As the Minnesota State Fair kicks into high gear, we’re talking with one of the state’s most iconic food personalities. Beatrice Ojakangas, who turned 90 this year, has Minnesota roots going back to the 1800s. She grew up milking cows and churning butter on a family farm, before her first blue ribbons at the State Fair launched her on a path to culinary innovation. She wrote the first Finnish cookbook published in the U.S. and invented one of the most iconic snack foods in the American frozen food canon. Bea tells Dan about what it was like trying to become a writer as a woman in 1950s Minnesota, the huge risk she took when she entered a nationwide baking competition, and how a call from Julia Child changed her life.
Cheesy Picnic Bread (Chunk o’ Cheese Bread)
When I entered this recipe in the Bake-Off competition, I used the name “Cheesy Picnic Bread.” Pillsbury later changed the name to “Chunk o’ Cheese Bread.”
Today I use a medium sharp cheddar cheese instead of the processed American cheese I used in the original recipe.
- 13⁄4 cups water
- 1⁄2 cup cornmeal
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 1⁄2 cup dark molasses
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 package or 1 tablespoon active dry yeast
- 1⁄2 cup warm water (105°F to 115°F)
- 4 to 5 cups bread flour
- 1 pound sharp cheddar cheese, cut into 1⁄2-inch cubes
In a medium saucepan, stir together water, cornmeal, and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly, until thickened. Remove from heat and stir in the molasses and butter. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Let sit until creamy, about ten minutes. Add the cornmeal mixture and 2 cups of the flour; beat well.
Add the remaining flour 1⁄2 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition. When the dough comes together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. (Today, I’d put it into my heavy-duty mixer with the dough hook in place, and mix for 10 minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl often.) Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and turn to coat with oil.
Cover with a damp cloth and let rise in a warm place until doubled in volume, about 1 hour.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and flatten. Place 1⁄3 of the cheese cubes on the flattened dough and fold the dough up to enclose the cubes.
Do this twice more, until all of the cheese is incorporated into the dough. You may have to let the dough rest for a few minutes between folding. Divide the dough into two equal pieces and form each piece into a round loaf.
Place the rounds on lightly greased baking sheets, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until nearly doubled, about 45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Bake in the preheated oven for 45 to 55 minutes or until golden brown and the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.
Makes 2 loaves, about 20 servings.
Excerpted from Homemade: Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and Other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2016 by Beatrice Ojakangas. Used by permission.
The Sporkful production team includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O’Hara, Nora Ritchie, and Jared O'Connell. Publishing by Shantel Holder and transcription by Emily Nguyen.
Interstitial music in this episode by Black Label Music:
- “Happy With You” by Ken Brahmstedt
- “Homefront” by Jack Ventimiglia
- "Child Knows Best" by Jack Ventimiglia
- “Playful Rhodes” by Stephen Sullivan
- “Party Hop” by Jack Ventimiglia
- "When You’re Away" by Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
- "Lost and Found" by Casey Hjelmberg
- "Birthday Party" by Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
Photo courtesy of Beatrice Ojakangas.
Right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. The SiriusXM app has all your favorite podcasts, and you can listen to over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era. Plus, live sports coverage, interviews with A-list stars and more. It’s everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. For three months free, go to siriusxm.com/sporkful.
View Transcript
Beatrice Ojakangas: I don't think they're doing as much good food writing today as there used to be. I think it's more crazy, splashy stuff that doesn't really make a whole lot of common sense.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: I like common sense. [LAUGHS]
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. The last few weeks have been pretty big for Minnesota. The state’s governor is now the Democratic candidate for Vice President. He's been displaying his Minnesota charm in rallies all over the country. And the Minnesota State Fair just opened, over 12 days, more than a million people will descend on the Twin Cities for rides, livestock exhibitions, live music, and a lot of food.
Dan Pashman: Back in June, you may recall, I talked with Yia Vang, who opened the first Hmong food stall at the state fair a few years ago. Yia’s presence at the fair represents just how much Minnesota’s culinary scene has changed.
Dan Pashman: My guest today, Bea Ojakangas, has also cooked at the Minnesota State Fair, where she got her first taste of culinary fame back in 1946. Bea turned 90 this year. In her illustrious career she’s written an astounding 32 cookbooks and invented a frozen food that’s been an American icon for more than a half century. On top of all that, there’s a good chance she’s the person who first brought popcorn to Finland.
Dan Pashman: So as the Minnesota State Fair kicks into high gear, we think it’s the perfect time to share her story. Bea’s family has been in Minnesota for generations, since her grandfather Joel came from Finland in the late 1800s, part of a wave of Scandinavian immigrants. He began farming in Brookston, a central Minnesota town near Duluth, then got married and had kids. In 1918, a massive fire broke out on the family farm. Joel’s wife and kids tried to escape in a carriage when it caught fire. He was able to pull them to safety, but they were seriously injured. One of those kids was Bea’s mother Esther, who was five at the time.
