Katie Hunhoff

Our South Dakota Magazine crew started a coffee house called Muddy Mo’s in downtown Yankton a few years ago. On a frigid Saturday last winter, we decided to make mulled wine, both to warm our customers as they came in from the cold and also to try something new, which was the very inspiration for the shop. Mulled wine is warmed wine with spices added, but a quick Google search shows recipes from across the world using varied ingredients and techniques.

Bonita “Bonnie” Gill loved rhubarb. She helped spearhead Leola’s first Rhubarb Festival in 1972. She compiled a cookbook, wrote a poem about the town’s favorite vegetable, and was even crowned the town’s Rhubarb Queen. Gill died at age 96 in January of 2023. Just as she would want, the town’s festival continues, though for many it’s as bittersweet as a stalk of unsugared rhubarb. Merilee Beck, one of Gill’s seven children, remembers her mom working on the first rhubarb cookbook in the 1970s.

Wade Jorgenson was a longtime kraut lover, but he never attempted to make it until Larry Betlach of Brookings offered to show him in 2007. “Larry was tired of me for asking him for his sauerkraut, so he taught me how to make it myself,” Wade laughs. Jorgenson, who lives in Hayti, also remembers when Betlach came back six weeks later to check the sauerkraut’s progress. “He skimmed the gunk off the top and just took a bite from the pail. I about dropped over dead seeing that.