your cooked rice in the same container you cook it in. (Caution: Don't store cooked food in a reactive material like iron or aluminum. Iron rusts, and aluminum pits and can leach aluminum oxide, which is toxic.) And here's another advantage of glass: not only can you stick the pot in the fridge, but you can pop it right into the microwave to reheat!

If you bought the rice from a bulk bin, pick over it carefully for any pebbles you might find. Occasional green grains are normal, but discard any black, spoiled grains. Rinse the rice to get rid of any field dust.

Place rice in pot and add water and salt. From this moment on, do not stir! As the water boils, the rice grains will arrange themselves into a network of nooks and crannies through which the water bubbles up. In this way, each grain gets its own little space to plump up to perfection. You'll be able to see the passageways when you look inside the pot. I tried stirring the rice partway through cooking once, as an experiment. I suppose it was for the good of science, but I felt sorry for the sodden mass of rice that made the sacrifice.

Now, turn the heat all the way up to get a good rolling boil. Leave the pot uncovered for this step, so it doesn’t boil over while you're not looking. It helps to set a timer. On my stove, nine minutes brings me back just as the boil is getting started.

Once you’ve got the boil going, set your timer for another forty minutes, cover the pot, and adjust the heat until it's bubbling lightly, checking in now and again on the activity level. If you can't decide whether to call it a simmer or a boil, you’ve got it where you want it. The rice should be done in about forty to fifty minutes, but take note of how long it actually takes on your stove and with your cookware (check again if you change pots next time), and adjust your timer, or perhaps your flame, accordingly the next go-round.

As it gets closer to time, check in to make sure there's still water in the pot. Since you're not allowed to stir the rice, how can you tell when the water's all gone? Simple: tilt the pot. If you can see water pooling, it needs to cook some more. If no water pools, take the pot off the heat. Right away. Even if the rice looks very moist. Otherwise, it's going to scorch. Fortunately, rice is among the more forgiving of foods in this way; even if the bottom gets moderately scorched, the rest of the rice does okay. (I’ve known people who swear by the supposed fiery energy bestowed by the singed so-called “yang layer” peeled from the bottom of their cook pot. When life gives you lemons, I guess.)

After you take the pot off the heat, leave it alone – tightly covered – for at least fifteen minutes. Longer is fine. But if you serve it now, it'll be wet and droopy, and will lay flat on the plate. Some recipes call for "fluffing" the rice with a fork or paddle at this point, and then covering with a bamboo mat to let the steam escape. Wrong on both counts! This is a critical moment: the hot steam in all those little tunnels and chambers is now quietly finishing up the job of puffing up those individual rice grains. Let the steam do the fluffing. Let time do the work. I can’t stress enough, this isn’t extra time added to the cooking; this is an essential part of the cooking time.

Now your rice is ready to serve. A bamboo or plastic rice paddle, sold at Asian food stores, is the perfect tool for this: the wide, relatively flat, bowl section can pick up a good amount of rice, while the short, stubby handle gives your wrist the right leverage to hoist it.

Brown rice does take longer to prepare than white rice. But the active preparation time is really the same; it's only the total time frame that's longer.

Also, once it's cooked, it's terrifically convenient: it keeps for a few days in the fridge, and reheats easily in the microwave. It comes in handy all day long. For instance, for an easy breakfast that will power you through to lunch, try this: In a bowl, microwave some rice – anywhere between a half cup and a cup – till it's steaming hot. Make a one-egg omelet stuffed with some crumbled feta and perhaps (if you've a few extra minutes) some sauteed mushrooms and onions, and serve over the rice. With all those complex carbohydrates providing a steady supply of blood sugar, you won't be craving doughnuts mid-morning. [Author’s note, 2009: I am no longer under the impression that plenty of carbohydrates, complex or otherwise, stave off hunger. In fact, it’s the fat and protein in the meal describe that wards off the doughnut cravings. See this article by Barry Groves to learn more about this effect.]

At dinnertime, when the rice is freshly made, I like to serve stir-fried veggies and tofu over it. Rice from the refrigerator is better stirred in during the last few minutes of cooking. (But go ahead and take it out of the fridge at the beginning of your meal prep, so it has time to lose its chill.) A handful or two of cooked rice also goes great in soup for a stick-to-your-ribs one-dish meal.

Enjoy!

