Petra Boostrom, of Clearwater Lodge, used canned milk in her white bread. The Gunflint Lodge’s legendary Justine Kerfoot was a lot of things, but she wasn’t much of a cook, and nobody really knows why Justine’s Muskrat Stew is named after her. Charlet Kratoska, owner of Trout Lake Lodge for 40 years, made a German potato salad that had people practically licking the bowl clean at potlucks.
The women who ran the first of the lodges that dot northern Minnesota’s remote Gunflint Trail served dishes like these to guests and families for the better part of a century: food made from wild game and canned ingredients (no refrigeration required); bread baked, sometimes daily, in wood stoves; and vegetables dug out of the root cellar.
Today many Gunflint Trail resorts are in their third or fourth generation of owners, but legends of the early days are still passed around like so many homemade doughnuts. A few years ago, a group of businesswomen from the Gunflint decided to preserve those recipes, as well as some stories, from the early years: the result is A Taste of the Gunflint Trail, a cookbook that’s also a look at the legends of the Minnesota outback.
Making a home in the middle of nowhere
Located in the northeastern tip of Minnesota, the Gunflint Trail, now a two-lane highway, leaves Grand Marais and angles northwest, toward Canada. Many of the resorts and lodges along this 60-mile stretch of asphalt were built in the early half of the 1900s to house vacationers, lumberjacks, hunters and other visitors to the north woods. Hiking trails sprout from the sides of the highway, luring nature lovers from across the country.
Margy Nelson’s parents bought Clearwater Lodge, about halfway up the trail, when she was about 14. She and her three siblings spent summers there, less than five miles from the Canadian border. After attending college in Minneapolis, Nelson moved to France, where she lived for more than a decade. She returned home in 1984 to help run the lodge, bought it in 1986 and ran it for nine years. In 1995 she sold the lodge and property, but kept a small cabin that she and her partner had built.
“It’s hard to leave, once you’re there,” said Nelson, who now lives in Duluth and teaches massage therapy.
Nelson was one of 11 women who researched, compiled and wrote A Taste of the Gunflint Trail. The book was a tribute to their friend Gail Skrien, who, after thinking about publishing a recipe collection for many years, finally started work on it in 2001, only to discover she had cancer. When it became clear that she wouldn’t be able to complete the project, Skrien asked her friends and fellow Gunflint Trail businesswomen to continue it. Their efforts turned into a 400-page book filled with historical photos and more than 200 recipes. The book is organized geographically by lodge: Pincushion Bed & Breakfast, the first lodge on the trail outside of Grand Marais, opens the book; Saganaga Trading Post, at the very tip of the Gunflint Trail—in Canada, in fact—ends it. Many of the descriptions are first-person accounts of life on the trail, either by owners (sometimes a series of owners) or children who grew up there. Favorite recipes follow each lodge narrative.
Research for the book was exhaustive, said Nelson. The women split up the list of resorts and set about compiling a history of each lodge and recipes from each generation. Some owners, or their descendants, were still living in the area; others were long gone.
“We wrote and rewrote and called and tracked down everyone that had ever lived up there,” said Nelson. “We were trying to honor everybody, but some people never responded.”
Still, she is pleased with the final result. “I like that there’s a lot of stories,” she said. “I think a lot of people who come here are really interested in what it’s like when you live up here or what it was like in the olden days.”
Stories of the past
By most accounts, Sue Kerfoot, whose family has owned the Gunflint Lodge for nearly 80 years, was the driving force behind the cookbook, though she won’t take all or even most of the credit. “I was called the chairman, but it was the work of many people,” she said.
Kerfoot had some previous experience with books: she co-authored The Gunflint Lodge Cookbook: Elegant Northwoods Dining, which was published in 1997, and she also helped her mother-in-law, Justine Kerfoot, with the books she wrote about her life on the trail (including Woman of the Boundary Waters).
While compiling A Taste of the Gunflint Trail, Kerfoot realized that despite 32 years of living on the trail, there was a lot she didn’t know. (She and her husband, Bruce, ran the Gunflint Lodge from 1968 to 2000, and they still live there, although their son and his wife run it now.) That was one of the best parts about putting the book together, she said: “getting to learn the history of an area I thought I knew about. These women were amazing.”
One of Kerfoot’s favorite stories is about Jean Dailey, who used to own Seagull Resort: Dailey had to figure out a way to melt frozen pipes in the dead of winter. So she put water in her pressure cooker and boiled it on a camp stove, and then connected a hose to the relief valve on the pressure cooker. The steam thawed the pipes.
Kerfoot also shares credit with Adventure Publications, of Cambridge, Minn. “We were very lucky,” she said. “We gave them a manuscript written on white paper and they took it from there. They went up and learned about the community and the people…they had no guarantee this was going to work.”
The work paid off, though: A Taste of the Gunflint Trail is in its second printing.
