How the State Fair launched the career of a Minnesota culinary icon
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More than 75 years ago, the Minnesota State Fair helped launch the career of one of Minnesota's cooking legends.
For Beatrice Ojakangas, qualifying to enter her recipes at Minnesota’s great get-together was an opportunity to escape the small family farm where she grew up as the oldest of ten kids on a Finnish homestead in Floodwood, about 40 miles west of Duluth.
After winning blue ribbons at the Fair as a teenager, she went on to write more than 30 cookbooks, win a coveted James Beard award, and invent one of the most iconic frozen foods in American history.
As a child she dreamed of being a writer and of seeing the world. She ultimately did both.
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Beatrice has fond memories growing up on a farm, but she worked hard: milking cows, churning butter, shoveling manure and helping her mom cook.
“You learn everything from scratch when you're cooking on a farm,” said Beatrice, now 92 and living in Duluth. She learned the basics on a wood burning stove. “You cook what you need and you cook with what you have.”
She remembers being told at an early age that if she got good enough at cooking — and at explaining to the judges how to make what she cooked — that she could win a local 4-H competition to advance to the State Fair.
"The State Fair was a big deal,” she remembered thinking. “Because that was like a five-day vacation!"
So she practiced her cooking, and her presentation, including for her second-year entry, a cheese souffle.
"And I know my cows could have made it because I practiced so much while I was milking the cows," she said.
Beatrice won a blue ribbon with that souffle that year, in 1950. She also won one the year before for a chiffon cake, and she won again in 1951 for her Finnish Rye Bread. That victory also qualified her for the International 4-H Congress in Chicago, which included an overnight stay in a fancy hotel. She began to see cooking as a ticket to see the world.
From England to Finland to California
Beatrice graduated high school in 1952, and attended the University of Minnesota Duluth where she met her husband Dick. They graduated, got married, and moved to England in the span of a couple days, where Dick was stationed in the Air Force reserves.
It was 1956, and somebody on the base handed out entries to the Pillsbury Bake-Off, a recipe competition sponsored by the Minneapolis-based food company. She’d never heard of it. But one night while driving, she brainstormed a recipe for a cheesy loaf of bread she called “Cheesy Picnic Bread.”
She baked it once, and the cheese melted all over the oven. She modified the recipe, but didn’t have enough ingredients to bake it a second time. So she mailed it in, untested, and promptly forgot about it.
Months later, they were back in Duluth, staying at Dick’s parents, when she got a call from Pillsbury. She was one of the 100 finalists in the contest. She didn’t even have a copy of the recipe anymore; she had to recreate it.
The contest was held in Los Angeles two weeks after she gave birth to her first child. She didn’t want to go. “It’s that motherly instinct,” she said. But she flew there, made the bread, and to her shock, was the second grand prize winner.
She won $5,000 — nearly $60,000 in today’s dollars — which helped support the family while Dick attended graduate school in Missouri. She was 23 at the time.
Next they traveled to Finland for a year when her husband won a Fulbright scholarship. Beatrice got a job traveling around teaching Finns about American food, toting her two young children along with her. Meanwhile she soaked up everything she could about Finnish food.
"I took a lot of notes, and I asked a lot of questions."
From there they moved to California where Dick studied at Stanford. Beatrice got a job at Sunset Magazine as a typist. She was ecstatic. She closely studied the recipes that writers submitted as she typed them out, to learn what made a good story. Soon after she was hired, one of the food writers quit.
She applied, and got her dream job. “It was just a crowning glory, I just loved it,” she recalled.
Her editor at Sunset connected her with a book publisher in New York. That led to her first cookbook, based on her notes and travels through Finland. It was simply called, The Finnish Cookbook, published in 1964.
Sixty-two years later, it's still in print, she says proudly, and it is still her best known book.
By that time, the two had moved back to Duluth, where Dick took a job as a geology professor at UMD. Beatrice was hired by Chun King, a food company run by entrepreneur Jeno Paulucci. The company’s specialty was canned and frozen Chinese food. She was the only woman among Paulucci’s stable of recipe developers.
Paulucci assigned Beatrice to come up with different fillings for egg rolls. She brainstormed dozens of ideas, from peanut butter and jelly to mac and cheese, along with about six different pizza flavors.
She remembers packing the egg rolls into a cooler and getting flown to Jeno's huge lake house on Lake Kabetogama along the Canadian border for a meeting with company big wigs.
"There was Jeno with all of his executives around this table, and when the pizza flavored ones came out. He says, ‘Jeno's pizza rolls!’ and slammed his fist on the table, ‘That's it!’"
Jeno’s Pizza Rolls hit grocery stores a couple years later, and they were a huge hit. Paulucci sold Chun King to R.J. Reynolds for $63 million, but continued to make pizza rolls through his company Jeno’s, Inc. In 1985, he sold Jeno’s to Pillsbury for more than $100 million.
But Beatrice never profited from her invention. She recalls asking for a 25 cent an hour raise shortly after she came up with the popular snack, but she said Paulucci told her, “I'm sorry, we can't afford that.”
She quit Jeno's shortly after that, but her culinary career was just getting started. She launched a restaurant in Duluth called Somebody’s House in the 1970s.
Between 1980 and 1996, she published an astounding 23 cookbooks, including “The Great Scandinavian Baking Book,” published in 1988, for which she would later be awarded entry into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame for her “significant and lasting impact” on the culinary world.
The ‘Scandinavian Julia Child’
In 1992, Beatrice got a phone call that would raise her profile even more than her many cookbooks.
When she got home from shopping, her mother-in-law, who was staying with them at the time, told her breathlessly, “Julia Child called you. And she wants you to call her back, and she sounds just like she does on TV!”
Beatrice flew to the East Coast to appear on the famous cook's PBS show. Afterwards her name began to be included in the titles of her cookbooks. People began referring to her as the “Scandinavian Julia Child.”
She appeared on Martha Stewart’s show, and wrote several more cookbooks. In 2016, she wrote a memoir, “Homemade: Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food.”
But she's not one to brag about her achievements. "Well, I did what I could do,” she said. “I did what seemed important at the time, and I had a lot of good friends and a lot of family support." Dick died in December of last year.
Recent health issues have slowed Beatrice down some. She doesn’t cook as often. And she won’t make it to the State Fair. But she's begun to write again. And she thinks she may have one more book still in her. If she does, it will be book number 35.