Brown rice, good and easy

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Madison Magazine, 2001
Column: Table Talk

To read a longer, unpublished, version of this article, containing historical notes and more cookery details, click here.

– VVK, October 1, 2009

“I hate brown rice!” exclaimed my vegetarian editor, when I said I wanted to write about how to cook it.

I wasn’t surprised. I’ve heard lots of people complain they can’t get it to come out right—it’s mushy, crunchy, soupy or bland—and that’s why I wanted to share my simple method, developed over twenty years of whole foods cooking.

Brown rice is the quintessential natural food. Yet when I recently searched the Internet, cookbooks and even product packages, it was weirdly difficult to find effective, specific recipes for plain brown rice. When there were specifics, they often served to wreck the rice. For instance, after cooking a single cup of rice in a gallon-and-a-half size pressure cooker (the smaller of two sizes given as options—and anyway, how many people own such a thing?), I wound up with a flat layer of mush: slimy on top, crunchy brown singed beneath. Another cup of rice simmered in a saucepan for so long in so much water that it became a porridgey glue. A third ended up watery and hard.

Happily, good brown rice is easy and totally worth making. It’s fluffy, tasty, stick-to-your-ribs hearty. You can incorporate it into just about any meal as a side or as a bed for stir-fries, chili, omelettes. Toss leftover rice into soups and stews.

And it's good for you. With up to four times the fiber of white rice and lots of naturally-occurring vitamins and minerals (white rice is dusted with vitamins to make up for some of whatÕs polished off), brown rice is a great foundation for healthy eating.

Tips for brown rice perfection—and ease of use

• One light rinse is sufficient—despite the instructions for multiple scrubbings you might find elsewhere.
• If you find many rotten black grains or rocks, try a different brand next time. Green grains, on the other hand, are normal.
• Use salt unless your doctor says you can’t. Saltless rice is insipid.
• A low boil works much better than a slow simmer. It comes out mushy when you simmer at the lowest temp possible (as some advise).
• Never stir during cooking. The delicate network of steam tunnels formed by the boiling water is the key to fluffy rice. Stir, and the end product is sodden.
• Turn off heat according to the “tilt test.” Tilt the pot: if you see water pooling, leave the heat on. If there’s none, turn it off.
• Remove rice from heat and let set at least ten minutes before serving. The rice continues to steam to fluffy perfection during this essential cooking phase. Otherwise, the rice will lie wet and flat on the plate.
• Critical: Do not stir the rice after cooking! Nearly every recipe I found says to stir to "fluff," but stirring is really the anti-fluffer. It destroys the steam tunnels. Don't.
• You can refrigerate unused rice in the saucepan you cooked it in, if you use stainless steel or stove-safe glass. With glass, you have another bonus: you can place the whole thing in the microwave to reheat.

Brown Rice

• 1 cup brown rice
• 1 1/2 cups water (for short grain) or 2 cups water (for long grain)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Rinse rice. Combine all ingredients in a heavy 1 to 2 quart saucepan. On high heat, bring to full boil, uncovered (so it won't boil over). Turn down to a low boil and cover. Cook for 20–35 minutes (the time will vary depending on your stove, cookware, and variety of rice), until you can't see any water pooling when you tilt the pot.

Remove from heat and let stand, covered, at least 10 minutes.

Do not stir the rice at any point. Serve as desired. Refrigerate remainder for up to three days.

----------------------
Vesna Vuynovich Kovach studied brown rice cookery with natural foods pioneer Aveline Kushi.

Fresh Twist on Fast Food

Master of hospitality Craig Culver serves up the scoop on his dining niche and growing franchise chain
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Corporate Report Wisconsin, June 2001

All is gold shovels, plaques and photographers at the ceremonial groundbreaking of the Culver’s restaurant in Winona, Minnesota, a town wedged on the narrow plain between the west bank of the Mississippi River and a set of craggy peaks still swathed in snow this sunny March day. A matched set of Chamber of Commerce members in bright green jackets and blue ties, along with a mayor in baggy brown corduroys, felt hat and puffy down vest, pose with Culver’s president and co-founder, Craig Culver—he’s flown in from the company’s Prairie du Sac headquarters, 30 minutes away by private plane—and with new franchisees Ellen and Mike Minter. “I’m so glad Culver’s is coming here.” a onlooker says happily, “Now I won’t have to drive half an hour to the one in La Crosse anymore.”

