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[MUSIC PLAYING] GARY EICHTEN: Good afternoon. It's 12:06. We'll learn how to read our time in our clocks yet. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio News. Gary Eichten here. During this hour, Midday, two Voices of Minnesota Interviews with two women who have risen to the top of two rather different fields, cooking and classical music. We'll hear from Minnesota Orchestra concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, and Prolific Food Writer, Beatrice Ojakangas.

Fleezanis grew up the daughter of poor Greek immigrants in Detroit and now plays her violin in some of the finest concert halls in the world. Ojakangas, who was raised in rural Minnesota, has published more than 25 cookbooks over the course of her career. And just this year, she was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. Here, with today's installment of our Voices of Minnesota Interview series, Minnesota Public Radio's Marianne Combs.

MARIANNE COMBS: Jorja Fleezanis is one of the world's leading violinists, a champion of new music, and a dedicated teacher of a new generation of musicians. She became the second woman to ever serve as concertmaster to a major American orchestra when the Minnesota Orchestra hired her in 1989. This, despite her traditional Greek upbringing in which the women stayed at home.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: Really, there were no working women in my family. So I was the first one to get launched into the world of thinking of becoming a money earning person, as a female, and to actually have a job.

MARIANNE COMBS: Beatrice Ojakangas grew up on a farm in Floodwood, where she learned the basics of baking and cooking, but she dreamed of more elegant fare.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: In the summertime, we were out, doing haying, and I'd be bouncing along on the hay mower talking about cheese souffle.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: Now, Ojakangas is considered an expert in the cuisines of Finland and Scandinavia. I'm Marianne Combs. Coming up in the next hour, we look at the lives of these two women and how a love for something, whether it's music or food, can lead to great adventures.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you should attend a concert of the Minnesota orchestra, you will have no trouble spotting Jorja Fleezanis. She sits just to the left of the conductor, in the first chair of the first row of violins. Her silvery white shock of hair flashes as she stamps her foot, and her bow arm flies across the strings of a 300-year-old violin.

As concertmaster, she is a leader for the orchestra, willing all the instruments to sing with one voice. But her expressive dark eyes are fixed on the conductor as she seeks to capture the nuances of his or her interpretation of the music.

Balancing between two worlds is nothing new for Fleezanis. She grew up in an immigrant community in Detroit, Michigan. Though she lived in America, her family was steeped in Greek culture and traditions. She remembers her father leading animated, philosophical, and political discussions at the dinner table. She and her brother, Nick, were both encouraged to play musical instruments. And there was music, often, Greek folk music. Early on, Fleezanis remembers listening to the weekly Metropolitan Opera broadcasts with her mother and grandmother.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: To be quietly in a room and to have these people wailing at you, and to feel a certain quality of the drama, even though we-- of course, none of us knew what was being said. And we had no-- there was no Greek operas. So it was all in the languages of the other ethnic groups around us.

A lot of Italians, which we always love the Italian operas, we were not so keen on the Wagner operas when I was growing up, but there was a definite feeling of these three generations of something very transporting and somehow, an escape for all of us. It was those two hours or however long it was, of musical escape into these beautiful places where most of the time, we were crying because we knew something horrible was going on. You could tell there was always some tragic element in the music.

MARIANNE COMBS: I was surprised to learn that you fell into the violin because your brother wasn't having very much luck with it.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: Well, could just be luck, hard to say, but there was a violent instructor at our school who was young, ambitious, just graduated from the Eastman School of music, and he settled into Detroit. And our school-- our neighborhood school was one of his operating areas for his training of a string training program. His name was R. [? Zuronian. ?] And he still lives in the Detroit area. And he was the one who had the task of identifying whether we had music in us or not. Even a little crumb would mean that you could be given a string instrument or an instrument.

And my brother, being eight years older than me, had his little examination. And my mother was so just determined one of us would get an instrument, especially the violin. So she was thrilled when he was given the instrument.

And so for the eight years I was growing up, from 0 to 8, he was just struggling to do it and growing taller and taller and taller with each year. To the time I was 8 and he was 16, he was 6' 4". And he wanted to be playing football. And the practicing was clearly, it was just an agony for everyone. He was just not happy.

And Mr. [? Zuronian, ?] who was a very dear man, was patient. And he allowed this to go as far as he could, I think, mostly because he loved my mother's cooking and she always fed him at the end of every lesson. And-- but he was also part of that immigrant thing. He was Armenian. And, you just did this. You just became part of the family. That was what happened. He came to our house. And it was one of these things where he was one of us.

And the natural thing was, since I was going to the same school, is, at one point, he just said, Mr and Mrs. Fleezanis, Nick is really-- I think we've taken him as far as he can go. And my father, as he tells us-- told me the story, said, well, I think we really have the real violinist waiting in the wings. And he said, you mean your daughter? And he said, I really think she's got-- and of course, I wanted to be a pianist. I wanted to be something different than my brother. And had been already explained to me, that was just not an instrument we could afford, it'll have to be a violin because we can get that from the school. And so I settled for it. But I have to say, I was-- I felt a bad wedge between my brother and me with having accepted this.

