In a good year, the wild rice grows thick on the lakes and rivers in northern Minnesota toward the end of August. The rice stalks multiply into such dense thickets that the waters become nearly impassable—to everything but the sleek canoes that glide through for harvesting. This job takes two people: one to knock rice into the canoe, and the other to propel the canoe through the water. Last year, I took the canoe’s middle seat, and my ricing partner stood tall in the back, pushing at the bottom of the creek bed with a twelve-foot pole, hand over hand, maintaining a gentle pace. With a stick like a fat pool cue in each hand, I poked one end behind a hank of rice stalks, bent it over the canoe, and used the other to softly strike the bursting seed heads: A shower of rice rained into the canoe. All the while, rice spiders, tiny and albino-white, skittered down my arms. Between swatting at them and keeping up with the canoe’s steady pace, it made for arduous work in the heavy, late-summer heat. But on and on it went, until the canoe became heavy with a belly full of rice and we slowly weaved our way to shore.
Hand-harvesters like us generally yield small batches. In our case, we brought in around two hundred pounds of raw, or green, rice. Compared to the professional harvesters, or even the ambitious amateurs, it’s considered peanuts, and hardly enough to process. All rice must be cooked, or as they say, parched, in order to solidify the milky, soft kernel inside its sheath. Everyone we talked to pointed us to Lewie DeWandeler and Donnie Vizenor, friends and business partners who have been parching wild rice at Lewie’s farm for more than twenty-five years. Just like Donnie’s father and his father before that, they use a steel barrel that rotates over a blazing wood fire. Standing by, their eyes, ears and sense of smell are expertly attuned to the rice. “Some people use propane for parching, but you can taste the difference,” says Donnie. “We like to use wood, so that there’s a certain amount of smoke in the rice.” The heat dries out the soft kernel, but it’s the smoke that lends the wild rice its flavor.
There’s also history to consider. Then and now, the many hours spent hand-harvesting rice provokes a desire to finish it in the right way. People from this area of the state have always parched their rice over wood fires because it’s the best, most precise treatment for a precious grain. Wood-fire parching also requires a great deal of intuition. Knowing when to raise the temperature and when to slow the barrel’s rotation are skills maintained through generations only by the act of doing. In this age of mass production of wild rice and other grains, those few who have kept the craft of wood-parching alive seem to sense that they are the last inheritors of a great tradition.
Lewie DeWandeler and his wife Betty live on the Ponsford Prairie within the White Earth Indian Reservation, where fields of bright green hay give way to lush clumps of beans in rows. Abandoned farmhouses and the occasional one-room school sit squat in the middle of fields, shedding their whitewash.
My partner and I had been told to show up at Lewie’s at the crack of dawn, no later, but when we get there Lewie leans out the kitchen door and says, “Come in. I have to eat my breakfast yet.” We stomp the mud off our boots as we climb the rough steps to the kitchen. It’s been drizzling for hours, and looks to be a day of pure gray sky and soaking wetness. The three dogs standing at well-spaced intervals across the long driveway glare at us, standing proud in their heavy wet coats. One, to be polite, gives a slow wag.
Inside, Lewie is whipping eggs into flour to make pancake batter. His eyes have the glint of a true Midwestern prankster—someone who works hard but can make light of it. He makes a triple stack of pancakes and fried eggs, one on top of the other, and pours dark Minnesota maple syrup, thick as caramel, over all of it. We watch Lewie eat, we drink coffee, shoot the bull, and wait. Donnie Vizenor shows up, cheerful for the early hour, wearing bright blue workmen’s overalls.
By 7:45 we are all well-fed and, holding our coffee cups, heading out to the parching shed. A wind-worn but stubborn structure, it’s open on two sides, and a lush green mess of baby oaks and bindweed comes in through one of them. The other side, next to the fire, is open to the grand sweep of the Ponsford Prairie. Like many people who live on the prairie, Lewie DeWandeler has learned to diversify: he logs and traps in the woods in the winter, farms hay and pinto beans in the summer, parches rice in the fall, sugars maples for syrup in the spring, and in this way generally survives the extremes of Minnesota weather.
Over the years Donnie and Lewie have filled the shed with equipment for processing wild rice, an operation that begins and ends on the behemoth 1912 scale given to them by Donnie’s father. With its smooth white enameled shoulders, it stands as tall as a man and weighs in up to thirty-four thousand pounds of green rice each year. Donnie’s father, who grew up on the White Earth Reservation, updated the original parching method with a gas-powered motor: His first barrel parcher used a Ford Model A engine. As he scaled back on parching, Lewie and Donnie took on more of the job, eventually trading in the Model A engine for an electric motor to turn the barrel. They also invested in a thresher (often pronounced “thrasher”), which looks something like a washing machine and sports rubber rudders that gently beat the chaff loose from the parched rice. A large screen-lined grain separator shakes the whole kernels of rice down into a bucket, leaving a cloud of rice dust and chaff to blow out the side of the shed.
While the rice is in the barrel, it is tempting to lean in close, to get the full force of the steamy smell of grain toasting—but the fire beneath is intensely hot. Lewie and Donnie keep a large but well-controlled blaze going from logs of white pine and oak, whose smoke perfumes the rice. Lewie stands next to the fire, leaning on a tall, blackened stick, which he uses every few minutes to adjust the logs and maintain the temperature. Parching rice demands full attention, but also allows those involved plenty of time for leaning on sticks and reminiscing. “Back when everyone brought in local rice, we used to be able to tell what lake the rice came off of,” says Lewie. “Some is almost yellow, some brown, some almost white. Rice from Mitchell Dam is short, fat, like coffee beans. And then there’s that lake just north of Highway 200—the rice from there is blond, almost transparent, once it’s parched.”