Newspaper and radio reporters cluster around the 51-year-old Culver, white-haired and hale, comfortably dressed in a dark blue sports jacket, light-colored slacks, and brown loafers. With round face and ready smile, he talks about signature menu items. What is a ButterBurger, anyway? “It’s a good old fresh tavern burger, that’s what it is.” Culver’s burgers are made of lean, never-frozen beef, each one cooked to order on a searing-hot grill. “A friend and I were reminiscing over a glass of beer one day, about the old drive-ins of Milwaukee. He told me about one, the Milky Way, that had ‘butter burgers.’ That sounded so great—I never forgot it. When we opened the first Culver’s, I thought, ‘The butter burger has to be there.” Culver’s ButterBurgers are served on buns that are lightly buttered, then grilled.

Frozen custard? It’s not egg pudding, says Culver; it’s a super-rich, dense, ice cream fortified with egg yolk. “The ripples you see when ice cream is being scooped, that’s the air that’s been mixed into it. You won’t see that in ours. There’s no better ice cream in the world than frozen custard.”

Culver is the star of this show, a visiting Wisconsin celebrity. But he persists in shifting the focus to the Minters, who will own and operate this, the 140th Culver’s restaurant. When someone asks, “What’s your favorite flavor?” Culver answers, “Vanilla,” then calls over the reporters’ heads, “Ellen, what’s yours?” “Snicker Swirl,” she responds. “Snicker Swirl!” Culver smiles and shakes his head. “These young people.”

Eight years ago, when she couldn’t find work with her brand new teaching degree from UW-Platteville, Ellen Minter took what she thought would be just a summer job at a Culver’s, the popular family eatery which has single-handedly revived Midwestern road food traditions like frozen custard and malteds. Now she’s building, marketing and staffing her own restaurant. “The success of our organization has been because of people like Ellen and Mike,” Culver declares.

Franchisees like the Minters pay Culver’s Franchising System, Inc. an initial $45,000 fee, plus 4% of net sales thereafter. Average gross revenue for a Culver’s restaurant is $1.5 million per store, much higher than the average for quick service hamburger chains ($1.15 million) or ice cream chains like Dairy Queen ($550,000). In the year 2000, Culver’s saw bottom line margins increase to 7 percent. Since its first successful franchise in 1990, the restaurant has spread to eleven states, from the Dakotas to Michigan, and as far south as Texas.

Though Craig Culver, this year’s recipient of Wisconsin’s SBA award for Small Business Person of the Year, is the president and co-founder of a growing company which expects to open its 150th location by the end of the year, he doesn’t have a formal business education. His 1973 undergraduate degree from UW-Oshkosh is in biology, and he’s kept up an interest in botany: at home, he grows native prairie plants like purple coneflower and big and little bluestem. He has a nostalgic passion for the classic American Graffiti-style 1950’s drive-ins. And right now, he’s busy filling the Midwest with restaurants that fit into a new niche. In the previously unnoticed gap between quick service (think Burger King) and casual dining (think Applebee’s and Denny’s), Culver has created a new category: “We’ve coined a term—quasual,” he says.

The restaurant model Culver and his wife, Lea, founded in 1984 serves up a unique blend of affordably-priced, service-oriented dining. You order and pay at a counter, fast-food style. But your meal is brought to your table restaurant-style, by a smiling team worker. The dining room is carpeted; the seats are comfortably padded. Coffee is served in real, solid, mugs, not disposable cups. Custard is made fresh several times a day. All food is cooked to order, not made ahead. Even the custard flavor of the day is mixed especially for your cone.

Craig Culver’s carefully worked out philosophy of quality plus committed citizenship underlies the restaurant’s special character. It’s central, he believes, to the success of the entire enterprise. “We’re in the quality and hospitality business,” he says, “not the price point business.” In the quality business, he says, “you can raise the prices when you need to. People are willing to pay for clean restrooms, for customer service.” Culver decries the “minimum wage” mentality in parts of the restaurant industry. “The best, brightest, smartest people—that’s what we want at Culver’s,” he says.

