Open-faced sandwiches, however, are a "fading presence" in Minnesota, although you can order them at the Scandinavian café Takk for Maten in Duluth. It looks like a sushi menu that customers could check off what filling they wanted on which bread style, a kind of Scandinavian tapas deal. "In the fifties, the Viking Room at the Minneapolis Radisson had a dedicated Smorrebrods Seddel menu that would, when unfurled, stretch for about five feet," writes Norton. Let's take Norton's chapter on open-faced sandwiches ( in Danish, smorrebrod, or "butter and bread") as a unique Minnesota tradition. Not so Minnesota Lunch - it's well written and a pleasurable read.
That regional food specialties remain amid the onslaught of Hardee's, Olive Gardens and Applebee's nationwide is noteworthy, but regional guidebooks that cover them are so often dreadfully written, in exclamatory Chamber-of-Commerce style. The book is nine parts food narrative to one part recipe, but there is a recipe, or recipes, for each of the star sandwiches. A chapter on Sambusa pays tribute to the local Somali population, and finally, a grab bag chapter at the end covers bratwurst and other beef sandwiches. More local to Minnesota is a sausage called the Hot Dago and the lauded stuffed bar burger known as the Juicy Lucy. As the subtitle suggests, the Cornish pasty is covered as is the Vietnamese banh mi sandwich, but other subjects are the fried walleye sandwich, the "State Fair Turkey Sandwich," the meatloaf sandwich, Mexican tortas, and Scandinavian open-face sandwiches. Norton, editor of the Twin Cities' food blogazine The Heavy Table and co-author of The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin (UW Press), and a graduate of Madison West High School, is both editor and contributor to this volume, which consists of 11 essays by Norton, Jill Lewis, Susan Pagani and Lori Writer.
But with Minnesota Lunch: From Pasties to Banh Mi (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $19.95), editor James Norton has put a stamp, an identity, on what Minnesotans eat for lunch and come up with a nice volume of regional food history to boot.
Frankly, you'd suppose that what folks eat in Minnesota is not all that different from what we Cheeseheads chow down on, come noontime.
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