MARIANNE COMBS: Well, and certainly, looking back at it, now that you're a concertmaster, it seems like despite the possible rift with your brother, you probably made the right choice.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: It's true. Every time I am sitting behind a pianist-- a piano soloist with the orchestra, and I see this-- I mean, it's a split thing, I have to say. I love the association to this big instrument. And I love the fact that you can sit and play a whole concert all by yourself. And that's what they do mostly. I mean, except for concerto appearances in chamber music. But they spend a good deal as monks at this instrument.

And there is something about that very personal one-to-one relationship where you are communing with this beast and you make the poetry completely on your own, and that you live on this mountain, in a way, by yourself. These people are very complex human beings. And it's not to say that you can't be complex and play in a Symphony Orchestra or another instrument, but it's different. It's very different. You're required to be front and center in a very different way as a pianist.

So I mean, I guess because I grew up in a big family, I like big numbers of people. I know what that means. And I always attribute my sense of ensemble playing to the chaos of trying to find, how are we going to make this dinner work when we have five women in the kitchen and 30 kids running around, and it's all going to happen, suddenly. And of course, it always did and it was always great.

MARIANNE COMBS: Well, and you must have gone through the same argument. There was a time when there was pressure being put on you to be a solo violinist. You had to make a really conscious choice there.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: I didn't have that kind of ambition. And it isn't to say I didn't love what I was doing, I just didn't have that particular kind of ambition. I did not really connect the idea of this whole world of professional music quite yet. I mean, that's what I mean when I say I was a late bloomer. I think I learned about the world of music more toward my late teens. And that had to do with, again, critical people that I met when I was 14, 15, 16.

And by then, it's too late, really, to go into solo repertory. It's too late. You have to already have been in competitions. You're like a racehorse that's going to be doing the Kentucky Derby when you're 17, 18. And my derby's were going to come much later. And they were going to be very different races.

And they were more, in a certain sense, and I'll say humble, but I would say that they were about, in a sense, the working class musician. I mean, I wanted-- if I thought I could be in an orchestra, a professional orchestra when I was 15 and earning a salary when I was 23, it would have blown my mind. I mean, I would have thought, it's worth everything I'm doing right now. I didn't even think that far ahead really, until I was maybe 19, 20 that I start to really see that next phase of my development.

I think that's partly to do with, again, the time, I was being brought up, the people that I was around. And also, we haven't mentioned this, but really, there were no working women in my family. So I was the first one to get launched into the world, thinking of becoming a money earning person, as a female and to actually have a job.

What a launch you made. Well, I mean, it was-- I have to say, if I hadn't had all that deep down security as a person from my upbringing and just a sense of well-being about the world, whether rightfully or wrongfully, that the world-- but I always believe the world is good. I mean, that's, again, part of the upbringing that I was in.

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota. I'm Marianne Combs. Jorja Fleezanis' ability with the violin was immediately apparent. She left her Detroit high school to attend Interlochen Arts Academy, where she honed her talent. The summer before graduating, she attended Michigan's Meadowbrook Festival and met a young conductor whose star was rising. His name was James Levine. And he would eventually go on to become the music director for the Metropolitan Opera.

Fleezanis followed him to the Cleveland Institute of Music. There, she sharpened her technique and precision, but she also learned how to protect herself from the psychological pitfalls of being a professional musician.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: He taught me about the composer. I mean, as a musician, this, I think, was key to my becoming more an advocate for the composer rather than for myself. And that taught me something about not being so vulnerable to my ego. And my ego, as players, as you probably can well imagine, is very fragile because you're very exposed.

You're playing-- oftentimes, if you're playing chamber music, you're playing by yourself or you're playing a solo recital, you're playing by yourself. And if you're not feeling comfortable with yourself and you're not certain about why you're out there, and the only reason that you're out there is because you feel that you're a great player or your ego is telling you that you are supposed to be doing this. And somebody has always been telling you since you were little, you're supposed to be doing this. That can be a house of cards.

And I found that the thing that Jim was great in teaching me was, you're never alone out there. You always are there. You're always an advocate for the composer. And on his behalf or her behalf, you are out there, defending the music. And that got me past a lot of pitfalls I might have had to go through, otherwise, of having to go through auditions, having to stand up and do solo appearances in my early 20s. That might have been much harder for me. I might have not succeeded quite the way I ended up succeeding in terms of my musical development as a player.

