Girl in the North Country

You'd need a calendar to know that Thursday is supposed to be the first day of spring.  I mean, you're not going to remember it just by looking outside and for sure you're not going to know it by stepping outside.

My friend Barb, who's lived in Minneapolis for more than a decade, says that by mid-March it's supposed to be in the 30's and 40's here.  I want to tell her that saying this to me is preaching to the choir and she really needs to direct her comments to Mother Nature, but that seemed rude, particularly since I am her house guest.  And after all, she has to go out in this stuff and I don't.  Anyway, I really didn't expect great weather when I decided to pop up to Minnesota in March, and it's safe to say those expectations have been met.

But beyond the weather, it's been a great trip.  I've seen a couple of wonderful museums and had all sorts of culinary adventures.

The Museum of Russian Art is the only museum dedicated to Russian art in the western hemisphere.  Their exhibits rotate every few months and I saw a collection of several dozen forged brass icons, a number of paintings from their permanent collection, and a large exhibit of modern Russian art.  You can't take pictures in the museum but the icons were so impressive that I wanted you to see them.  The one pictured on the left has blue enamel on it, and the others are most likely brass with gold added.

photo credit: www.TMORA.org

My paternal great grandparents came from Kiev, but my Russian heritage wasn't people to whom Christian icons spoke (other than possibly, "get out or we'll burn your house down").  Still, they're beautiful pieces.  (This summer the museum is bringing an exhibit called "Jews in Tsarist Russia" which should also be interesting.)

Apparently the museum's most popular painting is "Milkmaids - Novella:"

photo credit: www.TMORA.org

It's a large painting and I have to say it was my favorite as well.  It obeyed the "Socialist Realism" directive of the time that art had to show happy workers.  This picture does so, obviously.  But it's more than that: there's just something so universal and real about the women's smiles and laughter that the spirit is infectious.  And, of course, one can be as subversive as one wants to be in deciding what the women are laughing about.  So long as you kept that to yourself.

As you know, I love historical museums and have seen a bunch of them over the past four months.  It's difficult to pick a favorite, but for sheer depth of focus and height of elevators, it's really hard to beat the Mill City Museum.

In downtown Minneapolis, built in the ruins of the Washburn-Crosby Company's A Mill, the museum explains and documents the development of the flour industry which is arguably the basis for the city's existence - certainly it is the basis for the community's economic significance. 

Up until the mid-19th century, flour in the U.S. was milled from wheat grown in the southern part of the country which had a soft outer shell that was easily removed during processing.  The climate in Minnesota and the Dakotas wasn't conducive to planting such "winter wheat" (see my comments at the top of this post) and the kind of wheat that would grow around here is called Red Hard Spring Wheat.  That means it is planted in the spring and has a hard shell.  And it's red.  In about 1850 a couple of guys from New England, who had moved to Minnesota to harness the power of the Mississippi's only waterfall and make textiles, figured out the secret to milling hard wheat.  Even better, they learned that such wheat was superior for baking bread, and the next eighty years saw Minneapolis become the Flour Capital of the World.  One of the docents Cousin Susan and I spoke with, T.J., said that he felt that this site - the Washburn A Mill - was the most important building in Minneapolis history, since it was in this building that the milling process was developed.  The A Mill had exploded in 1878 (flour dust is more explosive than TNT - the explosion killed eighteen people, destroyed one-third of the area's milling capacity and was felt miles away) and was rebuilt in 1880.  General Mills (successor company to Washburn-Crosby) made Gold Medal Flour there until 1965, when the plant fell victim to decentralized production and was shuttered.  In 1991 a fire gutted the property but luckily, Susan explained, the head of the state historical society and the mayor worked to save the site and, in a sense, the city's history.

