There’s much to appreciate about the kind of bare-bones cookbooks that dominated the mid-to-late 20th century—Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Edna Lewis’s invaluable The Taste of Country Cooking, Betty Crocker and her whole jam. Rich in detail and technique, they’re austere in presentation, their neatly typed instructions accompanied by black-and-white sketches. I still flip through my mother’s tea-stained 1997 edition of Joy of Cooking for cornbread and strawberry shortcake and pot roast recipes; it’s larger and heavier than the average dictionary.
But a cookbook, of course, can be many things. A cookbook can be a story—or 12 stories, even. That’s the case with Back of House, a new project from local artists and photographers Diana Albrecht and Ryan Stopera. Twelve recipes from Minnesotan immigrant chefs, 12 accompanying essays, 12 plates laden with tongbaechu kimchi and steamed whole fish and sweet malawah (the Somali crêpe), each a shining filament of Minnesota’s food culture.
Albrecht, who works as an art director, and Stopera, who serves as photography and film advisor at the Northeast art gallery Public Functionary, knew each other distantly before teaming up to create Back of House. Albrecht reached out first. “I was like, Yo, dude, what if we made a cookbook?” she says, laughing. “It was the best DM I’ve ever gotten,” Stopera says.
Albrecht handled the design for Back of House, but she and Stopera split the 12 subjects between them, photographing the cooking process and writing essays in partnership with each chef. Local food and music writer Ali Elabbady contributed the book’s foreword. Albrecht and Stopera already knew a few of the subjects who are featured, but they also crowdsourced with a general community callout. “That was a game changer for us—that’s when I personally felt the momentum shift,” Albrecht says. “We got so many comments with people saying, like, I want to share my family story, or I want my grandma to be part of this, her recipes have never been written down.”
Each of the subjects in Back of House is photographed, notably, in their own kitchen. The Twin Cities have so many amazing chefs, Albrecht and Stopera say, but with Back of House, they wanted to lift up everyday people, those who rarely step into the spotlight. (The book’s name, Stopera says, points to the invisibility of many immigrant chefs and home cooks, paying homage to the sweat equity they invest in restaurants and our broader food culture.)
The stories vary widely: there’s chef Qu Ng of St. Paul’s Golden Chow Mein, who emigrated to the U.S. 45 years ago and has been running his restaurant for nearly as long. There’s Shea Maze, formerly the chef at Public Functionary’s café, who shared a recipe for his grandmother Ceci’s collard green flatbread, topped with sugar-brined peppers. There’s Jai Stephenson, whose Haitian grandmother Antoinette Charles flew to the Cities from her home in Miami for the shoot, speaking to her grandchild in Creole as they boiled black beans and mashed vegetables, preparing legume and sòs pwa.
The recipes span many cuisines, but they all share roots in the American immigrant experience, bound together by a particular kind of wholeness, a particular kind of fragmentation. Many are family recipes, but some are from chefs who are estranged or isolated from their biological families, who are attempting to piece together their relationship with their ancestry and culture on the plate.
Albrecht, an adoptee herself, resonated closely with some of the stories. Eating with chef Qu’s family, she says, was deeply emotional for her, since she grew up largely disconnected from Asian culture. (She delves into those feelings in the book’s corresponding essay, so we won’t spoil it here.) Another featured chef is an adoptee who was raised in New Zealand, though her birth parents are Polynesian-Chinese and Vietnamese. “She was trying to think of a dish from New Zealand that represents her Asian background—she was like, I can’t think of anything right now,” Albrecht says. “Being able to talk with her and witness the mental gymnastics of, like, Who am I? Where did I come from? What does this food mean to me? It’s deeply humbling, and I feel honored that people want to share their vulnerability with us.”
Albrecht and Stopera started working on Back of House two years ago. They say they couldn’t have predicted that it would launch at this particular moment, amid such devastating state violence against immigrant communities. But Stopera points out that xenophobia in America is a constant—immigrants have been experiencing it since they first came to this country, he says. “For Back of House to [launch] in this moment feels powerful, because we know that folks across identities love immigrant food,” he said. “This reaffirms that and goes even deeper in the essays—thinking about the ancestral origins of these foods, and the journeys that folks took for those plates to be served. The hope is that the book reinforces the love that we have both for their dishes and for them as members of our community.”
There was one moment, Albrecht says, when she was interviewing a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota just a week after ICE had detained an international graduate student. “I was like, Are you okay? We don’t have to do this,” she says. “He was like, I can only control what I can control, and I’m going to try to remain as positive and joyful as I can, because that’s literally the only thing I can do. If this project can just be a small light for people—a little bit of celebration, resistance, and pride for what we’ve all experienced, and how we continue to be resilient, that’s what makes this project worth it.”
Back of House launches November 8, with a party planned at Bar Brava from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.