Women kept it all together
One of the defining aspects of trail life, which Nelson remembered firsthand, was the elephantine scope of work that fell to women, from fixing the plumbing and chasing off bears to raising the kids and cooking for everybody. The book faithfully captures this part of women’s lives. “Men go off and do projects and come back for coffee,” Nelson said. “And the women keep it all together, doing all those multitasking things that women do.”
Even after compiling the book, Nelson finds it hard to imagine how someone like Petra Boostrom managed to help build the lodge (she and her husband lived in a tent the first few years), cook meals on a wood stove, bake bread daily (with evaporated milk, often the only kind available), tend to lodgers and at the same time raise 13 children.
“How do you do that when you don’t have modern conveniences?” pondered Nelson.
Part of the answer stems from the close-knit community that grew up on the trail out of necessity, she said. “There was a lot of neighbor helping neighbor, because you had to.”
She says this sense of community comes across in the book; it’s emphasized by the fact that no one person is credited as the author. (The author is listed as “Women of the Gunflint Trail.”) And though many of the old timers have sold to newcomers, the feeling persists.
“I think the people that are buying still really have a connection with the Gunflint Trail,” she said. “There’s still the spirit, the sense of community and helping each other out. Self-reliance [goes] hand in hand with community.”
Not everything stays the same, though. As new people move in, those with a lifetime of accumulated experience take their knowledge with them. “What happens is, there is a certain bank of knowledge that, as people either die out or sell, is hard to replace,” said Nelson. “Because of the way the economy is going, you gotta have some money to be able to buy something up there—so that changes who you are.”
More tastes of the trail Perfect White Bread
(Petra Boostrom, Clearwater Lodge)
1 pkg. yeast
1/4 cup hot water
2 cups evaporated milk, scalded
2 T. sugar
2 tsp. salt
1 T. shortening
6-7 cups sifted flour
Dissolve yeast in water. Cool milk slightly, add sugar, salt, shortening. Stir in yeast, add flour a cup at a time, stirring until a smooth ball forms. Knead on floured surface. Let rise once, then make loaves and rise until double in size. Bake for 45 minutes in a 350° oven.
German Potato Salad
(Charlet Kratoska, Trout Lake Lodge)
5 lbs. potatoes
1 lb. bacon
2 large onions, chopped
2 qts. of water (about)
salt and freshly ground pepper
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup vinegar
2-3 T. cornstarch, mixed with about 1/2 cup cold water
1 bunch of green onions, chopped with tops, and/or 2 T. parsley
Cook potatoes, cool and peel. Cut them into cubes and salt them a little as you set them aside. Cut bacon into bits and sauté until crisp in a large Dutch oven. Pour off a little of the bacon grease, add onions and sauté until tender. Add about 2 quarts of water and salt and freshly ground pepper. As it simmers, add sugar and vinegar. Stir cornstarch and cold water in a cup and add to mixture. Stir to thicken and add more if needed. This should be a gravy. Now this is where the skinny cook leaves the kitchen. Spoon a little sauce into a sauce dish. Cool it a little so you can taste it. Add a little salt, or sugar or vinegar, until it has the right combination of all of these. Add chopped green onions and/or parsley. Let your gravy simmer for half an hour or so until all the flavors blend. Add the cubed potatoes. Serve warm.
Italian Beef in a Bucket
(Ruth Darling, Way of the Wilderness Canoe Outfitters)
3 1/2 lbs. beef roast, sirloin tip or rump roast
1 12-oz jar of mild Italian giadiniera, drained
1 12-oz jar of pepperoncini peppers
1 envelope zesty Italian salad dressing mix
1 10-oz can beef broth
Place the roast in a 3 1/2-quart slow cooker. Mix all other ingredients together, draining the oil from the giardiniera. When adding the giardiniera and pepperoncini, use half a jar of each for a mild version or all of each jar for a spicier version. Add all ingredients to the slow cooker, cover and cook for 18 (yes, that’s right, 18) hours on low. Meat will be very tender. You can use a fork to pull it apart.
NOTE: the roast can be placed in frozen.
Twenty-Four-Hour Cole Slaw
(LaVonne Groth, Moosehorn Lodge Bed & Breakfast)
1 medium head of cabbage, shredded
A bit of red cabbage for color
1 small onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
one-quarter to half a green pepper
salt and pepper to taste
Dressing:
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup oil
3/4 cup vinegar
1/8 tsp. celery seed
Combine the vegetables with salt and pepper and set aside. Simmer the dressing ingredients until clear. Pour hot mixture over vegetables as follows: add one-third of the dressing and mix. Repeat until all is used. Cover well and refrigerate for 24 hours. Keeps well.
Taken from A Taste of the Gunflint Trail, by Women of the Gunflint Trail (Adventure Publications, 2005)