MARIANNE COMBS: From the Cleveland Institute of Music, Fleezanis moved to Cincinnati, where she studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory and helped found the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. And then a very large door opened. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had an opening for a violinist. The orchestra was at its peak in the day, regularly receiving national praise. Fleezanis auditioned and got the job. She was just 23, the youngest member of the orchestra, and one of only a handful of women.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: It was definitely a man's world, even though there was-- there were signs of this changing. But of course, it only changed as fast as men retired from the orchestra. But music-- I mean, I knew there were other women in music, but many of them were just singers. So I didn't--| I had-- there was one woman in the Detroit Symphony, and she was very crucial to me because she represented the fact that you could do it.

And it was important for me to be near her. And I remember somebody saying, I think you should study with Emily Austin, you should go and work with her. And I thought, yeah, that would really be great because then I'll be able to see what it's like to actually have a role model in the profession and to see what she-- how she talks, how she handles herself.

And of course, I always, I would Usher at the Detroit Symphony, watch her very carefully because she was one among-- all the rest were men in the orchestra. I think she was-- I don't think there was another woman in the orchestra that I can think right now. Maybe the harp player. Usually, the harp player.

So it took a lot of my having visualized and understood that women can be in this profession. And if you're going to be able to survive, you have to be a lot like your mother and just put your head up high, and walk out there on stage, and behave like this is something that is your world, and you were always meant to be here.

MARIANNE COMBS: The years that followed led to more work in the midwest, on the East Coast, and then to the West Coast, where Fleezanis took a position with the San Francisco Symphony orchestra under conductor Edo de Waart. There, she met the orchestra's musical advisor and nationally renowned classical music critic, Michael Steinberg. They were both in relationships at the time, but Steinberg says he became smitten with her as soon as he saw her audition. The attraction built between them until they met at a mutual friend's house for a Thanksgiving dinner.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: At the end of dinner, for some reason, Michael and I just sat on the floor underneath the piano. And we're just talking about music. And suddenly, somebody put on some Haydn string quartets. And it was-- from that moment, it was clear that we were both listening to that music in the same way and both hearing it the same way, but we'd never had that experience together of listening to that kind of simple classical music that Haydn is where the little nuances and the little jokes are very-- I mean, they're just off the cuff.

And somehow, I kept looking at him and seeing him react to it. And he must have been looking at me and looking at how I was reacting. And we suddenly realized, wait a minute, this is like-- this is like your other person. This is like the other part of you. This is like that molecule that's been floating around in the universe. And you just suddenly realize, golly, let's just get together.

And that was the night, the famous night where he dropped. He was going to take me home and I-- dropped me-- drop me off in front of my apartment. And I said, you know what? I just don't feel like going home. It was like one of those moments where I just said something I couldn't believe I was saying it, but I just said, I can't go in there now. I can't leave you. I mean, it was just-- it was just like a confession.

And it was very weird. It happened so-- all of these things happened very fast. But sometimes, I think you have to act on your gut. And there was enough information that it wasn't just a frivolous act, but it just felt like you ride through life. And it's nice to know that you've got somebody there who really grooves the way you groove on the thing that's most important in your life. And I think for both of us, it is the most important thing in our life, music.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sounds like you've got a pretty good gut instinct.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: Well, it has proven. I mean, you work, you work at these things, of course. But, if the core-- if the core is not, again, based on the ephemeral or fleetingness of physical love or just whatever that-- which is not going to weather the storms, you're probably talking about, you can survive just about anything.

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota, with Minnesota Orchestra's concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis. I'm Marianne Combs. Coming up in the second half hour, a conversation with food writer and cookbook author, Beatrice Ojakangas.

Jorja Fleezanis and her husband, Michael Steinberg, now live in a Minneapolis condo from which they both work. She rehearses in a small room kept humid for the violin, while he wanders from one desk to the next, printing an article and talking to his editors on the phone.

The condo is the perfect place for someone like Fleezanis, who embraces what's new and modern while also holding a high respect for the past. The windows look out on both the new Guthrie Theater and the old riverfront flour mills.

Sitting on the living room couch, Fleezanis holds her violin in her lap with both affection and confidence. Every time she plays it, she's balancing two worlds in her hands, one in which the violin is a precious antique and work of art which should be preserved. Another in which the violin is her workhorse, from which she must draw the finest, truest sounds possible, sometimes, at a furious rate.

The varnish on the neck has been worn from years of playing, but it is still a beautiful instrument. A couple that regularly attends the Minnesota Orchestra donated it for Fleezanis to play. It was made in Venice in 1,700.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: This instrument came, as these instruments do, floating through town. Somebody was selling it. And it got shipped through the violin shop here, Claire Gibbons. And she's known about my interest in a certain kind of Italian sound, which is a sound that is very vibrant, very-- has a very fast spin on the sound, meaning that it responds very quickly and that the sound spirals and has a certain life of its own with very little effort on the part of the player. But it's also very warm and very human-sounding.

