“You have written one hundred million cookbooks,” I falsely accuse the innocent and smiling Beth Dooley as she looks at me over a little glass of white wine, mirth dancing in her light eyes.
“Nope, only 13,” she replies. “And three more forthcoming. And a memoir, maybe.”
“Impossible!” I sputter. “I have no fewer than one hundred million of your cookbooks in my office right now!”
Dooley cackles with laughter, but it’s so loud in this bar no one turns our way. We’re in the most crowded bar in Uptown, the basement speakeasy beneath Sooki and Mimi, tucked in tight around a tiny table.
Of course, I freely admit Dooley has only—“only”—13 cookbooks. Still, emotionally, I defend my truth: Minnesota cookbooks, Minnesota food on the page, Minnesota food concerns, and Minnesota recipes? There’s no one bigger than Beth Dooley. One hundred million cookbooks feels more accurate.
Dooley’s preeminence began in 1994, when she and chef Lucia Watson coauthored Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland. The book considered our unique culture of fine flour and snowy farm towns and kicked off our northern food revolution. It’s an American food essential today, not least because it was written for legendary editor Judith Jones (who rescued the diary of Anne Frank from the slush pile; went on to fish Julia Child out of the slush pile; and published Marcella Hazan, James Beard, and John Updike).
Dooley’s book with Watson was nominated for a James Beard Award, and while it didn’t win, it did something bigger. The book created a road map for transforming our local food identity. It shifted us out of a place that lived, even in local imagination, as a slightly not-good-enough continuation of an undifferentiated Midwest, part of the flatness stretching from Ohio to Oklahoma, into something far more meaningful and important: the unique North. By the time I wrote my first words about Minnesota food, in 1997, I did so in a world that Dooley delineated.
Twenty years later, in 2017, Dooley was coauthor, with Sean Sherman, of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, the latest effort at the time to think, in new and big ways, about what this place where we now live meant and means, edibly and otherwise. This book went on to win the James Beard Award for best American cookbook of the year, and the ideas within it are still transforming the world. The writing within it is certainly part of the collection of Sherman’s work that inspired Time magazine to name him one of the 100 most influential people on the planet this year.
Between those two books? Dooley has a great many others, each adding layers of understanding, including my favorites, The Perennial Kitchen (on soil-building foodstuffs and regenerative agriculture), The Northern Heartland Kitchen (the essential book on how to eat well right here with local goods selected from a farmers’ market and co-op nearby), and In Winter’s Kitchen (essays with a touch of memoir).
Dooley’s importance in local food is only overshadowed by her reputation in local food: the nicest woman in the world. In that loud bar, the two of us cozied up around a voice recorder. As we sipped drinks made with macadamia milk and shared light-as-a-feather Korean chicken wings, I revealed my mission: to write anything about Dooley besides, “She’s the nicest woman in the world, and a great cook!”
This was not going to be easy, because the truth is: Dooley may in fact be the nicest woman in the world. I think I’ve known her for 20-odd years. She’s the kind of person who hears in your voice that you have a cold and then brings chicken soup to your radio-show interview. She’s the person at the edge of the big celebrity food event who seems to be holding a little chalice of empathy and warm human feeling right next to her, so that when you’re out of energy, you go stand near her because that’s the safe and good place to be. But is nice all there is? To find out, I launched a flaming barrage of sharply barbed questions at her and came back with a 30,000-word interview transcript proving Beth Dooley has been hiding something big from us this whole time.
First, the facts. It all started in martini-and-tennis country, in prosperous Short Hills, New Jersey. That’s where, in 1954, Dooley (then Beth Anton) materialized smack-dab in the middle of “John Cheever country, swimming pools forever,” she recalls. She’s referring to that famed short story about a man leaving a party and climbing from one backyard to another to swim forever in his prosperous discontent. Beth, the oldest of four, was born to a dad who was pulled in to run his father’s successful company, Suburban Propane, and a mom who found the prosperity that life afforded her not a source of discontent but of downright fun.
The Antons in the 1950s and 1960s seem like a microcosm of postwar America. “Selling propane, my dad had the opposite career someone should have if you care about climate change,” recalls his daughter, who has written extensively, and for decades, about the importance of eating local and minimizing food miles. Dooley found more in common with her grandmother, her namesake, Elizabeth Flower. “My own Gram Flower had a garden,” Dooley remembers—full of carrots, green beans, and tomatoes. “She was a big, big part of my life, the only big cook in the family. I’d go over, and we’d make tiny sugar cookies together to lay out on tiny plates so the fairies could eat them when they came out at midnight—fairies come out at midnight for tea, you know. And then we’d sit in the garden zipping peas out of their pods, plunk, plunk.”
