Noted Chef Abra Berens Talks Northern Michigan Roots, New Fruit-Centered Cookbook

Who doesn’t love a trilogy? From (the original) Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings, there’s a certain balance and beauty to things that come in threes. Last week, Abra Berens – a nationally acclaimed chef and author with roots right here in Leelanau County – closed out her own culinary trilogy with the publication of Pulp, a new cookbook focused on the art of cooking and baking with fruit. The book, a sequel to Berens’ previous kitchen compendiums Ruffage (about cooking with vegetables) and Grist (about cooking with grains, beans, seeds, and legumes), is the culmination of a journey Berens has been on for more than four years. It’s also the chef’s latest excuse to plot a return trip to northern Michigan, a place she says will always have her heart.

Berens wasn’t born and raised in Leelanau County, nor does she live here now. But the chef – whose bestselling books have garnered accolades from the likes of The New York Times, Bon Appetit, and the James Beard Foundation – does cite Leelanau as a key part of her origin story.

After growing up on a farm south of Holland, Berens attended the University of Michigan and got her first professional cooking job at Ann Arbor’s famed Zingerman’s Deli. After college, Berens spent time overseas at a cooking school in Ireland before finding her way back to Michigan and making her home in Northport, where she co-founded an agricultural endeavor called Bare Knuckle Farm. It was there, growing produce and learning to navigate the wild swings of northern Michigan seasons, that Berens dialed in on the art of cooking from the land. The entire Ruffage-Grist-Pulp trilogy was born out of those years and everything Berens learned during them.

“Ruffage started with vegetables in my time farming in Northport, and then I moved on to Grist, which was all about grains and legumes, and which is also really rooted in the production [of those ingredients] and how the Midwest factors into that,” Berens explains. “And then Pulp is really a love letter to Michigan and Michigan's fruit producers. A lot of people don’t realize it, but Michigan is the second most agriculturally diverse state in the nation, and a lot of that is because of how much fruit we grow.”

These days, Berens lives in Three Oaks, Michigan, where she serves as chef at Granor Farm – a job that “combines her love of Michigan, cooking vegetables and grains just-pulled from the ground, and sharing them with others around one big table.” But the chef still has ties to northern Michigan, and those ties are evident in her books.

“I find vapid discussions glorifying food while ignoring the people who grow or process our food very, ahem, frustrating,” Berens writes in the introduction of Pulp. “It is trite but true: no farms = no food.” She goes on to describe some of the oft-overlooked mechanics of the food production industry – using Leelanau County and its cherry farms as an example to explore the difference between fruit sold fresh (at grocery stores or farmers markets, for instance) and fruit sold on the commodity market (such as processed cherries used in pies or available in canned or frozen form).

“Driving around Leelanau County, the center of Michigan’s cherry heartland, it occurred to me that most of the visitors seeing these trees might not know that the fruit they produce doesn’t go to a farmers’ market or grocery store,” Berens writes. “There are vast differences in how farms and orchards are organized depending on whether a grower sells fruit on the fresh or commodity market.”

That little lesson in the complexities of the Michigan fruit economy isn’t Leelanau County’s only spotlight in Pulp. There’s are also multiple Q&As with local producers, including Michael and Peter Laing, the brothers who today own MAWBY Vineyards & Winery; and with Dr. Nikki Rothwell, coordinator of the Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Center and co-owner of the Suttons Bay-based Tandem Ciders.

Berens also gives northern Michigan credit for giving her the idea for Pulp in the first place, just as growing and eating veggies in Northport once inspired the bestselling Ruffage.

“I used to cook in the Grand Traverse area, which is responsible for about 80 percent of Michigan’s cherry production (along with a lot of other tree fruits and berries),” reads one section of the book. “It was there that a diner at one of the farm dinners I hosted remarked, ‘You put fruit in a lot of stuff. I didn’t think I would like it, but I do.’ That one little comment made me realize, I do, in fact, add fruit to a lot of savory dishes, which, with a bit of time, led to this cookbook.”

Speaking to the Leelanau Ticker, Berens says that one of the fun parts of compiling the recipes for Pulp was the subversion that came with offering up just as many savory dishes as sweet ones. Most people, she notes, think of fruit either as a standalone (e.g. eating an apple or banana by itself) or as an ingredient in desserts. Pulp pushes back against those assumptions, offering entrée recipes ranging from a decadent apricot and brie grilled cheese sandwich to a lamb chop dish made with buckwheat and black pepper strawberries.

“In most cases, the fruit is lending a sweetness and acidity to something that's a little bit on the richer side,” Berens explains of the more savory dishes she included in Pulp. “One of my favorite examples of that is a Sunday roast in the apple chapter, which is a roasted pork loin that has apples and potatoes and rutabaga and a bunch of different herbs to it. The apples get kind of leathery and crispy on the outside, but then they're also soft and sweet to pair against and cut through the richness of that pork.”

Pulp is organized so that each fruit – from apples to melons to rhubarb to strawberries – gets its own chapter. “And then within each chapter, there are different preparation techniques,” Berens says. “So: raw, roasted, poached, stewed; things like that. And then for each technique, there's a savory recipe and a sweet recipe. That was, for me, really important as a way to highlight how fruit can be in all kinds of courses of the meal, not just dessert.”

Want to learn more about Pulp, or about Berens and her ties to northern Michigan? The acclaimed chef will be in Leelanau County next week for a book release party and sit-down conversation with Nic Theisen of Loma Farm and Farm Club. Berens previously served as chef at Farm Club, splitting time between Traverse City and Three Oaks in 2020 and 2021 to help the business launch its restaurant component. Her homecoming event will take place at Farm Club from 6-8pm on Tuesday, April 18, and tickets are available for $25.