Good deeds get recognized, he says—“people want to support the good citizen”—but must also be done for their own sake. Culver’s public-interest activities over the years have been as diverse as helping establish a bald eagle reserve across the Wisconsin River from the company headquarters (“How can anyone say no to those beautiful eagles?”), promoting Wisconsin farmers, giving college scholarships for student employees, and contributing to the Hunger Task Force.

Within the company, education is promoted strongly. Management skills are honed at three-day managers’ workshops held at company headquarters every other month. Nearly one thousand Culver’s workers have completed the National Restaurant Association’s ServSafe food safety training program. Culver’s maintains four certified staff members on each shift—even though state and federal standards mandate only one certified person on staff.

But Culver’s, for all its successes, faces a serious challenge “There’s an old-fashioned family feel to our business,” says Culver. “Warmth, honesty, and loyalty. That’s what’s at greatest risk as we develop further. How am I going to protect this culture we started in 1984?” The answer, he believes, is in the Ellen and Mike Minters of the world. “It’s going to be by selecting the right operators to run our business,” he says. “I believe in the franchise system of owner-operators, who run the restaurants day in and day out. The Moms and Pops. I believe in those people, I really do.” Every Culver’s store has at least one operating partner who works in store fulltime, and who has at least 50 percent ownership.

To open your own Culver’s, you must first go through a six day, 60 hour in-store evaluation and orientation. That means long days of work, making custard, serving customers, cleaning up. It means classes and lectures, too. “We’ve had people drop out after a day or two,” Culver says. “That’s fine. Better they find out sooner, rather than later, that this isn’t what they want.” If your background check, application, and evaluation all pass muster, you move on to a twelve-week in-store training program, and your $5,000 application fee is applied to your franchise fee. If not, your money is refunded. By design, the orientation program only has space for 30 people per year, to control the rate of Culver’s growth.

There’s one other franchise requirement on which Culver is standing firm: any new restaurant must be somewhere near an existing one. “I won’t add any new markets,” he says. “We’re saying no to places like Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Carolina, California. I get calls every day that I turn down.” Why turn down opportunities for growth? “We’d be going crazy, and we’d wind up losing,” he says. “I don’t want to do that.” Each new market demands its own set of logistics, like developing affordable networks of quality food suppliers and building contractors. And a TV spot costs the same whether its broadcast area covers one Culver’s or ten. Plus, every new population that encounters a Culver’s has to learn what frozen custard is, what a ButterBurger is.

“The restaurants must be run to our standards,” Culver says. “That’s the one thing we can’t lose our grip on. It’s hard to say no. But we don’t have the infrastructure to grow like McDonald’s, adding 500 restaurants a year.”

Craig Culver learned the importance of careful growth the hard way back in 1987, with his first attempt at a franchise, in Richland Center. “They found out that they hated the restaurant business,” he remembers. “They couldn’t keep employees, because of their hate for what they were doing.” Every Culver’s restaurant since then has succeeded.

There was a time when Culver himself wanted out of the restaurant business—in 1973, just after graduating college. He’d grown up working in his family’s restaurants. “I just wanted to get as far away from restaurants as possible,” he says. When his father became ill and asked him to take over the family business, but Culver refused, so his family sold the 40-acre resort near Devil’s Lake, with its 24 cabins and 350-seat restaurant. But Culver couldn’t escape his fate; he soon found himself working at, then managing, a Madison McDonald’s. By 1976, he’d gained invaluable experience and training—and he’d forgotten about wanting to leave the hospitality industry.

“From my family, I learned about quality and hospitality. But from McDonald’s, I learned the systems approach to restaurant management—waste management, inventory control, training manuals, things like that.” Culver asked his parents to buy back the Sauk City A&W they’d owned in the 1960s. “I wanted to be my own businessman. I wanted to open my own restaurant.” He and Lea operated the A&W until 1982, then sold it, moving on to the Ritz supper club in Baraboo. But the new owners of the A&W ran into trouble, and, says Culver, “They begged me to buy it back, take it off their hands.”

Now Craig and Lea had an idea: ditch the Ritz, move back to Sauk City, and remake the A&W into an entirely new thing: a modern version of the old-fashioned custard stand. “We said “Hey, let’s do this under our own terms!” The couple developed a fresh foods menu including fish—“A real Wisconsin fish fry, like in my family’s supper club, with my parents’ tartar sauce recipe—but why not serve it every night of the week?”—hamburgers made with fresh beef, frozen custard, malted shakes. “We remodeled the whole building. We made it blue and white, as different from orange and brown as we could. I suppose we could have chosen green and white, or purple and white. But blue just felt like ice cream to me. Clean and wholesome, like what we were trying to do.” The classic Culver’s oval logo came about simply because something had to fit into the knocked-out A&W sign in front of the restaurant. Today, the flagship Culver’s restaurant stands on the site of that remodeled A&W.