I mean, it's like trying to find that perfect red wine or where the ingredients are really the transport of the taste or the transport of the sound is smooth or quick or it expands in the right way at the right moment. Of course, on a violin isn't all string instruments. You have four voices. You have four different qualities. You have the soprano E string. You have the alto A string. You have the tenors on the D string. And you have the bass baritones on the G string. So you have four very special timbres, if I want to call them, or color palettes.

And you want to feel like you can really get a bass sound on the instrument, even though it's a violin, but you want to-- its richest side is the low side. And I feel, if the low side of the instrument has real rich, round, and vibrant, chocolaty colors, that resonates up through the whole upper register of the instrument, because you can always hear those low overtones. Even if you're just imagining them there, but they're there. They're usually sympathetically resonating along with the upper-- upper partials of the upper strings.

MARIANNE COMBS: Does this violin have a personality? I mean, you talked about an Italian voice.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: Well, I mean, now this is going on to my third year with this instrument, starting in February-- in March. I will have had it for starting to have a three years. And it's more of a type A instrument than my other instrument was, meaning that it's really proactive. It's eager. It's eager to play. It's-- the response, as I said, is very fast with my other instrument. It was I that had to do the work with my bow arm to spit the notes out and to get them to come out quickly. And that's-- you can do that, but it's a lot of work to do it.

Whereas this, I can sit back and I can play the passage. And the instrument is producing the electricity by itself-- all by itself. So I'm actually able to work on a different level with my energy. And it means that when I'm playing something very high in the upper register, like going from, let's say maybe--

[VIOLIN MUSIC]

Just to do that, those two notes, that took half of what it used to take me to do on my other instrument, because this instrument is hot. It's very-- it's on fire from the very beginning. And I-- if I'm aware of that, I'm sensitive to that, all I have to know how to do is to be very savvy, to use the right energy, to get the dynamic that I want going, and then just let the instrument manufacture and trust that manufacturing.

I would say, it's an Italian sound in that it's-- when it's wants to cry and when it wants to be very penetrating, it can get to you. It's got this way of being-- both the fire of the sound is very penetrating. But when it has to be quiet and as I say, in a soulful or tender mood, it has a beautiful quality of cantabile. And that cantabile, which is singing in Italian, is something that the Italians really, really-- that's what they did. That's what they understood. It's a kind of connection between the notes that-- so you--

[VIOLIN MUSIC]

A kind of a melody like that, where you want to feel like you can be both tender and searching in what you're saying. The instrument is right there for you. And if I were standing, which I wasn't just now to play that, and if I had the orchestra behind me playing, and I was in a big hall, this sound would carry-- this very sound that you could hear up close would carry to the back of the hall. And that's what great Italian instruments and great instruments do. They can speak privately with such intensity that that projection can come with the least amount of effort just by the sheer method of the spin. It's that spin.

MARIANNE COMBS: Jorja Fleezanis has just returned from a concert tour in Finland. There, she performed a work she helped shape, John Adams violin concerto. She premiered the concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra in 1994.

She also commissioned a British choral composer, Sir John Tavener, to create a piece inspired by the Greek orthodoxy. He wrote the Ikon of Eros for her, a work that gives the violin a haunting voice and soul behind the spiritual intonations of a choir. Fleezanis says new music is often mistakenly categorized as some strange, impenetrable creature.

JORJA FLEEZANIS: When I first started to learn about new music, what it was, I didn't see it as a the orphaned child or the ugly sister or the dark sheep of the family. I mean, in music, it was just-- it's music. And it's all in different times in history. And of course, it's changing. And how is it going to change? And how is it going to be part of the new lineage of music? What-- how-- where is music going to go? And of course, since I've been in it professionally since 1975, we've come a long way. We've gone through a lot of changes.

And my connection to music is to be in it now, past, and way past. And I would become very restless if I were cornered into one part of music, simply because it's just too-- it's too restrictive. It's stopping the music at a certain point. And we can't possibly do that. We don't do that in any other respect of our lives. I mean, you don't want to look like you looked when you were dressing in the '50s. You want to look like you look now. You take on things. You change. You do things to your hair. You pierce your nose, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to take on, but you are in the times. And to me, that's just what I do. I mean, with new music, I mean, that is-- to me, it's like, let's dig what's happening right now. Let's get into it.

And most of the music that I've played when I've ever done anything with the orchestra, hard to say it's new. I mean, a lot of this stuff was written in the '40s, '30s. The Bernstein that I'm playing is from 57. I mean, come on, that's ancient. That's like a dinosaur in my opinion now.

And so it's just a question of catching up and people not getting hopelessly lost and mired into thinking, I've just got to feel comfortable because you actually will dig it. Most of the time, everybody digs it.

And I guess, the other thing I like about if I can call it new music, is that I'm closer to it. It's part of me. It's part of my time. And I feel, as a result of it being part of my set of experiences and connection to history and events, I can bring something to that. It's part of me. And if I think of all the time that I spend in the time of 1812 and 1794, when a time when I really don't have any association to those times and what it felt like to be in candlelight all the time, and wearing powdered wigs, I mean, it's something I can't even relate to.

