Wisconsin Table
As I pulled into the parking lot of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises, Inc., in rural Marathon County, I realized that I don’t know much about ginseng. Yet in Wausau, as I will soon learn, this gnarly white-root vegetable is king.
In 1929, as much of the country began to feel the pain of The Great Depression, German emigrant Ellis Huntsinger found a new fortune in the ground beneath his feet just south of Eau Claire.
It’s been three decades since I took my first bite of wild game. It was the fall of 1992, and, fresh out of graduate school, I had just begun my first real job—production manager for scholarly journals at the University of Wisconsin Press.
Jessica Ross, a conservation biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, knew nothing about mushroom foraging before moving to Wisconsin. But trekking through forests in search of fungi was already in her DNA.
You don’t have to be a beverage industry expert to know beer is big business, and you don’t have to be a historian to know Wisconsin is home to one of the country’s proudest beer brewing cultures.
Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and provocateur, once said that good food and good eating involve an element of risk. I believe he was talking about oysters. One of my risky food experiences involved a different kind of seafood.
Once a week, from late spring to early fall, Vollrath Park on the northeast side of Sheboygan transforms from a serene lakeside park to a bustling mall of hungry people and colorful food trucks.
We strike out for Together Farms one evening in mid-May. The minivan is packed tight: every bench and bucket seat claimed by one family member or another.
It’s a noun, a verb, an exclamation, and a hot bowl of everything but the kitchen sink. Booyah, a regional soup, holds a firm grip over the people of Green Bay and northeast Wisconsin at large.
It’s fermented, cured, delicious, and often misunderstood and mispronounced. Perhaps you’ve seen them before and wondered what they were. Or you’ve seen them and never given them a second thought.
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Wisconsin Academy Offices
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Madison, Wisconsin 53726
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201 State Street
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: 608.733.6633 x25