Meanwhile, Dooley’s mom had other notions of time well spent. She would say, “‘I’m not cooking. Bye. I’m going to go play tennis. That’s way more fun,’” recalls Dooley today.
Feet away from the family dining room, the TV in the den brought in Walter Cronkite and the chaos of the 1960s. America was in full conflict with itself. JFK was assassinated in 1963, the Harlem and Philadelphia race riots were in 1964, the Newark riots were in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968, Vietnam War protests became louder with each year from 1964 until the United States left Saigon in 1975—and still the Anton children were expected to go to dancing lessons.
Dooley remembers the Kent State shootings of protesting students in 1970 as typical of the topics of conflict at home. “My dad, who had dropped out of high school to join the navy to fight in World War II, was very, very patriotic. He’d always say something like, ‘The government must have their reasons; they must know something we don’t know.’ His experience was, World War II was a just war; this must be one too. We had shouting matches. I can be loud.”
It was a confusing time for Dooley. “The TV was often on while we were eating dinner,” she recalls. “I’m looking at the My Lai massacre, and my dad, who was the nicest guy in the world, is saying, ‘War is hard.’ But it wasn’t all like that. I’d also go down in a car full of teenagers to the shore to eat clams and see Bruce Springsteen. The ’60s and ’70s in New Jersey were a tumble.”
Amid the backdrop of that tumble, Dooley rebelled in a way that made sense to her: cooking. She learned how to make lasagna from the babysitter, Mrs. Della Piazza. Then, while her parents were off at the country club, she would invite friends over to eat lasagna before school dances.
Dooley still makes Mrs. Della Piazza’s lasagna. “It’s my boys’ favorite thing: very cheesy, good ricotta, eggs, garlic, homemade sauce, lots of herbs, plenty of oregano, no meat. When you’re homesick or your girlfriend broke up with you, you’ll feel better eating it—or at least I’ll feel better making it. I’ll send you the recipe.”
It was during these high school lasagna-rebel years that Dooley found another peculiar rebellion: hiding cookbooks among her school textbooks so she could sneak them up to her room to read when she was supposed to be doing homework. As she says, often, recipes are “short stories that all have happy endings.”
“When someone is a good cook like you!” I object. She hoots with laughter before attempting to steer me into a conversation about how everyone can cook.
Teenage Beth charted a path much like other cultural observers of the time, like John Cheever, who looked with skepticism and an eye on the complexity of that tumble of New Jersey. She headed up into the mountains of the Northeast to study literature—first at St. Lawrence University and then at the University of New Hampshire for a master’s in writing. She rubbed elbows with the likes of Alice McDermott and studied with luminaries like Russell Banks and Charles Simic.
“Four of us rented the top level of an old furniture store,” she recalls. “People would come over to eat that lasagna and drink bad wine, then we’d go over to Charlie Simic’s, because he threw the wildest parties. We’d talk big ideas, drink so much beer, howl at the moon. I had really long hair; I’d wear a tie-dye shirt and the worst jean skirt. But I read a lot of M. F. K. Fisher and Rachel Carson, so that was good.”
Dooley published a few short stories. Then she did what up-and-coming writers in the 1970s did: She went to New York City to work in publishing and smoke cigarettes indoors and be dazzled by Jackie Onassis and Andy Warhol. Her job? Publicity assistant at Harper and Row.
“I had a little office, no windows, but I did have a door and a big heavy phone, the kind you stick between ear and shoulder when you need to light a cigarette while you type,” she recalls. She had an entry-level publishing salary, which meant lunches of street pretzels and dinners of whatever was offered next to the jug wine at book launches.
“One of my authors was Annie Dillard; another was Howard Cosell,” she says. “I’d shepherd them to interviews, tag along to the book parties—the most fabulous parties. William Buckley’s house, William Safire’s house.” The guest lists were staggering. “I remember a couple parties with Jackie O., right there, drop-dead gorgeous, a black slip dress, no jewelry at all, her hair beautifully done. The whole party’s focus was just like, Jackie O. is here. Don’t look. Look! And here comes Andy Warhol!”
But it didn’t take long for the shine to wear off. “I shared an apartment the size of a postage stamp, and we had an oven with two settings: Stay Raw or Burn Everything. And New York really was dirty and dangerous at the time. After three years, I had enough.”
Beth had been dating her now husband, Kevin, a fellow St. Lawrence grad, for years. He was finishing law school, and Minnesotans he met at school persuaded the two that the Twin Cities was a better fit for a young couple than New York: They would be able to afford a home bigger than a postage stamp, and they could keep kayaks in the yard.
In 1980, the newlywed Dooleys moved into a duplex in the Wedge, unaware it was a move that would profoundly change Minnesota food. They have lived within walking distance of Lake of the Isles ever since, in one house or another, raising three sons, running marathons together, loving a string of dogs—the latest is a 30-pound orangish sweetheart named Daisy—and making a life that included a lot of good dinners as well as a 1914 cabin on Madeline Island.