And how weird that we then don't choose to be around the thing that is us, is a part of us, an extension of us? So, I mean, I just feel that's just a very easy and natural thing for me to groove on my own, on the people around me, and the people that have lived through my time.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sounds like you maybe don't think that orchestras today are doing a good enough job of playing that new music of our time?

JORJA FLEEZANIS: Well, I think there's a little problem in thinking that our public is just too dainty and too refined or too incapable of handling this. And honestly, I don't want to get talked into that. I-- first of all, I don't underestimate the audience. I think the audience, if they're given a very strong performance of something, they always, always respond to it.

And it's not about like or dislike, it's about experience, experience things, be exposed to things, and keep your ears open, keep them-- flush things out, move things around in your ears. Don't get caught into one little corridor and then find yourself just trapped in there and then you can't get out. There's nothing-- it's not like we've created another monster or some kind of monster that's totally unrelated to Brahms.

I mean, one has to remember that all through time, it was possible to just write off new music and say, this is just not like what we had before. We don't want that. We want to stick with Vivaldi. And it would be a sad state if we had locked ourselves behind that door.

MARIANNE COMBS: Jorja Fleezanis, violinist, concertmaster, and teacher. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Marianne Here's Fleezanis on violin in the Minnesota Orchestra's recording of Sir John Tavener's Ikon of Eros.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Beatrice Ojakangas' home outside Duluth is the image of a Finnish winter oasis. Several pairs of cross country skis lean against the wooden retreat, ready for whoever walks out the front door. Birds and squirrels flock to numerous bird feeders on the patio. And large chimes ring out low and melodiously at the first sign of a breeze.

Inside, winter sun blazes through a wall of windows. The ceilings are hung with woven baskets. And it smells of oatmeal raisin cookies. Ojakangas' husband mills about in the background, prepping last minute paperwork for an upcoming lecture, and snacking on the cookies cooling on the kitchen counter.

The kitchen is open and airy, but not flashy, like many kitchens of famous chefs. In fact, it seems quite modest for the kitchen of a woman who's baked with Julia Child demonstrated new techniques for Martha Stewart, authored 25 cookbooks, and been inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame.

Beatrice doesn't look like many typical cookbook authors, either. She's trim and fit with big sparkling eyes, and her silvery white hair is cut stylishly short. She grew up on a dairy farm in Floodwood, about 30 miles West of Duluth, the eldest of 10 children.

As soon as Beatrice was able, her mother began passing on the skills of the kitchen, teaching her to cook and bake in their big wood stove oven.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: My mother taught me how to make a cake. And I was too young to read, so she said, I had to memorize it. And so I did, I memorized this cake recipe that she said, put butter into the bowl, and add the sugar and the eggs and the flour. And with each cup of flour, you use 1 teaspoon of baking powder. That's still the same.

And then she went through the whole thing. And I was very attentive. And we made this cake. And we fired up the wood stove to a certain degree because a wood stove had a thermometer on the door. And that was what we often had. My mother called it a huluppu cake, a cheap cake [LAUGHS] in Finnish.

But then when my-- she was-- I'm the oldest of 10. And she was in the bedroom, we were all born at home, having another baby. And I thought I wanted to do something special for her. My job was to keep the wood stove going, so I had to throw in a stick of wood every so often so everything kept going. And I thought, well, I'm going to bake her a cake.

So I tried to remember everything that she told me about baking the cake. And I mixed it all up. And got it in the-- well, she had said that if the cake tastes flat, it needs-- it probably needs a pinch of salt. And so I thought, OK, I tasted it, it tasted flat, [LAUGHS] the batter, that is. And so I threw a pinch of salt in. And I tasted it again, still flat. I threw in more salt. [LAUGHS] And I kept doing this until finally, I was throwing handfuls of salt into the cake. I mean, here I was, I was about five years old, four or five years old, something like that.

Anyway, I baked the cake. And it turned out fine. I mean, it looked really nice and everything. And as-- it was about half baked. And I thought, I forgot to put sugar in. [LAUGHS] And so I-- but it looked really nice. So it came out. I gave my mother a nice, great big piece. And she-- all she said was, oh, it's just a beautiful cake. She never told me until many, many years later that it was so salty, her tongue curled.

MARIANNE COMBS: As a baker, I'm sure that there are a lot of mistakes and experiments that happen along the way in your profession.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: Oh, yeah, all the time. I was always experimenting with things. I guess we started out by experimenting with cakes. And I remember thinking of all the possibilities, things you can put in.

We had a lot of wild blueberries on the land. And so I thought, I'm going to make a blueberry cake. Turned out purple. So after that, I always said, well, that was a purple cake, if something didn't turn out.

