Imagine a regional cookbook that includes recipes from that region but also from farms/mills/markets/etc and from various cultures related to the region, with some background and history to help connect everything; that’s Dishing Up Minnesota. I may be biased, having been born and raised in that state, but it also means that I actually know something about the food culture of that part of the country.
Some ingredient and recipes are obvious necessities, such as a wild rice soup, at least one or two walleye preparations, and hotdish. The fun thing for me was that although each of these items are present, there is sometimes an interesting tweak, like Apple Dessert Hotdish. Hotdish is essentially a casserole that involves some sort of proteins, veggies, gravy, and a potato topping (probably tater tot if you’re going traditional church-style); to quote the recipe header, “Here, fruit replaces the meant and vegetables, and a lightly sweetened cream cheese imitates the cream soups often used {…} The result is sort of a cross between a bread pudding and an apple-cream cheese pie”. I wanna try this. Besides the hot dish reference, the apple connection is also more relevant than you might think; the University of Minnesota invented the Honeycrisp apple variety.
There’s some unexpected things like Honey-Spiced Chicken Tagine” included that doesn’t sound all that midwestern, btu the connection happens to come from a MN resident who is a beekeeper, director of dining services who has in the past run award-winning Mediterranean places with his spouse. The info is in the recipe head-note in this case. If you want to learn to make your own gravlax or lutefisk, there are recipes for both of those, but so too are there recipes for Hmong larb, Mexican horchata, and Somali stew. These are all prefaced by a 2-page spread explaining the diversity of the Twin Cities area in particular which does include sizable populations of each of the cultures referenced.
There are a few cases of the ingredients required being so local it would be a challenge to make some recipes exactly as listed, such as eelpout, groundcherries, or genuine wild rice (one recipe specifies this over paddy-grown). For the most part though, most of the book is doable assuming you have access to some good produce, game, seafood, cheese, and a few specialty things like pine tips and fiddleheads. My main concern is that a lot of the time the recipes are a little more snobby than they need to be in a way, as in there’s a lot of duck, foraged ingredients like specialty mushrooms and ramps, and references to specific very local brands in several recipes. I’m sure you could use the internet for most of this, but that shouldn’t be necessary for so much of the book.