Beatrice Ojakangas: And my mom was badly burned. She had scars all over her arms and legs, which I thought were really pretty [LAUGHS], but she ended up in the hospital. It was the same time as the Spanish flu was going around.
Dan Pashman: The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 was not a good time to be in a hospital. Joel’s wife caught the disease and died in the hospital. He was left with four badly burned kids, and a farm in shambles.
Beatrice Ojakangas: So what did he do? He got a mail order bride from New York.
Dan Pashman: Her name was Helena, and she had trained as a chef in Helsinki, and then worked in New York, until she accepted Joel's mail order invitation and moved to Minnesota.
Beatrice Ojakangas: She married him sight unseen and she came to Brookston. I can just imagine what a horrible scene that was, you know, coming to a burned out farm. I mean, she had all these dreams of the life in America and it wasn't anything like what she thought. She was really an angry woman.
Dan Pashman: Bea’s mother, Esther, often butted heads with her new stepmother Helena, especially in the kitchen. Esther always wanted to see what Helena was making, but Helena …
Beatrice Ojakangas: She says, "I don't need any watchdogs in the kitchen!"
[LAUGHING]
Beatrice Ojakangas: Yeah. But my mom was so curious and she was always trying to figure out what was going on. That was a relationship — they were not very compatible.
Dan Pashman: When Esther became a mother herself, she decided to run her kitchen differently. By the time Bea was five, she was already helping to cook.
Beatrice Ojakangas: My mom had told me earlier, "All girls need to know how to bake a cake." She took out all the ingredients and just told me what to do. And she said, "You mix up this cake and then you pour it in the pan and — but you have to taste the dough before you bake it. And if it doesn't taste quite right, if it's a little bit flat, it probably needs a pinch of salt." And she was about nine months pregnant.
Dan Pashman: Since the baby was coming, a few weeks later, Bea decided to try that recipe herself and baked her mom a cake.
Beatrice Ojakangas: So I put in a pinch of salt and I tasted it again ... Nah, still flat. [LAUGHS] Soon I was putting in handfuls of salt.
[LAUGHING]
Beatrice Ojakangas: It didn't get any more .... [LAUGHS] more tasty than that. And got the cake in the oven and then remembered that I'd forgotten to put the sugar in. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] It was, of course, too late.
Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: And I brought this piece of hot cake to my mother. She was in the bedroom having my sister, Lil.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: She was literally in the middle of giving birth?
Beatrice Ojakangas: She was, yeah.
Dan Pashman: And you brought in a piece of cake?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: Okay. [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: Well, she had just finished giving birth.
Dan Pashman: Okay, all right.
Beatrice Ojakangas: So anyway, I brought her this piece of cake. I was really proud. And she tasted it and she told me later it was so salty it curled her tongue.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: But she told me it was really beautiful. And, you know, that was my mother's way of encouraging all of us. There were ten of us, all in all, but she was always, she wouldn't criticize. She always just told us what was really the best thing we did. And she said, "This is just a beautiful cake," it was, too.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Bea and her nine siblings grew up on a farm in Floodwood, a rural town in Central Minnesota. It first received electricity in 1940, when Bea was six. Around that same time, the family also got indoor plumbing, and installed their first toilet. All the kids worked on the farm.
Dan Pashman: You were milking cows, you were driving a tractor. What were some of the other chores you were doing?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Well, do you want to really know? [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: Sure. [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: We shoveled manure. [LAUGHS] And I think that's why I have a great immune system right now.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] Yeah, and am I right that you once gave a speech in school about how much you loved milking cows when it was negative 40 degrees out?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Oh yeah.
Dan Pashman: Do you remember any of the speech?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Only thing I remember is that the cows are really friendly and they listened to everything I said. They didn't talk back.
[LAUGHING]
Beatrice Ojakangas: And they were nice and warm.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Beatrice Ojakangas: When it's a 40 below day, you know, you ... That was a nice place to be.
Dan Pashman: As Bea grew up, she became a better cook — no more salty cakes. She made classic Scandinavian foods like Finnish rye bread, but she also churned butter and made homemade ice cream. By age 11, she was doing cooking demonstrations for the local 4-H club. She liked doing the demos, but she had a bigger reason for getting into it …
Beatrice Ojakangas: I knew that if I worked hard enough, I would win a trip to the State Fair and I would get to be off the farm for five days in the end of the summer, you know? And the Minnesota State Fair is a big deal.