MARIANNE COMBS: It just sounds like a lovely childhood. Here you are on this farm. And you have this wood fired oven. And was your mother a real avid baker? Was she someone who constantly baked around the house?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: Well, she baked because there were a lot of us. And they were always hired men around. And they had to have something to go with their coffee. And we-- she baked all of our bread because it was way too expensive to buy bread. And besides, the bread that we could buy wasn't all that great. So she baked a lot. But we did a lot of other cooking, too.

MARIANNE COMBS: Growing up on a dairy farm, Beatrice was spared from the food rations of World War II. They had their own supply of beef. But it wasn't easy for Beatrice to get into town, let alone the big city. It wasn't long before she realized that she could use her skills as a young cook and a baker to gain her some freedom from milking cows.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: When I was young, I figured out that I could win a trip to the State Fair if I did demonstrations for 4H. And that was my time away from the farm the last few days before Labor Day. That's when the Minnesota State Fair has always been on. And I would work real hard. And my friends would work real hard. And we didn't want to compete with each other, but we always won the trip to the State Fair in our project, our respective projects.

And anyway, it meant that I learned a lot about different kinds of-- I mean, not just baking, but a lot of cooking and how ingredients react with each other and everything. And I always figured, those judges every year were going to ask harder and harder questions.

MARIANNE COMBS: What was it like going to the State Fair as a kid from Floodwood?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: It was great fun. Great fun. That 4H building, now you've gone to the State Fair and seen the 4H building. I went back to look at it. It doesn't look as big as I thought it was. It's like going back to the home you grew up in, and it was so huge. And you go back and look at it, gosh, it's not very big at all. But it was so much fun.

We would get up early in the morning, and we'd go out, and we'd have our breakfast. And then we'd go out on Machinery Hill, and walk around, and get our freebies for the day, which was great fun. And then we always-- we-- they sold spudnuts. And they-- I wish they still did because they were the best donuts. But that's what we-- I always go out and get our spudnut.

And we never really went to the midway all that much. That wasn't-- that wasn't so much fun. But just bumming around the Machinery Hill and the tractors and all the farm machinery, going over to the cattle barn. And we had friends that were in those kinds of projects, chicken, and cattle, and pigs, and horses, and all that. But that was the fun part.

MARIANNE COMBS: So what were your prize winning entries that you brought to the State Fair as a kid?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: Well, I was-- I always did demonstrations. And I did a demonstration on cheese souffle that won a trip to the State Fair, got a blue there, blue ribbon. And I did one on Chiffon cake. I can't remember now, one of the two, I did get the grand championship.

And then I did a rye bread. I was making all these fancy things-- fancy, according to my dad. And he says, why don't you make something that we can eat? [LAUGHS] So I said, OK, I'll make bread. So I made bread. And I did win the National Grand Championship with that and a trip to Chicago, which was fun. [LAUGHS]

MARIANNE COMBS: So how old were you at the time when you were winning these contests and doing these demonstrations?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: 13, 14, 15, 16.

MARIANNE COMBS: And doing souffles-- cheese souffles and chiffon cakes? Wow. That's an advanced teenager doing those sorts of dishes.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: Well, it was interesting. It was fun. Yeah. So I-- and I learned a lot about how different ingredients work in foods. And I did a lot of studying on it. And then I would practice my demonstration. I'd get it all figured out.

But in the summertime, we were on the farm. I mean, we were out, doing haying and all kinds of stuff. And I'd be bouncing along on the hay more, talking about cheese souffle, telling-- talking to myself because it was so noisy, you couldn't hear anything. And then on the dump rake. [LAUGHS]

So that was my growing up. I mean, I really-- I was out in the country all the time. And so I didn't really get to bum around in town with kids like others did.

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio, with food writer and cookbook author, Beatrice Ojakangas. I'm Marian Combs. It was on a high school summer break that Ojakangas discovered the heights to which fine food could soar. It didn't take a trip to Provence or the Italian countryside. It happened just a few miles from home, where she worked in another family's kitchen.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: It was a pretty exciting summer because these people really ate gourmet food. And it was my first taste. My first taste of gourmet food was food I cooked myself, which is really weird, isn't it?

The woman that I was working for would-- she had The Gold Cookbook and the two gourmet cookbooks and the Larousse Gastronomique next to her bed. She had a duplicate copy of these in the kitchen. And so I-- she would, at night, just think of menus. And then in the morning, she'd come and she'd say, all right, Beatrice, we want to-- we want to have this, and this, and this, and this for dinner tonight. And sometimes, I didn't even know what she was talking about. And-- but she wrote them down.

So sometimes, I'd have to look it up in the dictionary, and then in Larousse. Then I looked it up in The Gold Cookbook and then into-- in the gourmet books. And I found-- I would find maybe even two or three recipes for what she was wanting, and made them.

It was really fun. And it tasted really good. I mean, because when you work with good ingredients and you follow good procedures, you can serve really good food.