What’s next for these restaurant innovators? The Blue Spoon Creamery Café. Conceived as a lower-cost franchise that can be fitted into existing buildings, Prairie du Sac’s casually elegant Blue Spoon serves upscale dishes like smoked salmon Caesar salad and artichoke focaccia. Coffee beverages include imaginative hybrids like steamed custard cappuccino and espresso malted. “Where our destiny lies with the Blue Spoon, I’m not sure,” says Culver. We’ll probably open another restaurant or two and then decide its fate.”

Whatever the restaurant format, Craig Culver has mastered hospitality: the kind of personal attention that’s as much about making each employee and franchisee feel welcome and valued as it is about engaging customers. The future of Culver’s, though, depends on being able to transmit this skill to every new person who joins the organization. Ken Dickinson, a 27-year-old franchisee about to open a restaurant just outside St. Louis, has noticed this about Culver: “He doesn’t forget a name. He remembers the names of fry guys he sees once a year. I’m trying to get like that.”

Low Country Boil

In Madison Magazine, June 2001
Column: Table Talk
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach and Don Kovach

The trees! The birds! The sun! What is it all saying? Have a cookout! You want to make a big heap of food and share it with your friends and family. And you want to be able to relax and enjoy your own party. Celebrate the summer with a Low Country boil.

The Low Country is the expanse of island-dotted salt marsh that makes up the coastal plain of Georgia and South Carolina. Time there is marked by the tides, rather than the hands of a clock. The culture is intimately tied to the life of the sea and the salt water.

Low Country boil is a synthesis of life in that part of the south: shrimp from the sea, potatoes and carrots from the farms, and sausage from the pigs people keep. The simple act of boiling these everyday ingredients in seasoned water creates a lively, eloquent harmony. Low Country boil is also called Frogmore Stew, for the St. Helena Island community where it’s thought to originate. But it isn’t a stew as we know it—a stew is slow-cooked to soft, thick, inseparability. In a Low Country boil, the ingredients all stay separate, though they come together in the pot and get served in a massive heap on the table. Folks just reach in and pull out what they want, as they want it: a shrimp, a potato, a hunk of corn.

Low Country boils are so popular in coastal cities like Savannah and Charleston, and the territory all around them, you’d think this was an ancient custom. In fact, historians have been able to trace it back only to around 1940, about the time sausage in casings (as opposed to sausage patties) were introduced to the region. Maybe it became so popular so fast because it it’s so easy. It’s a lot of fun, and it brings together so many good things. The salted water, when it boils, evokes the smell of the ocean. There’s a fragrant rush of seasoning as you pour out the food. It’s a big meal, a big thing, and it takes the whole of the outside to hold it.


RECIPE: Low Country Boil

A Low Country Boil is great for outdoor gatherings of eight or more people. It doesn’t scale down well below that.
To serve, just dump the food onto a wood or metal picnic table that’s covered with newspaper. No plates are necessary—people can gather around and eat straight from the heap, shelling shrimp and cutting off hunks of sausage as they go. Cleanup couldn’t be easier: put away any leftovers, and roll up and throw out the rest.

Tools:
This is an outdoor cooking project. You’ll need a six-gallon pot with a basket insert and a propane burner with a sturdy stand (the same equipment used for deep-frying whole turkey—Table Talk, November 2000).

Multiply these amounts by the number of people coming. These are the ingredients per person:
1/2 pound raw shrimp, shell on (thaw if frozen)
1/2 pound kielbasa, smoked sausage or ring baloney
1 ear corn, husked and broken in half
3 new potatoes, scrubbed but unpeeled
3 baby carrots (or one pound for up to 16 people)
1/3 clove garlic, peeled and chopped
1/3 bay leaf
1 peppercorn

For the whole pot:
4 gallons water
1 bag crab or seafood boil
2 tsp. salt

Put the seasonings—crab boil bag, garlic, bay leaves, peppercorns and salt—in the water and bring it to a boil. Put the potatoes, carrots, and sausage in the basket, and lower the basket into the pot. Cook for a few minutes until the potatoes are almost done. Add the corn and cook for a few more minutes. The fresher the corn, the shorter the cooking time needed. Add the shrimp, and cook just until they turns red, about 3 minutes. Don’t overcook the shrimp, or they’ll be tough. Lift out the basket, and serve immediately.