Dan Pashman: Bea knew that the competition at the fair was not just about who cooked the best dish. It was also about presentation and knowledge. She’d have to cook something in front of a group of judges, while explaining what she was doing. And the judges would go around the room and quiz the contestants.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Cause had to get these words all in a row and be able to explain this very carefully so that people would really understand. Because these judges were really picky. You know, they'd ask you, "How does that go now again?", you know, and, "How long do you knead the bread?", and all that stuff. So anyway, I worked real hard on it.
Dan Pashman: When she was 12, Bea won her first trip to the Minnesota State Fair. Luckily, before the big day arrived, she had a chance to practice on the farm.
Beatrice Ojakangas: And when I'm milking cows, I'm telling the cows how to make bread and ...
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: That first year competing at the State Fair, Bea won the blue ribbon! And she kept winning, year after year. In her teens, Bea won her first trip out of state, to Chicago.
Beatrice Ojakangas: And it was the International 4-H Congress. And it was at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, and it was so fancy ... Oh, it was so much fun.
[LAUGHING]
Beatrice Ojakangas: I don't even remember what we ate, but I do remember how it looked. There were lots of flowers ... It was just very, very posh, very elegant. So unlike home.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Were you actually that passionate about cooking? Or did you just see cooking as the way to get the prize you wanted?
Beatrice Ojakangas: That was it. It was a way to get where I wanted to go.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Fast forward to college, you go to college and when you go to college, what was your dream? What were you hoping to do with your career?
Beatrice Ojakangas: What I really wanted to do was to write. I always wanted to write. But then when I got to UMD, the University of Minnesota Duluth, there were only two choices I could really take. One was elementary education, which was not what I wanted to do. And the other was to take home economics.
Dan Pashman: Home economics was basically a class on homemaking — cooking, sewing, etc. So in 1952, the only courses women were allowed to take were to learn to be a teacher to little kids, a housewife, or a home ec teacher.
Beatrice Ojakangas: And in fact, even the physics and chemistry that we took were watered down for the home ec girls, you know?
Dan Pashman: Oh, they didn't think you could handle the real science?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Right, right.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: Or something? They thought we couldn't be smart enough to figure out equations and stuff like that.
Dan Pashman: Bea found the Home Economics program stifling. There were courses like hat blocking and tailoring, and long labs that seemed pointless, like when the whole class had to boil an onion for two hours and just to figure out why it came out tasteless. Bea writes in her memoir that she nearly flunked a personal grooming course because she refused to wear a girdle. She felt trapped in the curriculum.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I didn't have time to take any of the creative writing, which I really wanted to do.
Dan Pashman: What was it about writing that captivated you?
Beatrice Ojakangas: I don't know, it was something about expressing yourself, and it was just a kind of desire that I had to talk. And I really loved to talk and I loved to explain things to people. And that was basically, it was just ... I wanted to say things.
Dan Pashman: You had a lot to say.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I had a lot to say.
Dan Pashman: But the head of the Home Economics department wasn’t interested in hearing it. She told Bea that because Bea was on scholarship, she should focus her career on repaying her debt to society. Bea says this dean told her, "You come from a family that doesn't know how to fold their sheets right." Ouch, that’s a pretty sick old-timey burn. When this department head found out Bea wanted to sign up for creative writing classes, she called Bea into her office.
Beatrice Ojakangas: She sat me down, and she said, "You're not going to amount to anything," you know? I said, "Oh, huh? [LAUGHS] Is that right?"
Dan Pashman: And what were you thinking when she said that to you?
Beatrice Ojakangas: I thought, she's just dumb.
[LAUGHING]
Beatrice Ojakangas: I just sat back and I thought, oh no, you know, I'll teach her.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: I'll show her.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Coming up, Bea does show her. She publishes her first cookbook, then ends up inventing one of the most popular frozen foods ever. Stick around.
MUSIC
+++BREAK+++
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, we crank up the Salad Spinner! That's our rapid fire, round table discussion of the hottest and oddest stories in food news. I’m joined by Josh Scherer and Nicole Enayati from the podcast A Hotdog is a Sandwich, which is part of the Mythical Kitchen universe. We talk about the new cereal mix that Travis and Jason Kelce have launched, why the internet is obsessed over whether Chipotle is giving us smaller portion sizes, and the lawsuit about whether or not Cold Stone pistachio ice cream should actually have pistachios in it.
CLIP (JOSH SCHERER): Dan, you mentioned that you enjoy a Slurpee from time to time. How many blue raspberries do you think ended up in that blue raspberry slurpee?
CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Right. [LAUGHS]
CLIP(JOSH SCHERER): A fruit that does not exist.
CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): It's true. Yeah.
CLIP(JOSH SCHERER): These words, they function as adjectives, right?
CLIP (NICOLE ENAYATI): Yeah.