MARIANNE COMBS: That must have been a revelation for you.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: It was. It was like an epiphany summer for me. And it was great. She made her own ice cream. She always made a burned sugar ice cream. That was absolutely delicious. And I think that recipe came out of the old Gold Cookbook.

And my friend and I were working for her. There were two of us. She-- my friend did all the housework and the serving of the meals. And we lived together in a little-- they had a little bunkhouse for us. And we'd sneak into the freezer and eat caramelized sugar ice cream or burnt sugar ice cream. And that was a great memory that I have of that summer.

But it was just like a total-- it was so exotic. I hardly ever even come across a hotel where the food is as good or the whole situation is quite as fancy as what that was.

MARIANNE COMBS: Beatrice ojakangas attended the University of Minnesota in Duluth. It was the 1950s. And she was presented with three possible majors appropriate for a woman, teaching, physical education, and home economics.

Ojakangas chose home ec, with the intention of taking writing and communications classes on the side. Her college advisor said that simply wouldn't be possible. And so she stuck to her home ec classes.

It was in college she met her future husband, Dick Ojakangas. He was a geology major. They got married after graduation. And Dick enlisted in the Air Force. They were assigned to Oxford, England. While there, on a whim, Beatrice decided to enter a Pillsbury bake-off.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: We were driving from London to Oxford one night. We took in a lot of plays and operas and stuff. And I can't remember what we had been at, but it was late at night. And it was a long drive on the wrong side of the road And I didn't dare drive.

So Dick was driving. And he says, keep me awake. Keep me awake. Talk about anything. And I couldn't think of anything to talk about, except I said, the Commander's wife just held up these entry blanks and said, well, girls, if you want to win a bunch of money, you can enter the Pillsbury bake-off. And I said, maybe I should send something into the bake off.

Yeah, well, we talked about that. And I had been baking bread there. And we decided that I would make a-- bake a loaf of bread with a layer of cheese in it, which, see, I was not experienced enough to know that that cheese was going to fall all the way through to the bottom. But little pieces of it-- when I got back to the apartment, we tried it, little pieces of it stayed inside the bread and it really tasted good. So I thought, OK. But I didn't have enough ingredients to try it again. And the deadline was the next day for the entry.

So I just typed it up and said, I'd cut the cheese into chunks and put it into the bread. And then I-- and mailed off the recipe. Totally forgot about it.

MARIANNE COMBS: Later that year, her husband was discharged. They returned to the US so he could attend grad school at the University of Missouri. Soon after, Beatrice learned she'd been named a finalist in the Pillsbury bake-off and was invited to the final round of competitions. But Beatrice was pregnant, and the baby was due on the same day as the competition.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: And this got into the newspaper. And people were sending me notes, and letters, and phone calls, and everything, saying, oh, you've got to go, you've got to go, because this is such an opportunity. Not everybody wins a trip to the bake-off. And I thought, oh, my gosh. Well, anyway, it turns out that the baby was born on the 1st of October. And I did go to the bake-off. And I won second grand prize.

MARIANNE COMBS: Wow. And how much-- how-- what was the second grand prize?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: The second grand prize was $5,000.

MARIANNE COMBS: And what year was this?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: In '57. So now if you calculated it upward, it would be like $50,000 prize or something like that. Somebody did that calculation one day and wow. And what did I do with the money? Put my husband through grad school. [LAUGHS] He'd better be thankful. [LAUGHS] Well, I think he is. But in those days, you never thought about it. You never gave it a second thought. This is our money. OK. [LAUGHS]

MARIANNE COMBS: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. Today, a conversation with Finnish baker and cook, Beatrice Ojakangas of Duluth. After completing grad school, Beatrice's husband applied for and was granted a Fulbright scholarship to study for a year in Finland. It was 1960. Beatrice picked up the family again and settled into their new home, but soon found herself feeling stranded and bored.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: I thought, oh, I've got to get out of this apartment. It was a little tiny apartment. And we didn't have much money. And we couldn't really go anywhere on my own. But I did call the United States Information Services and I said, you know, I can speak Finnish. I've done a lot of cooking demonstrations. And I can talk to Finnish women about American cooking. And if there's just anything I can do, I'd love to do it.

Well, they got their heads together and they planned a program for me to go all over Finland. So I flew at that time. And now when I think in retrospect, that was pretty advanced of Finland., they've always been advanced, to have a real network of flights around the country to all rather smallish cities. And so they flew me to all these little villages.

I demonstrate hamburger. And-- because at that time, hamburger was something completely out of the realm of-- now there was McDonald's there, and popcorn, and just stuff like that. I was making these things for them. But then the most interesting thing for me was to ask them about what they ate, where they grew up. Pretty much at the time, they were pretty much-- they didn't go out of their areas very much. So I'd ask them about certain breads and certain preparations and words that my grandmother had left in my mind that I didn't know what they meant, like l'attico.

