Midwest obvious

We hold these bEANS to be self-evident

Hi, I’m Adrienne, and you’re reading the Local Technique Opinion, a journal about cooking from the soil.

This week’s edition comes to you from the Driftless, an area of southwest Wisconsin that went untouched by glaciation during the last ice age. If the glaciers that scraped the region had come through here, today this zone would be flat as the stereotype of a midwestern cornfield. But they didn’t, and so the Driftless remains a patchwork of ancient ravines (“coulees” in the local parlance) plus cold, glittering trout streams and low green alps.

I grew up on the perimeter of the Driftless, on the Minnesota banks of the Mississippi. The crevices of this landscape are imprinted in the crevices of my brain. I’ve encountered a similar vibe elsewhere (Transylvania, the Vosges region of France), but the Driftless is one of a kind.

Every place is one of a kind, I suppose, though you might not see it until you’re there. Like glaciers, the forces of media and history and search engine optimization (and however else we find out about things beyond our own horizons) tend to be large, blunt and hungry, with a taste for chewing up the intricate landscapes of everyday life. But remote hilly places are harder to reach, which means they have a natural resistance to being scoured for easy content. If you’ve ever happened to hear of a place like Transylvania or Vosges in a place as far away as our dear USA, it’s probably been for some character so extra that their story shot to notoriety thanks to shock value alone: Dracula, Joan of Arc. Likewise, the merits of Driftless Wisconsin fly undetected on the popular radar. If the region’s fame has ever rippled into your ears, it’s probably for the exploits of its vocal native crab, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Up close, you notice the beauty and texture that blunt surveys miss. Turn over a rock and you’ll find a unique soil where crops as unexpected as wine-friendly grapevines thrive. Knock on doors and you’ll find more surprises: world-class cheesemakers are my personal favorite, and they’ll gently suffer even your dumbest questions. Back-to-the-landers flocked here in the ‘70s and ever since there’s been a strong tradition of cooperative businesses; for far longer than that (twelve thousand years, roughly) the area has been home to a human way of life that doesn’t center on steamrolling nature for maximum profit. Organic Valley, the nationally known farmer-owned co-op, is still based in its original city of La Farge. Look to the sides of the public trails here and you’ll see berries, mushrooms, wild greens, fish and fowl in every direction.

If you’re dropping in from afar, Minneapolis is one of the portals through which you can approach the Driftless. I spent the night there on my way in, and it’s where I ate a meal that keeps echoing in my head. It happened at Owamni, where the menu relies on Indigenous ingredient sources. The restaurant’s location alone is something to write home about: rising from the grounds of an outdoor museum built around the stone ruins of the city’s industrial flour mills, it overlooks the Mississippi from a glass-and-brick pavilion that the nonprofit restaurant shares with the Parks Department, part of a new civic vision for this beautifully turbulent section of the river.

Bean dip with smoked trout and berry sauce is the dish that haunts me. Not because it was exceptionally delicious — everything at Owamni was delicious, from the wild rice lager to the carrot tartare to the smoked bison with chimichurri that we watched the open kitchen send to nearly every table in the place — deliciousness was no exception here, it was the rule. The reason this dish haunts me is because it bonked me on the head with the obvious.

Take a moment to imagine what “bean dip with berries” might taste like. Does it make you…uneasy? It’s certainly not part of the Eurocentric culinary traditions that continue to center what counts as good food or good taste in the elite coastal cities where myths are made. But if pounding legumes to a paste and presenting them alongside fruit sauce is wrong, how can peanut butter and jelly be so right?

That was the epiphany. To a certain ear, bean mash plus fruit may sound unusual, but it’s far from strange. The combo is more American than America itself. Ah, but this is lowbrow food. The sort of cuisine that needs to be elevated. Maybe that’s because if you went to a typical supermarket in a seat of imperial power (New York, for example) and tried to source the ingredients for this from the shelves, you’d end up with a slimy puree of bland canned beans plus cold, lifeless berries shipped from another hemisphere, encased within the brittle bodybag of a 6-ounce plastic clamshell. It makes me uneasy, too.

What if there’s another way? What if you let heirloom tepary beans stream into a pot of water like beach pebbles, cooked them with a cedar branch, pounded them in a mortar and pestle until fluffy as fresh guacamole, then served them with a side dollop of “jam” that’s really just a jolt of forest-fruit acidity with a whisper of maple to temper the richness of the beans? What if you scooped it all on to a freshly fried tostada made from corn grown for the character of its flavor (not ethanol, like most field corn in the US)? This is how Owamni does it, and it’s revelatory. “Ironically foreign,” in the words of Owamni’s co-founder, Dana Thompson.

Moments like this remind you that the original meaning of a restaurant was a place that served the kind of food that restored its patrons. Now, back in my NYC kitchen, I’m feeling restored just thinking about it. I don’t have cedar branches, but I do have juniper in my pantry; ever since I learned to cook in Texas it’s followed me around. As much as I’m excited to order Ramona Farms’ tepary beans in the future (they come recommended by Sean Sherman, founder of The Sioux Chef and executive chef and co-founder of Owamni), at the moment what I have on hand is a lingering surplus of Rancho Gordo (hat tip to a certain pandemic for that), so I’ll use those first. Back in the Driftless, I was able to forage a quart of wild blackberries in ten minutes; here in Brooklyn, I’ll buy whatever the chefs haven’t cornered at the greenmarket now that the local season is underway.

Here’s the recipe: cook, season and mash the beans; mash and season the berries; serve them together (more beans than berries) on a fresh tortilla (fry it if you like). Accompany this with strong black coffee in the morning or Lake Monster Last Fathom wild rice lager at night (made in Minneapolis, dark as coffee, crisp as a Lake Superior breeze). If you can manage to bless it with a few slivers of smoked trout, even better. When you get it right, it’s perfect.

I wish there were exact measurements and commands I could give that would replicate the magic that Owamni does, but snazzy hacks don’t exist here. There’s nothing I can say online, nothing that could be conveyed by keystrokes. It’s the sort of thing you have to experience in person, with your offline senses. Tracking down raw materials whose flavors haven’t been flattened — and building a network of support for the growers and cooks who care for them — is where this recipe’s real work lies.

Illustration by Adrienne Anderson.