CLIP(JOSH SCHERER): This is an ice cream that has been. Inspired by the pistachio's existence.
Dan Pashman: This is a super episode, we cover a lot of ground. I think you're gonna love it. So make sure you check it out, up now wherever you got this one.
Dan Pashman: Finally, a quick note, that I hope you'll stay tuned till the end of this episode for a special segment with Nellie’s Free Range Eggs about the incredible scientific properties of eggs.
Dan Pashman: Okay, back to my conversation with Bea Ojakangas. During her freshman year in college, Bea met her future husband, Dick. They dated for a few years, and got married right after she graduated in 1956. The week after getting married, they moved to Oxford, England, where Dick was stationed in the Air Force. While she was there, Bea heard about a baking competition happening back in America, The Pillsbury Bake Off. The way it works is that people sent in written recipes and judges cooked them, so Bea could enter from the U.K.
Dan Pashman: Now remember, she was no stranger to cooking competitions. And she’d been baking bread all her life. So she set out to develop a recipe for the contest.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I decided I was going to make a big round loaf of this bread with a layer of cheese in it, like a great big sandwich, and the cheese just melted out and went all over the place, and ... You know, I thought, oh man, that doesn't work.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: But there were little pieces of that cheese that stuck in the bread, and I thought, oh, that tastes kind of good. Maybe I should just cut up chunks of cheese and put it into the bread.
Dan Pashman: Bea rewrote the recipe, calling Chunk ‘o Cheese bread. But it was the day before the contest deadline, so time was short …
Beatrice Ojakangas: But I didn't have enough ingredients to try it again. So I just wrote it that way and sent it in, and totally forgot about it.
Dan Pashman: In other words, Bea entered a recipe for a bread that she never actually baked. A few months later, Dick’s job brought them back to Duluth and Bea was eight and a half months pregnant. They were staying with Dick’s parents, when the phone rang.
Beatrice Ojakangas: "Well, congratulations, you're one of the 100 finalists in the Pillsbury Bake Off." I said, "Oh my gosh, what did I send in?"
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: And [LAUGHS] I didn’t even know what I had sent in.
Dan Pashman: After the phone call, someone from Pillsbury came to her house with the paperwork.
Beatrice Ojakangas: The Pillsbury representative that came, he had my recipe, but I didn't have it. I didn't have a copy, they were all packed away in household goods. And I looked over his shoulder and I copied the recipe down.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: Yeah, and they said, "Well, will you be able to come to the bake off?" And I said, "Well, when is it?"
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: And they said, October 16th. I said, "Oh, that's my — the due date!"
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: The news that Bea was a finalist made the local papers, and friends and family all urged her to go, if she could. So she signed a letter saying that she would attend if conditions permitted it. Thankfully, her daughter was born early. So a week after giving birth, Bea was on a plane to Los Angeles.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I wanted to take her with me, but at that time they didn't allow people to travel with a baby. You know, in those days it was a prop jet airplane and it took a — took forever to get from Minnesota to Los Angeles.
Dan Pashman: Pilsburry put Bea and the 99 other women up in the Beverly Hilton hotel. Bea then went into the Hilton's massive ballroom, where each contestant made their recipe three times over. Then, as the recipes went to the judges, they had their photos taken with the host, a young actor named Ronald Reagan.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Well, I couldn't wait until I could make this bread and get out of there and come back home. Well, you weren't allowed to leave. But, so I follow rules, you know, and went to the banquet in the end.
Dan Pashman: At the banquet, they announced the winners. When second place was revealed, the host held up the Chunk o' Cheese bread and said that, "Second Grand Prize went to Mrs. Richard Ojakangas." Bea writes in her memoir, 'I had won! Even if they hadn't called my name. In those days, women didn't have first names but were identified by whom they were married to. But I had won! The downside was I had to stay in Los Angeles an extra day.'
Beatrice Ojakangas: I won $5,000.
Dan Pashman: I mean, that's a big prize.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Significant.
Dan Pashman: I mean, you're about to have — you just had your first child, you're newly married. I looked it up because I was curious. If I ran that through the inflation calculator, $5,000 back then is the equivalent of $58,000 in today's dollars.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Wow, and people say, "Well, what did you do with that money?" [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: So …
Beatrice Ojakangas: So, my husband wanted to go to grad school, so I ... That's where the money went.
Dan Pashman: How did you feel about that?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Fine, that was my job. That's what I thought. Well, yeah, if I made this money and it puts him through school. [LAUGHS] I mean, that's just the opposite of the way people think today. They might have spent it on themselves, but I didn't.
Dan Pashman: Regardless of where the money went, Bea clearly still takes a lot of pride in her success in that competition.
Beatrice Ojakangas: The first prize was a thing called accordion cookies, and I've never seen that recipe used much at all anywhere. But there were restaurants that started making Chunk ‘o Cheese bread.
