Photograph by Matt Taylor-Gross
Amy Thielen
Amy Thielen
Why do we leave? Every Minnesotan knows why some number of our most promising sons and daughters head east or west—because that’s where the proving grounds are. But we come back. And every Minnesotan knows the story of this return as well as we know that strawberries follow rhubarb in the spring. The homecoming happens when the babies are due or when the babies are school age or something something kids something. Right? But, what is it really? What are the dimensions and the subtleties of this odyssey? Why, really, do Minnesotans come back?
Give a Girl a Knife book by Amy Thielen
Amy Thielen’s launch party for Give a Girl a Knife is May 18 at 7 pm at Tattersall. All are invited.
That’s the big question that threads, haunts, teases, and ultimately blazes like morning sun on a wet, frozen lake in Amy Thielen’s memoir about cooking, Give a Girl a Knife. Thielen, of course, is the hometown girl who starred in the Food Network show Heartland Table and wrote the best-selling cookbook The New Midwestern Table. And she’s not just a hometown girl in a little way. She’s so hometown she has family living in lime Jell-O-colored ramblers.
Thielen grew up in Park Rapids, a town of 3,000 halfway between the Twin Cities and Canada, and she knows everything anyone might need to about how to fish for suckers off a dock using steak fat scraps, and how a road Up North will start to fur in with bottle-brush pines if you let down your guard. She moved to Eagan with her mom halfway through high school, and knows that the Twin Cities are where Minnesotans go to start over, and how the family cabin is the first sacrifice in any divorce.
She graduated from Macalester in 1997, and knocked around the Twin Cities with her MCAD boyfriend, Aaron Spangler, who later became her accomplished artist husband (look for his first cast bronze sculpture to be part of the permanent collection of the reopened Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden). During this post-grad knocking around, Thielen cooked at Café Brenda—and then the young couple took off for the proving grounds of New York City, where Thielen cooked in some of the toughest and most elite restaurants in Manhattan, including Danube (under chef David Bouley), 66 (Jean-Georges Vongerichten), and Cru (Shea Gallante). Her memoir will be sold to the wider country as a tale about New York—the swashbuckling knife work, the lobster massacres, the sexism she faced in male-dominated kitchens. But for Minnesotans, it’s a far more unusual story, explaining why we come home, and why we long for Minnesota even when we’re here.
“When I turned 16, the winter my parents split up, I learned how to properly whip my car into a donut (what we called a “shitty”) on the icy tundra of the nighttime grocery-store parking lot,” writes Thielen. “My friends and I were good girls and didn’t usually do such things, but we assiduously practiced our car twirls—speeding, whipping the wheel, and spinning wildly out of control—feeling the circadian swoop low in our bellies, as if by mastering it we could conquer our fears of moving out and moving on.”
As a transplanted New Yorker reading that sentence, I had so many thoughts: about all the parking-lot and lake-twirl stories you all have told me over the years, about how it’s actually probably pretty good training for winter catastrophe driving, and about how unique and valuable it is that someone gave that experience the depth and detail it deserves. There are many parts of the book that remind me of the work of V.S. Naipaul in a certain exacting, and thus ennobling, attention. Thielen has a fascinating riff on how the carefully cooking ladies of her childhood concealed their difficult and accomplished cooking in old Kemp’s ice cream buckets slung over their wrists, carted along to potlucks and church basements like jewels concealed in rags. Thielen is happy, too, to riff on her native Park Rapids. “It’s a stunningly beautiful area,” she tells me when I talk to her on the phone for this story. “In a quiet way. It’s not a Getty Images landscape, like the Grand Canyon or something. It’s quieter, like it’s just for you. I’ve been a lot of other places to visit, and I always think, this is beautiful, but it’s not a spiritual landscape. Like home. . . . I feel like my home kind of chose me. I was drawn back to it in an unnaturally strong way, and I learned something—and I wouldn’t have learned that if I hadn’t had the courage to come back.”
Spangler and Thielen came back when they learned they’d be joined by their son Hank, now 9. They accepted that they could only do the real work of their lives in Minnesota, where they now make art by the creeks and among the tamaracks of Two Inlets, near the start of the Mississippi River. “Aaron built me a little cabin inside my [deer-fenced] garden. We call it the dacha, a two-room writing hut.” It’s where Thielen found her voice, starting with a $20-a-week food column in the Park Rapids newspaper. It’s where she wrote her memoir, and it’s where she’s writing her next cookbook. Spangler’s sculpture studio is steps away.
Have we ever talked about the courage of coming home to Minnesota? That’s Thielen’s story—one of being yourself in a place little understood outside our borders—and it might be yours, too.
