Le Ventre du Nord / Borealis Books: Sounds Like a Good Team

Le Ventre du Nord ("The Belly of the North"), Trout Caviar's tagline, is a sort double pun that I was quite pleased to hit upon, expressing as it does the sense of eating up the northland, in a francophilic way.

It combines Le Ventre de Paris ("The Belly of Paris")--Emile Zola's epithet for the sprawling Les Halles market that used to cover a good chunk of the Right Bank in central Paris--with L'Etoile du Nord ("The Star of the North")--the Minnesota state motto. (I should find a way to get the Wisconsin state motto in there, too, I know; I'll work on that.)

And borealis, that means "of the north," or maybe just "northern," as aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, is "northern dawn." It's a great name for a publisher like Borealis Books, the trade imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

The ultimate significance of this whole thing is that Borealis Books is going to publish the Trout Caviar book, recipes, essays, photographs, based upon this here blog.

I'm pleased as all get-out to announce this news, and very grateful to Shannon Pennefeather and Pam McClanahan at Borealis and MHS Press, who started checking out the blog a while back and thought there might be potential for a book in it.

I'm slightly terrified, too, since though the book will not be published until fall of 2011, I've got just a few short months to pull everything together. Mainly it's very exciting, and I'm really looking forward to having a chance to show off the splendid foods of our cold (and, lately, not so cold...) climate. Not that I haven't been doing that already. But this is going to be a book, you know, an actual honest-to-god book. That's different. And really, really cool.

Anybody wanna help test some recipes...?