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by Andrea Baumgardner (Author), Sarah Strong (Photographer)
From BernBaum's, the beloved downtown Fargo bagel shop and restaurant, comes a gorgeous, down-to-earth cookbook filled with rustic, hearty Jewish-Scandinavian recipes.
Since its closure in 2024, BernBaum's has left a bagel-shaped hole in Fargo, North Dakota's restaurant scene. The surprising harmony of Icelandic-meets-Jewish dishes made BernBaum's a hit in Fargo and beyond, earning chef Andrea Baumgardner praise from the New York Times and Food and Wine.
Now, BernBaum's: Recipes from Fargo's Nordic-Jewish Deli gathers the best recipes from the renowned restaurant to bring Nordic noshes right to your home. With trademark charm, Baumgardner shares her rustic, cook-friendly food philosophy, the humble roots of BernBaum's, and a tempting array of Jewish-Scandinavian recipes that embrace the joy of improvisation and bring families and cultures together.
From the legendary shakshuka focaccia Nordic lamb meatloaf with lingonberries and labneh, classics like chicken or vegan matzoh ball soup, or mouth-watering sweets like rugelach with fig and chocolate hazelnut filling, the cookbook captures this unique deli's most iconic recipes, beginning with the "perfectly blistered exterior of one very fine bagel" (Food and Wine).
Author Biography
Andrea Baumgardner is the Baum in BernBaum's, a bagel shop and restaurant in downtown Fargo, North Dakota. Baumgardner's interest in food has roots in her high school job at Leeby's, an old-school bakery and delicatessen that featured gruff, knowledgeable butchers and serious farm-style bakers who turned out perfect cake donuts, pies, and lefse. While attending Macalester College, she spent a year in Spain and France, greatly expanding her palate--and her pants size. A graduate of San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, Baumgardner externed at Chez Panisse before cooking on the line at Vivande and Eos in the Bay Area and at Boxer and Cobras & Matadors in Los Angeles. In 2003, she returned to Fargo as the opening executive chef of the Hotel Donaldson. She was a partner and chef of Green Market Kitchen before creating BernBaum's with her husband, Brett Bernath, in 2016. A 2015-16 Humphrey Fellow in Public Policy at the University of Minnesota, Baumgardner is committed to teaching children to cook as a form of justice. She is a 2020 semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest from the James Beard Foundation, a believer in pickles, and counts her retired physician father as one of her prep cooks.
Sarah Strong is a traveling flâneur, photographer, cook, and mostly lifelong Minnesotan who thrives on documenting the simple bits of everyday life--ideally, people cooking and eating together.