And so I would ask them what that meant to them and-- when they ate them. And what did they eat for their-- for special occasions. I learned a lot about the different areas of the country and was able to compare them all too. So I had a lot of information that I got just directly from people. And then they would write their recipes down on the back of envelopes, and napkins, and scraps of paper.

MARIANNE COMBS: The year in Finland, in a sense, became Beatrice Ojakangas' postgraduate education. When the year was up, her family moved again, this time, to Stanford, California. There, Beatrice got a job with Sunset Magazine. She says the job was a perfect match for her. It developed her writing skills, took advantage of everything she'd learned over the years, and allowed her to develop her own knowledge of cuisine on the job. But three years later, her husband was offered a job back in Minnesota.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: I would have loved to have stayed at Sunset. I really would have. But there was no question. At the time, you didn't question these things. He got a job in Duluth, so we came to Duluth. Then ever since then, I've been trying to put together things that are so much fun, as much fun as working on that magazine, because that was really creative and fun. And it was exactly what I wanted to do.

MARIANNE COMBS: While Ojakangas followed the model of a good wife, she was determined to find the time and space necessary to pursue her passion. In addition to publishing 25 cookbooks, she's opened a restaurant, taught cooking classes, written articles for Cooking Light, Family Circle, and Bon Appetit, and helps run the annual lutefisk dinner at her church.

Right now, she's creating low fat, high fiber recipes for sun-maid raisins. She has three cases of them awaiting her experimentation in the walk-in pantry. For this, Ojakangas will turn to her library for inspiration.

She shares a home office with her husband, two walls of which are covered with books, not geology books, but cookbooks. A rolling ladder allows Beatrice to reach the ones closest to the ceiling.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: I put the ones that are really old ones way up on top, but to move the ladder, it's a chore now because there's geology stuff in the way. [LAUGHS] And--

GARY EICHTEN: Grief.

[LAUGHTER]

And then the books are-- they're grouped in segments.

MARIANNE COMBS: About how many do you think you have, did you say?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: I don't know, would you figure, it's about 3,000 books?

MARIANNE COMBS: Oh, yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: Yeah. And-- but I've got some old kind of fun books that I mostly use now for inspiration. There, you see the old gourmet books and the Gold Cookbook that I used at that summer when I was working. And a lot of times, it's just looking at books that are-- they give you an idea, which way to go on something.

MARIANNE COMBS: Now the fact that some of these are higher up, does that mean you don't use them that as often?

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: Exactly. Yeah, that's right. And I know where the ones that are almost totally useless now. But then once in a while, I think, yeah, they did do something in there that. I'd like to revisit. And I just read these books for inspiration and ideas. I very seldom follow a recipe from any of them. It's terrible, isn't it? [LAUGHS]

MARIANNE COMBS: Ojakangas says cookbooks are just a place to start. They should help demystify a process, whether it's baking rye bread, or cooking with wild rice, or making a cheese souffle, like she did as a young girl on the farm. Ever practical, Ojakangas says what she wants most of her cookbooks is for them to be of use to people.

BEATRICE OJAKANGAS: I go and have a book signing. And people come with a tattered book. I think that's so great [LAUGHS] because that means that they are following the recipes and they are having-- using them, and they're of use to somebody. I like that idea.

MARIANNE COMBS: Food writer and cookbook author, Beatrice Ojakangas. Earlier, we heard from Georgia Fleezanis, concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra. I'm Marianne Combs. And you've been listening to voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: Minnesota Orchestra Concertmaster, Georgia Flazinas-- Fleezanis, rather, playing a John Adams violin concerto. By the way, if you're interested in seeing Fleezanis perform, she's the featured soloist this weekend at Leonard Bernstein's serenade at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.

If you'd like to try some of Beatrice Ojakangas' recipes, some of her better known cookbooks are titled The Great Scandinavian Baking Book, Scandinavian Cooking, and Great Whole Grain Breads.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Well, that does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hope you can join us tomorrow. We're off to the Olympics-- Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Jay Wiener will be joining us both hours of our Midday program tomorrow to talk about preparations for the Olympics. The Minnesotans in Turin, get your questions ready, and give us a call tomorrow for Midday. You're tuned to 91.1 WFM Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Sunny sky, 24 degrees in the Twin Cities. And the weather service says it should be sunny all afternoon, might warm up to 30 degrees before we're done today. Tonight, clear to partly cloudy skies forecast a little bit on the nippy side tonight. Overnight, low of 10 degrees above zero. Then tomorrow, 50/50 chance for some snow in the Twin City area, with high temperature again, like today, right around 30 degrees.

The extended forecast calls for more snow. Then tomorrow night, more snow on Friday, with a little bit cooler weather, high temperature of 25 degrees over the weekend. The Weather Service says we can expect some flurries on Saturday with a high near 20. And then on Sunday, partly cloudy skies forecast with a high, again, 20 to 25 degrees. The forecast high for today, 25 to 30 under a sunny sky. Currently, it's 24.