Corn bread, cole slaw, green salad, and great Wisconsin beer go well with this meal. Watermelon is a natural to finish.

Vesna Vuynovich Kovach writes this column regularly. Don Kovach grew up in Savannah, where he loved to go shrimping and fishing along the salt rivers with his family.

Homegrown Food for Thought

Could alternative agriculture be Dane County's antidote for sprawl?

Through site selection and product placement, Dane County businesses support responsible growth and local agriculture.
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Corporate Report Wisconsin
May 2001

On the Capitol Square in downtown Madison, dollar bills and jars of jam flash across a vendor table in brisk trade. The woman busy behind the table grew the fruit for the jam on her own land, according to the strict requirements of what well may be America’s largest open-air farmers’ market, where an approximate quarter-million dollars is generated each of 28 Saturdays in the year. The waiting list for an open stall is three to five years long.

And it’s not just the market that’s been a huge success. Over the last 20 years, Wisconsin’s capital city has become a mecca for locally produced agricultural wares. Dane County restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses are leading the Midwest in a national movement toward regional and sustainable agriculture. Whether featuring regional products on the day’s menu, giving locally grown produce prime shelf space, or making siting decisions that protect farmland, businesses are fighting to keep the county’s agricultural heritage alive.

But urban sprawl, spurred by a growing economy and population, threatens the very source of the bounty: the open, pastoral landscape of Dane County. According to the June 2000 “Farms and Neighborhoods” report from the county executive’s office, at the current rate of development, the farmlands will be virtually gone by the century’s end — and with them, a defining feature of the county.

Visually, agriculture is the area’s most striking element, far more prevalent than parkland. Southcentral Wisconsin’s farm vistas, with sweeping fields punctuated by stands of trees and grassy ice age hillscapes — gentle oval drumlins, winding eskers — beckon tourists from Wisconsin cities and neighboring states. And this natural beauty is easily accessible to everyone living in Dane County: Even from the center of Madison, bucolic scenery is as near as a 15- or 20-minute drive in any direction. It’s a treasure, and not just when compared to strip mall suburbia. Some rural landscapes may be flat and featureless; Wisconsin’s is exquisite and endlessly diverse.

A few years back, Money magazine rated Madison the country’s most livable city, and population trends indicate that many people agree. In the 1990s, the county’s population rose an estimated 16.7 percent — an additional 61,500 people bringing the total close to 430,000. But as businesses and new residents race to take advantage of the area’s amenities, development patterns have been less than ideal. In February, USA Today ranked Madison one of the most sprawling of all midsized cities — the 65th worst out of all metropolitan areas. The American Farmland Trust has labeled the high-quality farmland in southern Wisconsin the third most threatened in the nation; Dane County lost 48,000 farm acres over the last decade.

So, how important is agriculture here? Dane County’s revenue from agricultural products, nearly $285 million per year, is by far the highest in the state, according to the most recent U.S. Agricultural Census. With more than 2,500 farms, Dane County leads the state in production of corn for grain, and is high on the list when it comes to soybeans, fresh market vegetables, fruit and flowers. An expanding part of this industry is “alternative” agriculture in its various forms: farmers’ markets, U-pick orchards and vegetable patches, and environmentally sensitive farming methods like organic and sustainable agriculture.

There’s a great deal at stake in the survival of agricultural Dane County, and much depends on the area’s business leaders — even those not in the habit of thinking about farms. Jim Arts, Dane County’s director of Policy and Program Development, is concerned that businesses may inadvertently “kill the goose that laid the golden egg” unless they act in ways that protect farms. “Businesses have a powerful impact on the future of the county in making siting decisions, and in the ways they support or don’t support public initiatives of land-use issues,” he says. “I would argue that they have a strong motive to work for maintaining a high quality of life here.”