Just like a cook, he’s keeping half a mind on the rice as we talk. He stops mid-sentence, turns a switch to speed the barrel. Opening the shed’s wide door to cool the place off a bit, he says, “Smell that? It’s going a little too fast.” When I ask how he can tell when it’s done, he gives my simplistic question a poker-faced, smartass response: “Standing here for twenty years looking at it has something to do with it.”
Then he responds seriously, for Lewie is serious about this: “When the rice is just right it rattles against the barrel and sounds heavy.” He could parch it just enough to make it edible, but he works toward something a little better than that. Crafting a superior product with great flavor takes someone who again and again chooses to bring each batch precisely to the point of perfect doneness. “I toast the rice almost until it burns,” he says, winking, “but just almost. That gives it a nice smoky flavor.” And it does. Steaming a mere cup of rice that Lewie and Donnie have parched will fill an entire house with its earthy fragrance, as if you can smell at the same time both the fire it was parched in and the water it was raised in. Each taupe-colored kernel cooks up separate, tender and gently bent, barely splitting.
Lewie’s and Donnie’s parching method closely resembles the Native American method practiced around the turn of the century. At that time, the rice spent a day or two drying in the sun before it was toasted in a large cast-iron kettle over a wood fire. After parching, it was then stamped upon with soft, moccasined feet to loosen the chaff. Once cool, it got poured it into shallow grass baskets and flung expertly into the air. The breeze carried the chaff away, and the rice fell back into the basket.
Ricing on lakes within a reservation is limited to enrolled tribe members, but lakes on public and private land outside of the reservation are open to anyone. The best ricing lakes on reservation land (such as the aptly named Big Rice Lake near Mahnomen, Minnesota) throw annual lotteries: Names of tribal members go into a bucket, and only a lucky handful win the right to go ricing.
Today the portrait of a small-time harvester is an interesting amalgam of Native American and European settler, with some of the ricing and processing being done by Native Americans on reservation soil, some on private land, and some by mixed teams on reservation lakes and on public lakes. The fact is, wild rice is a northern Minnesota foodstuff and its gathering is intertwined with the history of the northern territory. Settlers learned to rice from the Indians who lived here, in this place where rice grew wild on most every lake and in nearly every stream. When the Depression hit, all kinds of people took to harvesting and selling rice on a larger scale than ever before. At that time, the extra money and source of food nicely supplemented what could be, for both the settlers and the native people, a lean life on the northern prairie.
Since then, people devised ways to produce wild rice on large scale, and today, most commercial producers have eliminated the fussy steps: They flood a field to grow rice, drain it to harvest, dry the grain until it’s completely black, and then parch it with steam until it’s solid. There’s not a lot of aroma surrounding this kind of operation, and zero romance. And having eaten plenty of this solid black commercial rice, I have to say that there’s not too much flavor in it, either.
Cream of wild rice soup, a staple at diners in every small town across Minnesota, should be made with the old-fashioned, wood-parched rice. The steam-parched kind doesn’t cook evenly, so you end up with a few fully exploded kernels swimming among a lot of chewy, half-cooked rice. Wood-parched rice cooks more gently and evenly, and seems to thicken the creamy broth with its smoky, tender kernels.
I like wild rice best when it’s prepared most simply: steamed with a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, and a few cloves of garlic for perfume, with a thick pat of butter melting on top. (Contrary to popular myth, wild rice doesn’t take an hour to cook. Rinse it and cover it with enough water so that the tip of your finger touches the rice and the water reaches your first knuckle. Then bring it to a simmer, cover it, and steam for half an hour.) But this grain is also amazingly addictive when popped, salted, and buttered like popcorn. The kernels swell and explode when poured into a pan of hot oil; smaller than popcorn, the little puffed grains retain all the smoky flavor from the parching, and it’s a challenge to get the little bits in your mouth in enough quantity to satisfy.
This year, Lewie’s son is parching some of the rice. As my grandma would say, it’s nice to see young folk take an interest. Because while small processors like Lewie and Donnie parch rice year after year, they’re not exactly besieged by apprentices. And like any artisanal process, rice parching must be taught, not described.
Back in the day, families would bring their raw products to someone who would finish the processing. The cream went to the town creamery for butter and cheese; the wool was taken to someone who would spin it; the wheat was brought to the mill for flour. In this way, producers developed finely tuned skills for processing or finishing different products. With these kinds of cooking and processing, intuition is usually more precise than science.
In northern Minnesota, many people enjoy getting out onto the lakes, gathering the rice, getting it parched, and taking that simple pleasure in eating all winter what they reaped in the fall. “People like to come to us because they get their own rice back,” says Lewie. “We could parch two small batches from two different people together, but you don’t know what that guy did with his rice before it got here.” Though I hadn’t thought about it before, I too was thankful that we got back the very rice we brought in. When Lewie said “the taste comes from right here,” he may have been pointing to his barrel parcher, but he was also talking about this northern place, those logs on the fire, this creek bed, and the one down the way.