![]() She and her husband eventually decided that they wanted to move back to Michigan, and Berens found a job as a chef at Granor Farm in the state’s southwest corner. ![]() After almost a decade of operating a farm near Traverse City and shuttling back to Chicago in the off season to work in restaurants and bakeries such as Vie, Floriole, and Hoosier Mama, she moved to Chicago full-time to open the cafe at the late grocery store Local Foods. A chef there suggested that she continue her education at Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland, which has its own farm and focuses on sustainable, seasonal cooking.īallymaloe taught Berens that cooking is entirely dependent on farming and its exigencies, a philosophy she has carried through kitchens and her cookbooks. During one summer of college at the University of Michigan, she worked for the legendary Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor and hungrily learned everything she could about cooking and kitchens. She started working in restaurants around age 16-in part to avoid working on the family farm. “I don’t know jackfruit about cooking with pineapple,” she writes. Pulp, which presents both savory and sweet recipes for various fruits, includes only Midwestern produce. The state is the second-most agriculturally diverse in the country, she points out in Pulp, speculating that her proximity to its bounty is part of why she cooks with fruit so much. She grew up on a family farm near Holland, Michigan, in a part of the state known as the “fruit belt,” where the climate is moderated by Lake Michigan. ![]() You can even pick up a sort of sketch of her life in the book, via the personal details and stories and ideas and conversations sprinkled into recipe headnotes, explanations of cooking techniques, and interviews with colleagues.īerens’ actual biography goes like this. ![]() It is not often that a real sense of a person comes through in a cookbook, but you feel like you know Berens after reading through Pulp. Though she argues in favor of locally grown produce, she’s not afraid to admit to eating a store-bought apple and enjoying Gushers and Doritos. She won’t claim to be an expert and refuses to offer judgments or prescriptions, but it’s clear that she has thought deeply about food production, is still learning, and hopes that you might do so, too. Pulp not only glows with luminous descriptive writing (she and her grandfather would “wrap up the day sitting on the tailgate as he sliced a sun-warmed fruit with his pocket knife, juice dripping down my chin, and my heart wrapped in the gauzy, golden light of future nostalgia”) it also contains clear-minded, straight-talking explorations of complex issues around the economic realities of agriculture, sustainability, and farm labor-easier said than done.īerens has a distinctive voice, which she brings to both her unorthodox but insightful approach to cooking (her culinary “thing,” she writes ruefully, might be “That didn’t sound good, but it was!”) and to sections of the book that discuss the challenges farms face, as well as what being a responsible consumer might mean. You might not think of cookbooks as containing all that much writing, at least not the kind that an English and history major like Berens might aspire to, but her cookbooks are much more than simple collections of recipes. “Pretty early on, I knew that I wanted my food to be a window into agriculture and what it means to grow this food.” “The food world is so broad, and there are so many different ways to make it your own,” she says. She has now produced three cookbooks, the latest of which, the fruit-centered Pulp, comes out on April 4. She grew up on a farm in Michigan, found herself drawn to working in kitchens, and started her own farm before finally returning to her initial dream of writing. Get recipes, food news, and stories by signing up for our Deep Dish newsletter.Ībra Berens wanted to be a writer, but became a cook and a farmer first.
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