If you've made New Year’s resolutions to eat less and exercise more, start next week because I’m going to tantalize your taste buds with this delicious dish straight out of a novel beloved in Minnesota.

Here are some clues about this fictional family and a dish they loved:

This author was born two years after the Civil War ended and would live to see space satellites, integration in the South and the word “beatnik” appear in the American vernacular.

This author, who was born in the Midwest, lived many of the experiences that she wrote about in her fiction, including dangerous blizzards and an education in a one room schoolhouse.

This author may not have called herself a feminist but when she married at 18, she omitted the word “obey” from her vows and so began a marriage that biographers say was unusual for the late 1800s.  

That marriage, which this writer fictionalized in her novels, endured many hardships including poverty, the loss of a child and a fire that claimed everything she owned.

Think you know who it is? Let’s see if you can figure out which dish appeared on the table in the fictional feasts this writer created.  

This dish has been made and savored in the Americas for centuries and it was an early staple of the diets of Native Americans and settlers because the ingredients were ubiquitous.

Colonial cooks would eventually start mixing the essential ingredient of this dish with flour so it would be lighter and more easily digestible.

There are thousands of recipes for this dish, although many households just came up with their own, and it was made in many different kinds of cooking utensils.

When this dish appeared in our writer’s novels, it was made with things like buttermilk and bacon drippings.

One passage describes this dish as accompanying “stewed jackrabbit with white flour dumplings and plenty of gravy,” and another describes it sweetened with molasses and jam.

So, is your mouth watering for this dish? And can you guess which beloved series of books it appears in again and again? When you know it, tweet me @KerriMPR.

— Kerri Miller | MPR News