Dan Pashman: There you go. So who's the real winner?
Beatrice Ojakangas: [LAUGHS]
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: A few years after the Pillsbury Bake Off, Dick got a Fulbright scholarship to Finland and the whole family moved there for a year. Bea's daughter was three, and now they also had a one year old son. Their budget was tight. The Fulbright funding was just for one person, not an entire family. Dick was working all day, and Bea was alone, taking care of the kids, and worried about finances. She had grown up speaking Finnish to her mother. So she called the U.S. Information Service and said that she spoke the language, and was available to work on weekends. She got a job doing one of the things she does best.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I was hired to demonstrate American foods in different places in Finland. Finland had airplanes that went everywhere, small airplanes that would fly to all these small villages everywhere and I stayed overnight with people. And it was so much fun to fly around Finland and I was taking notes constantly.
Dan Pashman: What were you teaching and what were the responses?
Beatrice Ojakangas: [LAUGHS] We were making hamburgers.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Okay.
Beatrice Ojakangas: And then I brought popcorn. And they thought that was the most amazing thing in the world. Popcorn!
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: You take a little bit and you get a lot.
Dan Pashman: But while she was there to teach Finnish women about American cooking, Bea also began learning a lot about Finnish food. The women attending her classes began sharing their recipes with her for things like rutabaga casserole and Swedish Prince Cake.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I just asked a lot of questions and I got a lot of — people gave me their recipes and they — I wrote down a lot of notes about how they celebrated everything. And it was my mother who probably gave me the best advice about how to write. She'd say, "Just pretend I'm a little bird on your shoulder and you're telling me what you're seeing."
Dan Pashman: That was advice that would guide Bea for the rest of her career. After the family’s year in Finland, they moved to Stanford for Dick's graduate program in geology.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I was so excited when we drove in and we came through Menlo Park, and there was this beautiful, low building that had this — it was engraved "Sunset" on the front, and I thought, oh ...
Dan Pashman: Sunset was a magazine, a California lifestyle magazine, covering travel, architecture, design, and food — and Bea had seen Sunset before.
Beatrice Ojakangas: When I was in college I was working for people in — just outside of Duluth, who were rather wealthy, and I was their cook. And they had a Sunset magazine that came and I just devoured all of that.
Dan Pashman: For Bea, the recipes in Sunset were a window to a wider world. They were fresh and modern, they felt gourmet but also accessible. And now, she was living in California, right by the Sunset offices. It felt like a sign.
Beatrice Ojakangas: As fast as I could, I was over there applying for a job. Well, they didn't need any writers at the time, but I thought that was just fine. I came in and I was a typist.
Dan Pashman: She worked for three months, typing up recipes and articles written by the food writers. Soon she was in meetings, pitching story ideas, and the editors started to take notice. They began letting her write her own stories. And those months she spent typing up other peoples’ pieces taught her a lot about how to put a magazine story together.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Get a good title on it, and the first sentence has to be a certain way, you know, and that was — it was on the job training, basically.
Dan Pashman: The lessons that you were prohibited from learning in college, you learned in three months from typing other people's writing.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Exactly, yeah. Yeah.
Dan Pashman: So Sunset starts giving you assignments and now you're a writer. You're doing it.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Now I'm a writer, yeah. A writer and a tester and a photographer.
Dan Pashman: Wow. [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: Clearly, Bea’s never content just doing one thing, she’s always thinking about the next project. So while at Sunset, she devoted her nights and weekends to a Finnish cookbook, based on her notes from her year in Finland. The editor of Sunset connected Bea to the publishers at Crown, in New York, and they accepted the book. In 1964, The Finnish Cookbook came out, the first cookbook of Finnish food released in the U.S. Bea was now a published author.
Dan Pashman: It was a huge milestone, but that very same year, Dick accepted a job back in Minnesota. They'd have to leave California, and Bea would have to leave her job at Sunset. She’d been working there for three years, and had climbed to the position of staff writer. She was devastated.
Beatrice Ojakangas: It felt like I was at a funeral — just had to leave what I really loved doing.
Dan Pashman: But as she left California, Bea did get one small ray of hope that she’d be able to carry on her career in Minnesota.
Beatrice Ojakangas: The editor of the magazine was just a very good friend. He was just really very helpful. And he says, "You know, in Duluth, there's a company called Chun King and it's run by somebody by the name of Jeno — I don't know if it's Pellicini or what ..."
Dan Pashman: It was Jeno Paulucci, a name that Bea would not soon forget. Chun King sold canned Chinese food products in the grocery store, like canned chow mein and chop suey. Bea decided to apply for a job as a product developer, and she got hired on the spot. She and Dick did need the money, but for Bea, it was more than that.