Part of the museum is called the Flour Tower.  You and about three dozen people sit in a small room and your docent explains that you'll be hearing former mill employees talk about what it was like to work there.  If you are among the dimmest of the patrons, as I was, it's not until then that you realize that you aren't in a small room so much as you are in a large elevator.  The "room" moves up and down to various floors and you see everything from the office to the boilers.  It is very cool.  The rest of the museum is very well done, too, with some exhibits for kids and lots of information about the history of the industry:  foreign trade, millwrights, Betty Crocker - the works. 

You also get an awesome view of the Mississippi River and Minneapolis.

Last but not least, there's a movie called "Minneapolis in 19 Minutes Flat."  It's an entertaining and very informative history of the city.  I will illustrate my respect for your intelligence by not describing the movie's length.

The area that became Minneapolis was identified by a priest named Hennepin when he came across what he called "St. Anthony Falls" - the only natural waterfall on the otherwise-very-flat Mississippi River.  Here's a picture of what the falls looked like before it was heavily developed:

Photo credit:  http://www.uh.edu/engines/earlystanthonyfalls.jpg

Here's what it looks like today:

Photo credit:  http://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/images/stAnthonyFalls.jpg

So if you're in the Twin Cities you definitely want to check out both The Museum of Russian Art and the Mill City Museum.  You will not be disappointed.

Of course, a person cannot only feed one's mind.  She must also feed her stomach and there are a lot of great places to do that in the Twin Cities, as you would expect.

We did have a little trouble with that Friday night, however.  My friend, Barb, and her husband, Tim, and I, spent quite some time trying to decide where to go to dinner.  There are too many choices, really.  We finally decided to try a new place called Piccolo's which had gotten rave reviews.  Their slogan is "putting what is seasonal and creative ahead of what is safe and familiar."  We're all for that!  Unfortunately, what we didn't realize until after we'd gotten settled in and ordered a bottle of wine is that they are into this whole "small plates" movement.  Friends, if you are like us and didn't understand what that means, it means that each dish has about the amount of food on it that you'd get from a waiter passing hors d'ouevres at a cocktail party.  Yes, I know that most American restaurants give you way too much food and generally I wish they'd serve smaller portions.  But there's a difference between a reasonable serving and a bite-sized morsel.  Once we realized this, Tim and I each ordered one plate and we told the waitress we would just be having that.  I've never seen a waitress change her disposition so quickly.  We wanted to say, "Look, dear, you did not have anyone else waiting for this table.  Treating us like something on the bottom of your shoe is not a good way to maximize your tip.  And did I mention I just ordered a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine?"  But this is Minnesota, after all, and we're all much too nice to say such a thing.  When we finally finished the wine and left (quickly - before we started laughing), we found a fabulous Greek place with food that did not need to be explained and in quantities that didn't make you look around for dessert.  And in Piccolo's defense, the food was delicious.  In a diminuitive sort of way.

Sunday morning we faced no such dilemma.  Barb said that we'd be going to this really good place, which she refused to describe, and Tim said we needed to leave in plenty of time to be in line when they opened at 10.  Great call on all counts.  They took me to the Triple Rock Social Club which is a punk bar (the Clash played here) that serves wonderful brunch on weekends.  This is no "small plates" place and the waitress had no sneering attitude.  She did, however, have a lot of facial tattoos.  I had the house specialty, called a Mother Trucker, which included home fries covered in cheddar cheese (real cheese, not some nasty cheese sauce).  Awesome - and I needed that much food to help counteract an extremely strong Bloody Mary.

Then we walked through the Como Park Conservatory because it was very nice to get in from the cold.

That's not all of Minneapolis, of course - Cousin Susan took me into the Guthrie Theater and Barb took me to a great international market and I spent Friday driving around seeing all sorts of places and eating at Cecil's Deli - and I'm not done yet.  Tomorrow I am going with the Washburns (no relation to the Gold Medal people, I don't think) to see another museum with an exhibit about Minnesota and the Civil War and of course I will give you a full report.

In the meantime, the snow has stopped here and the sun is trying to at least brighten up the sky a bit.  I hope that wherever you are is showing similar signs of effort by Mother Nature to kick spring into gear.