Phil Lewis, a noted landscape architect (he was the driving force behind Madison’s 21-mile E-way system of greenway and trails), agrees. “High-quality personnel are seeking a high-quality environment — one with beautiful scenery and recreation that produces the clean food and fiber and farmers’ markets that they can enjoy throughout a lifetime, for generations.”

Businesses who value Dane County’s special character can help by putting their considerable muscle into supporting land-use policies that help farms stay in business, says Lewis. Making siting decisions that are friendly to farms and natural resources is another powerful tool, with an even more immediate impact. Once a siting decision is made, landscape architects and building architects can work together to ensure that the new facility will have a low — or even beneficial — impact on natural resources, through canny positioning of buildings on the lot, plantings and more. Also, businesses can get involved in local efforts to take advantage of the state’s new Smart Growth Initiative. Smart Growth rewards municipalities that comply with state guidelines for growth. Lewis encourages business leaders who are planning new construction to talk to county and municipal officers, and find siting solutions that are good for everyone concerned.

To Lewis, the countryside is a mosaic of interdependent elements, each reinforcing the other. He’s identified “corridors of exceptional natural diversity,” including farms as well as parks and historical attractions, which support the tourist industry. Wetlands, water systems and steep topography — where terrain is at a 12.5 percent slope or greater — are also key features. Says Lewis, “We’ve inventoried key patterns of natural diversity. Anybody can call them up and interact with them on the county’s Web site.” But neither wetlands nor steep topography, for instance, are protected by law. So it’s up to individual decision makers to make each choice a conscientious one.

Part of the problem, says Arts, comes when decisions are made piecemeal, instead of as part of an overarching plan. Individual exceptions to municipal planning policies add up to a general pattern of sprawl — residential, commercial and industrial. However, Lewis says “there’s ample room for building without encroaching on or destroying resources.” “Farms and Neighborhoods,” to which Arts contributed, supports that: the report says there’s plenty of developable land within Dane County’s existing city and town borders — enough to fit the expected growth for decades to come.

Odessa Piper is one local entrepreneur who’s earned national acclaim by directly — and vocally — supporting local agriculture, and encouraging more businesses to do the same. Her restaurant, L’Etoile, serves upscale cuisine based on locally produced foods. For more than 25 years, Piper has built tight relationships with more than 100 Wisconsin farmers and producers, who supply everything from strawberries and spinach to bison and veal.
“We put the customers and the dining room in touch with the local farmers by creating the synthesis from the field to the table,” she says. “People are delighted by it. Customers love to be part of the solution.” Piper is an activist as well as a restaurateur, writing and speaking around the nation about the importance of supporting local agriculture. She’s been featured in national magazines like Bon Appetit, Sierra and Wine Spectator, and she’s had a tremendous influence on the growing number of restaurants in Madison and in the rest of the Midwest who now purchase directly from nearby farmers.

But she’s concerned that many businesspeople don’t recognize how much Madison’s high quality of life depends on maintaining farmland close by. “I’ve sat down with people who have made absolutely no connection between their wealth and the way that they’ve developed land. No connection that they’ve had an impact on the availability of fresh, seasonal, locally available food,” Piper says. “But then they ask how is this so delicious? How is this food so good? I tell them, it’s because it’s from a farmer who’s local.”

In a country where food travels an average distance of 1,300 miles from farm to table, restaurants and food service are just beginning to take advantage of the premium merchandise offered by local farmers. A few years ago, Home Grown Wisconsin, a 20-farmer cooperative, broke into a new restaurant market: Chicago. There they were welcomed by chefs starving for locally grown food. Even the UW dining service is beginning to look into local connections, testing the waters with annual organic, regionally grown dinners. The UW’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, a research facility within the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, points out that if UW dining bought just 10 percent of its food from Dane County farmers, it would keep an extra $1 million within the local economy.

Besides restaurants, grocers are increasingly keen on locally grown produce. It’s easy enough to guess that natural foods stores like Williamson Street Grocery Co-op, Whole Foods Market and Magic Mill Natural Foods Market would support local, smaller-scale agriculture. But big supermarkets are also getting in on the local action, and Dane County is the focal point.

In the mid-’90s, Stevens Point-based Copps Food Center established the Copps Produce Developmental Center and placed it in Madison stores. “Our Madison customers spent more per dollar on produce than at any of our other stores,” says Tom Pozorski, Copps’ category manager for produce. “We look to Madison for what the trends are going to be in the rest of the Midwest.”

