Sue Zelickson and Karla Knutson: What cookbooks tell us about ourselves

Sue Zelickson has shaped the Twin Cities food culture for decades. Her time on WCCO and KSTP highlighted food trends and restaurants. She founded organizations to support food professionals that helped them flourish. She also founded Kids' Cafe, which operated in Boys and Girls Clubs to feed children and to teach them cooking. Her long list of acheivements have all significantly influenced what the food scene is today.

Sue will conduct a friendly, chatty interview with Concordia College Moorhead English professor Karla Knutson. Karla is researching how community cookbooks reflect the period, location, and culture of those who contributed recipes to them.

Karla's inspiration for her research was a copy of The Joy of Sharing, a 1985 church cookbook from Velva, North Dakota.The book had once belonged to her grandmother. While searching for a recipe for scalloped corn, she came across a recipe for microwaved bacon-wrapped liver.

“It was a recipe so far removed from my culinary expectations that it seemed like I’d unearthed a time capsule,” Karla says.

This sparked her interest in how recipes tell us what is happening in the larger community and how food was prepared, eaten, and thought about in the past. Even how a recipe is written changes with the generations. Karla is now writing a book aboout community cookbooks and commensality, the experience of sharing food with others.

Together, Sue Z., the author of ten cookbooks herself, and Karla will explore how community cookbooks record, often unintentionally, how different generations, including our own, think about food and friendship.

Host or Publisher Norway House