Beatrice Ojakangas: When I got to Duluth, I was trying real hard to figure out how to ... How to make life as fun as it was in California.
Dan Pashman: Her work at Chun King would be a lot of things, but fun wasn't usually one of them. Her first day, she met Jeno Paulucci, the owner of Chun King. He was tasting a new recipe in their test kitchen.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I went into this room, and there were all these guys around in white coats. Jeno was tasting this food. He was going down the long table of food and he was getting madder and madder and madder. He had a hot temper and he was throwing chicken legs against the wall and just cussing ... And I mean, just not using very good language.
Beatrice Ojakangas: And I thought, "Oh my gosh, I am the only woman in this place. He's going to be so embarrassed." So I just slipped out of the place cause I thought to save his face because he didn't ... He was ... He was out of control.
Dan Pashman: Bea didn’t think Jeno saw her come in, but he did.
Beatrice Ojakangas: He came out there, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back in and says, "Uh, you're going to get a bath in this along with everyone else."And I said, okay. And he says, " If you're such a hot shot home economist, tell me, what is it that makes good food?" I said, "Well, I don't know. I mean, you have to start with good ingredients and you can't wreck it." And that shut him up. He turned around and left.
Dan Pashman: After that initial outburst, Jeno mostly left Bea alone to do her job. After about six months of working at Chun King, Bea got her first big project. Jeno wanted to create a new kind of frozen snack. He was already making frozen mini egg rolls. He wanted to put something new and different inside the egg roll wrappers. Bea came up with about 50 different ideas.
Dan Pashman: And this was a very important project, so Jeno had everyone come to his lake house for the testing. Bea was picked up and flown to the house in a seaplane, with a cooler full of samples of her different concepts.
Beatrice Ojakangas: He had all of his executives sitting around a great big mahogany table, and they were tasting all these things that I've sent out there. I had everything from a cheeseburger, to Reuben burgers, and all different kinds of things — even peanut butter and jelly, because he liked peanut butter and jelly.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] And so what kind of reactions are you getting to these first few samples?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Oh, just not much of a reaction. Oh, yeah, that's good, you know, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you know? But, I had about five or six of them that were filled with pizza flavors. Then when the pizza flavored ones came in, he got all excited and he slammed his fist on the table and he says, "Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, that's it."
Dan Pashman: Jeno’s Pizza Rolls hit store shelves in 1968, and were a huge hit. Marketed as a fun new hors d'oeuvre, they were stocked in grocery store freezers across the country.
CLIP (MAN): How about pizza roll snack from Jeno's?
CLIP (WOMAN 1): Oh, I can't remember the last time I had these.
[PEOPLE GASPING]
CLIP (MAN): [SINGS] What's a matter, you?
CLIP (PEOPLE): Hey!
CLIP (MAN): [SINGS] What do you gotta say?
CLIP (PEOPLE): Hey!
CLIP (PEOPLE): Don't you miss that taste?
CLIP (MAN 2): What’s your mama gonna say?
CLIP (WOMAN 2): Eat your Jeno's Pizza Roll ...
Dan Pashman: Jeno’s Pizza Rolls became so popular that production was having a hard time keeping up with the orders. They sometimes skipped cleaning the lines that pumped the fillings into the wrappers so they wouldn’t have to interrupt manufacturing. As a result, the quality of the fillings suffered.
Beatrice Ojakangas: It had gotten to be kind of the consistency of toothpaste.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Beatrice Ojakangas: There was this time, we were at this meeting, and Jeno was really mad. So he gets up on the — in front of the table, and he slams his fist down, and he says, "Is there anyone here who is in charge of quality control?" And this little guy said, "Uh, yeah. Yeah, me. Me?", "Well, what did you do about it?", "I wrote a memo. [LAUGHS] ", "You wrote a memo?!"
[LAUGHING]
Beatrice Ojakangas: And he goes to the phone and he calls the production line and he says, "Stop the lines and clean the blinds and we're packing Jeno's pizza rolls, not crap in a crust."
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] So Jeno's Pizza Rolls come out. They're a big hit. Did Jeno ever give you any credit? Did he ever congratulate you? Like, did he acknowledge that you had had this important role?
Beatrice Ojakangas: [SIGHS] I called one day and I said, "Could I get 25 cents an hour more for what I'm doing?" And he says, "Oh, please don't ask for that. We can't afford it." So that was it. I never got anything more per minute.
Dan Pashman: He ended up selling the company for how much?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Well, I think it went to Totino's for $82 million. It made millions for him.