What the CPDC discovered was a strong preference for locally produced food; now Copps buys local whenever possible. “The growing season is short here, so that’s the biggest limitation,” Pozorski says. “But in season we sell 100 percent Wisconsin sweet corn, for instance. There’s nothing better than Wisconsin sweet corn when you’re in Wisconsin.” Apples and potatoes are also big crops, and they store well, too. Wisconsin is the third largest potato producer in the U.S. “They’re the best in the world. You can’t beat a Wisconsin spud,” Pozorski says. Locally grown organics and other specialty crops are growing in popularity and availability, too. “We have a lot of new growers approaching us,” Pozorski says.

Star Liquor in Madison finds that locally produced goods are a big draw. “People want to support the local economy,” says manager Mark Mason. “They want to know where their money is going. People want to drink local — I give them what they want.” At least 25 percent of Star’s beer sales are regional brands, says Mason, adding “that doesn’t include Miller, Leinenkugel and Point” — popular Wisconsin-brewed beers with out-of-state ownership. Mason points out that Dane County is the proud home of Capitol Brewery, rated America’s #1 brewery by the Beverage Tasting Institute in 1998. Even wine from Wisconsin sells well, especially at Christmastime for gifts to ex-Wisconsinites. In a refrigerated case next to the champagne, Star also sells specialty cheeses from Bleu Mont Dairy. It’s the only place other than the Farmers’ Market on the Square where this Dane County dairy’s cheese can be purchased.

If healthy, vibrant farms are key to averting sprawl disaster in Dane County, then alternative agricultural methods — and perspectives — will increase in importance. Compared with traditional megacrops like soybeans or corn for grain, which gross about $275 to $375 per acre, grosses for fresh market vegetables can range from $8,000 to $16,000 per acre, with a net of between $4,000 to $9,000. Therefore, to support a family, specialty vegetable farms don’t need to be as big as conventional feed crop farms.

Organic milk, meat, vegetables and fruit are more labor-intensive to produce, but they do command higher prices in an expanding market: the market for organic has been steadily growing by 20 percent yearly since 1989. The Miller Farm in Dane County’s Town of Bristol is Wisconsin’s largest organic dairy farm, with 350 milk cows. Because their milk is organic, the Millers can sell their milk for 50 percent more than the conventional price.

And there’s plenty of room for niche marketing. For direct sales, there’s the 300-vendor Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Square, as well as markets in Middleton, Sun Prairie and Fitchburg, and outside Madison’s Hilldale Shopping Center. There are roadside stands where farmers set up informal shop for the day. U-Pick orchards and berry patches let you walk through the growing fields yourself, and are often touted as an attraction for children.

Despite these opportunities, the future of Dane County’s rich agrarian tradition, and the beautiful landscape that comes with it, is far from certain. From here, Dane County may join the list of America’s lost paradises. Or it may become a great success story, a blueprint for others to follow. How the business community approaches development, how strongly it supports locally produced foods, and the stand it takes on land-use policies — all these will play an incalculable role in the shape the county will take.

But before business is likely to exercise its power to help Dane County farmers, it must first recognize how important Dane County farmers are to business. “We need to raise awareness,” says Jim Arts. “If we want to preserve the character of Dane County, we must keep farmers in business.”

Walter and Sam's chocolate cake?

by Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
in Madison Magazine, May(?) 2001
Column: Tidbits

German chocolate cake has nothing to do with Germany. It’s simply a recipe made with a sweet chocolate bar developed by Sam German in the 1840s.

Sam worked for Baker’s Chocolate, whose name has nothing to do with baking—Walter Baker, the Massachusetts physician who built America’s first chocolate mill in 1780, co-founded the company.

In 1957, a Dallas newspaper published a recipe for an unusual chocolate layer cake. Spectacularly soft and dense, it was leavened with buttermilk, baking soda, and stiffly beaten egg whites. It was topped and filled with a soft caramel frosting loaded with pecan bits and coconut flakes.

When sales of Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate skyrocketed in that city, General Foods went to Dallas to find out why—then sent the recipe to newspapers around the country.

Today, you’ll find a tear-off card with a scrumptious recipe for “German’s® Sweet Chocolate cake” inside each package of Kraft’s Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. There’s even a photo of the cake on the front of the box.

Sometimes history hides in plain view.