Amy Thielen's Northern Table

Photographs and recipe excerpted from “Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others”. Copyright (c) 2023 by Amy Thielen. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Thielen lives northwest of Park Rapids, not far from the roads Fargoans travel when they cut across toward Two Inlets, Itasca, and the surrounding lakes. She grew up in the area, left for college and New York City, cooked in some of the country's most demanding restaurant kitchens, wrote award-winning books, hosted a Food Network show filmed in her own home, and then she returned north and took Midwestern food seriously.

That might sound simple now, after years of regional cookbooks, farm dinners, and renewed interest in old food traditions. But Thielen has spent much of her career insisting that the food of this place has always been worthy of attention. Potatoes, pie, venison, sausage, kohlrabi, brown butter, garden vegetables, lake-country grocery stores, church-supper practicality, and the instinct to make use of what is in front of you.

CompanyCheck out the book on amazonamazon.com

Her first cookbook, The New Midwestern Table, helped make that case nationally. Her memoir, "Give a Girl a Knife," traced the path between rural Minnesota and New York restaurant kitchens. Her most recent cookbook, "Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others," turns its attention to hospitality, menus, and the art of making people feel comfortable at your table. Thielen is a two-time James Beard Award-winning writer and chef, and she was the host of Heartland Table on Food Network.

But when she talks about how she learned to cook, Thielen does not start with Manhattan. She starts at home.

"I just sat across the counter from her and watched," Thielen said of her mother. "She was like my personal food TV." Her mother taught her how to shop, how to notice the difference between a good lemon and a green one, how to sear meat and then build a small sauce out of the browned bits left in the pan. That kind of cooking—pulling every bit of flavor out of what you have—is still central to Thielen's way of thinking.

In New York, that foundation turned out to matter. Thielen attended cooking school and then worked in intense, exacting kitchens, including those of David Bouley and other major chefs. At Danube, Bouley's Austrian restaurant, she found some of the same flavors she had grown up with in Minnesota—brown butter, potatoes, kohlrabi, sausage. She sent some of her family's cold-smoked sausage from Thielen Meats in Pierz to the restaurant and cooked it for Austrian chefs. They loved it.

That was when she became sure that the food she knew from home could stand up anywhere.

"I was basically just a big crusader for Midwestern food," she said of those years. "I defended it to anybody who had anything to say about it."

Eventually, after the 2008 financial crash and the birth of her son, Thielen and her husband, artist Aaron Spangler, moved back to their place near Park Rapids. What had once been a rustic cabin became a home. There was a garden, an orchard, room to cook, and the quiet pressure of distance. When town is 25 minutes away, dinner is not something you casually outsource. You cook.

These days, Thielen said her energy changes with the season. In spring and harvest time, the garden takes over. Her day-to-day cooking is often simple and responsive to what is ready, what is in the refrigerator, and what needs to be used. She likes the creativity that comes from resourcefulness. "That's kind of how I develop recipes," she said, "out of necessity and the innovation that comes out of having to be resourceful."

That same spirit runs through her current project, Ham Radio: Cooking with Amy Thielen, a KAXE/KBXE radio show and podcast she hosts with producer Heidi Holtan. The show celebrates rural home cooks, food thinkers, foragers, cookbook authors, and callers with recipes and stories to share. KAXE describes it as a show about "the creativity and resourcefulness of rural home cooks," which might also serve as a neat description of Thielen's entire body of work.

Ask Thielen what makes a good meal for company, and she begins with the plate. She thinks about juices, textures, ratios, and how vegetables, starches, and meat work together. Her mother often served a protein, a starch, and several vegetables, and Thielen still believes that balance can make almost anything feel complete.

Not every dish needs "bells and whistles." Sometimes the thing that holds a meal together is a bowl of green beans boiled in very salty water and finished with garlic butter. Sometimes it is fried chicken cooked outside on a portable burner and served with creamed corn. Sometimes it is hash browns—properly made from par-cooked russets, grated, chilled, and fried in clarified butter until crisp.

Her hospitality extends beyond food. Thielen lights up when she talks about interior design, color, lighting, tile, and the flow of a room. In her kitchen, she has an Italian wood cookstove that she keeps going through the winter, using the dry heat to roast squash, bake potatoes, or burnish the tops of coffee cakes. For her, a good gathering is not just about what is served. It is about creating a room where people can settle in.

"I like creating a space where people feel comfortable."

She can talk about the exact moment soy sauce should hit a stir fry, the right way to preheat cast iron, or why water on a vegetable changes what happens in a hot pan. But she is just as interested in the mood around the table, the caller with a family recipe, the gas station with a great burger, the local smokehouse, the garden row, the old skills that never needed rescuing so much as recognition.

Northern Minnesota, she said, certainly feels northern. The accent gives it away. So does the food.

Follow Amy Thielen: Instagram @amyrosethielen | Facebook amythielencook | amythielen.com | Listen to Ham Radio: Cooking with Amy Thielen on KAXE