Dooley got her official start in food writing after moving to Minneapolis and landing a job at the ad agency Campbell Mithun, where she worked for client Land O’Lakes, writing promotional cookbooks and pamphlets on topics like butter cookies. It was work that taught her the business end of recipes, the formatting of teaspoons and tablespoons, and created favorable conditions for fate to come walking through her front door in the shape of a Minneapolis chef named Lucia Watson.
Watson—who had opened Lucia’s in Uptown in 1985 and soon turned it into Minneapolis’s most important restaurant—became known for championing then-new ideas like farm-to-table and working closely with Minnesota producers, like Hope Creamery and Fischer Family Farms Pork. One year, she was a guest at one of the Dooleys’ St. Patrick’s Day parties. For these events, Beth would bake half a dozen loaves of Irish soda bread and boil corned beef for 30. The two bonded instantly, kindred souls leading their own private food revolutions—Dooley’s about the intrinsic value of cooking at home like her Gram Flower and unlike her prosperous parents, and Watson’s about cooking like Gram Flower at scale.
“What people don’t appreciate about Beth is how tenacious she is,” Lucia Watson told me when I called her on the phone for this story. “I’ve sat next to her while she’s questioning a home cook—Why that flour? What does the gluten level do? Who grows it? Why do they grow it like that? How did your grandmother do it? What else do you do with it? Hours later, you’re like, ‘Wow, you found out everything.’ It took us a year—I’m not kidding, a whole year—to write the first chapter of our book. You think, We’re just hanging out, she’s so funny, what a good time, and then at the end, she’s the Woodward and Bernstein of that one bread recipe.”
Dooley and I talked for hours and hours for this story, sometimes in person, sometimes on the phone. She really does only want to be known as the nicest woman in the room: “I just want everyone to come to the table,” she’ll say. “I just want everyone to appreciate food.”
“Nope,” I push back. “If that was all you wanted, you didn’t need to spend years in the Minnesota Historical Society archives excavating original documents and 19th-century fishing photos. If that was all you wanted, you didn’t need to take editorial phone calls when you were in labor with your youngest son. What you did, what you’ve done, is bigger and more difficult than simply wanting everyone to come to the table.”
Finally, Dooley spills the goods. Aha! She’s always had a secret agenda. “When I grew up, around the tables I grew up around, it was very clear to me that the political is personal and the personal is political,” she explains. She was also very aware that whenever she said, “Ideally, we should do X,” a more powerful person at the table replied, “Be reasonable.”
Dooley has a shorthand for all of her idealism: She calls it woo-woo. And she’s always worried that she’ll be mocked and discounted for it.
“Are you haunted by the propane in the family tree?” I ask.
“Oh, absolutely,” she replies. “My dad was, too—he knew climate change was real; he actually bought a woodstove company to help with the transition from fossil fuels. But I think this is a pretty common conflict for anyone in my generation. I’m almost 70, and I feel like I’ve always been aware of my privilege, all that I’ve been given, and how I owe the world a lot. But I also have always known people don’t hear your message if you come in conflict. Or if they think you’re too woo-woo. Or if you’re preachy. Did you ever hear the slogan ‘Be a wolf in sheep’s clothing’?”
I never heard it as a positive, I admit. Is that the real Beth Dooley? A hard-working, extra-nice wolf in sheep’s clothing, not preaching, but bearing carrots instead of sticks?
“What happens when you pay attention to the soil? When you nurture relationships? The work I do is grounded in all that.”
Beth Dooley
“My generation, we questioned everything, but actual change was harder,” Dooley tells me. “You could call me a fraud because I’m not living everything I value. I’m not a hippie on a farm growing my own food. But I am writing about them. I grew up Catholic, went all kinds of directions as an adult, but a land ethic is something that is deeply embedded in me. What happens when you pay attention to the soil? When you nurture relationships? The work I do is grounded in all that.”
“Secretly, you’ve been packing your soups with world-changing kindness!” I trumpet. Dooley laughs; secretly is how she always wanted it. “I’m always a little wary of putting that out there. Does it come off as a little woo-woo? A little preachy? But I’ve always thought, Maybe a carrot starts the next revolution. Maybe a little kindness starts the next revolution. Maybe a carrot plus a little kindness—maybe that’s unstoppable?”
There’s no arguing with success. To judge by her impact on local food, Dooley is indeed unstoppable.
Maybe just like North Shore beach agates need tumbling to reveal that they are actually jewels, Minnesota food needed a smart cook, jostled within by the tumult of 1960s New Jersey, to come out shining?