Dan Pashman: So Totino's Pizza Rolls, that we see in the store today, that is the sort of direct descendant of the pizza rolls that you invented.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Abs — yeah. Yeah, that was the one.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: After Bea was denied her raise, she didn’t stay at Chun King much longer. In 1971, she worked for a while at a vocational school, teaching cooking. A few years later, she opened a burger restaurant in Duluth, inspired by Scandinavian cuisine, but she sold it after a few years. Around that time, she also had her third child. By 1980, Bea was 46-years-old and she had done a lot, personally and professionally. But it turned out she was just getting started, because it was at this point that she began writing cookbooks at an incredible pace.
Beatrice Ojakangas: I called them potboilers. You know, as I would get another idea and I'd cook it, do another cookbook and I'd get advance on it, and that paid for someone's bicycle, or someone else's trombone, or someone else's piano lessons, or ... You know, they weren't ... They didn't amount to that much, but enough to keep the family going.
Dan Pashman: From 1980 to 1996, you had 16 straight years in which you released at least one cookbook every year.
Beatrice Ojakangas: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Dan Pashman: Totaling 23 cookbooks in 16 years. Which is, like, ludicrous to me. Like, I just wrote one cookbook, and it took me two years, and I'm still exhausted.
Beatrice Ojakangas: [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: Bea wrote cookbooks about bread baking and casseroles, but also about convection ovens, food processors, and the Mehu-Maija , a fancy new juicer from Finland. No matter the topic, she always wrote as if she was telling the recipe to her mother, a little bird on her shoulder.
Dan Pashman: For more than a decade her cookbooks were consistently successful — selling well enough that publishers kept hiring her to write more. But in 1992, a single phone call would raise her profile more than any single cookbook had.
Beatrice Ojakangas: My mother-in-law happened to beat our house at the time. I was out, I don't know where I was. But when I came home, she said, "[EXCITEDLY] Oh, the phone rang, and it was ... It was Julia Child, and it sounded ... She sounded just like ... just like she does on TV!" [LAUGHS]
[DANISH PASTRY WITH JULIA CHILD]
CLIP (JULIA CHILD): Hello, I'm Julia Child. Welcome to my house. What fun we're gonna have baking all kinds of ...
Dan Pashman: Bea was invited to cook on Julia Child's PBS show.
CLIP (JULIA CHILD): Beatrice Ojakangas is Scandinavian cookbook author from Minnesota, teaches us how to make real Danish pastries ...
Dan Pashman: Of course cooking demos on TV were no big deal for Bea, she’d been preparing for this since 4-H! She nailed and she got invited back. Then, for the first time, her name started appearing in the titles of her cookbooks, starting with Beatrice Ojakangas' Great Holiday Baking Book in 1994.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: She would go on to publish nine more cookbooks, and a memoir, called Homemade: Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and Other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food. In 2005, Bea was inducted into the James Beard Awards Cookbook Hall Of Fame.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: When you went to college, you had such a clear dream for what you wanted to do with your life. And early on in college, you had a lot of obstacles, but you eventually did find your way into doing the thing that you wanted to do. So was there a moment where you realized like, I did it, I made it?
Beatrice Ojakangas: I think it was just a … the gradual thing, you go from one thing to another. You don't — I didn't really ever felt like I've gone — you know, done everything. I still feel like I could do things, but I'm tired. [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: How do you feel about your career overall as you look back on it?
Beatrice Ojakangas: I just think I was really lucky, but I don't think that I ever really made the big time. [LAUGHS] You get so you want to just enjoy life and the people around you and contribute as much as you can to the enjoyment of food. That's, I think, the biggest reward of all.
Dan Pashman: Well, I think that making the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame is the big time.
Beatrice Ojakangas: That was ... That was pure luck, I think. [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: Uh, I think you're being modest. I'm calling it the big time, but you don't have to, but I — to me, it's the big time.
Beatrice Ojakangas: It was fun. It was a lot of fun.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] We talked at the beginning about your step grandmother, Helena, she didn't want your mother in the kitchen and your mother then decided as a result that she always wanted people to come into the kitchen and to show people how to cook. How do you react now when kids and grandkids want to come into the kitchen when you're cooking?
Beatrice Ojakangas: Oh, I love it. I love it. Give them a job. Tell them to come and help and I'll give you a sharp knife.
[LAUGHING]
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: That’s the one and only Bea Ojakangas, author of 32 cookbooks and a memoir, entitled Homemade: Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and Other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food. And hey, if you are curious about that Chunk 'o Cheese bread, that wont second prize in the Pillsbury Bake Off ... We got the recipe! We’ll link to it in our show notes and on our website, at Sporkful.com.
Dan Pashman: One more note while we’re talking Minnesota food. When I spoke with Twin Cities chef Yia Vang back in June, he was still working on opening his long awaited restaurant, Vinai. Well, great news! It opened last month! If you’re in the Twin Cities, or planning to go there, definitely check out Vinai, the space looks beautiful and the food looks so so good. I can’t wait to get there myself!
Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, Jose Ralat has one of the best jobs in food media. He’s the taco editor at Texas Monthly Magazine. Yes, that's a real job and no, I don't expect him to vacate it anytime soon. Jose has traveled over 10,000 miles to find the best tacos in Texas, and now, we are tagging along as he criss-crosses the state in preparation for the, once every five year, taco issue of Texas Monthly. That’s next week.
Dan Pashman: While you wait for that one, check out last week’s episode, our Salad Spinner with the hosts of the Mythical Kitchen podcast A Hotdog is a Sandwich. We'll talk about the new Kelce brothers cereal mix , whether Chipotle is giving you smaller portion sizes, whether a taco is a sandwich, and much more. That episode is up now.
Dan Pashman: One more quick note, back when I was on the road for my book tour, at every event we do Q&A from the audience. But we were never able to get to everyone’s questions! We’d always run out of time. Now, I know you probably still have a lot more questions about Anything’s Pastable and castcatelli and we're gonna do one more pasta related episode this year, and this is your last chance for questions. Do you got something that you want to ask? Please drop me a line at hello@sporkful.com. Remember to include your first name and your location in your email. Again, hello@sporkful.com. I can’t wait to hear from you! Thanks.
Dan Pashman: And hey, did you know that you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus, live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And then there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It’s everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM.com/sporkful.
CREDITS
Dan Pashman: Swetha, if it's okay, I'd like to start off by engaging you in a little friendly competition.
Swetha Sivakumar: Okay.
Dan Pashman: Recently, I chatted with food science writer and former engineer Swetha Sivakumar.
Dan Pashman: I want us to go back and forth each naming a way that eggs can be used in cooking.
Swetha Sivakumar: Sure.
Dan Pashman: And whoever can't come up with something first loses. You ready?
Swetha Sivakumar: Ready.
Dan Pashman: Scrambled eggs.
Swetha Sivakumar: Omelet.
Dan Pashman: Sunny side up.
Swetha Sivakumar: Fried eggs.
Dan Pashman: Cakes.
Swetha Sivakumar: Sabayon.
Dan Pashman: Meringue.
Swetha Sivakumar: Mousse.
Dan Pashman: Carbonara.
Swetha Sivakumar: Cookies, cakes, brownies, muffins ...
Dan Pashman: Dressing.
Swetha Sivakumar: Mayonnaise, ice creams, custards ... It's endless.
Dan Pashman: All right, so we'll call it a tie. Point is, eggs are amazing. There are food scientists at big companies with access to all the latest technologies who will work their entire careers and never come up with anything as incredible as eggs, which has been produced by hens' bodies for a millennia. So what gives an egg its powers?
Swetha Sivakumar: It has a component called lecithin, which is so impressive. It mixes together two items that hate each other, which is fats and water. Fats and water don't want to react with each other. They don't want to do anything with each other. They try to move away from each other ...
Dan Pashman: There's a reason why we have this old expression of like it's trying to mix oil and water.
Swetha Sivakumar: Right! Exactly! And so, lecithin has this amazing ability to hold with one hand, the fat, and the other hand, the water, and create creamy emulsions, and so you create creamy sauces and you can create custard bases — creme brulee — and things really tasty on your tongue just because of this power to hold fat and water together. And these are things that are so unique to eggs.
Dan Pashman: So you should respect the mighty egg and all its power and take good care of the hens that produce these wonders by buying Nellie's Free Range Eggs. Did you know that free range and cage free eggs are not the same thing? Cage free hens rarely set foot outside. Free range hens roam free on open pasture in the fresh air and sunshine, the way hens should. And when hens live the way they should, they make eggs that taste the way they should. So Nellie's Free Range Eggs have rich, creamy, golden yolks and sturdy shells. Whether you're using them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or dessert, you'll know they're high quality. Swetha calls eggs "a chef's best friend", so I asked her what her favorite use for them is.
Swetha Sivakumar: I love making custards. It's an Indian tradition to make vanilla custards and top it with a bunch of fruits. It just takes me back to my childhood.
Dan Pashman: Pick up some Nellie's Free Range Eggs today and you can make your own vanilla custard ... or cookies ... or chilaquiles! However you're using your eggs, remember that Nellie's Free Range Eggs are certified humane, from hens raised on family farms with open pastures, so the eggs are high quality and delicious. Nellie's Free Range is proudly part of the Pete & Gerry’s. They've raised the bar for eggs by pioneering humane egg farming. Visit geteggs.com for $2 back on your next purchase of Nellie's Free Range — and look for the purple carton wherever you get your eggs. That's geteggs.com. Nellie's Free Range — life's better out here.
