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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
June 15, 2000
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk
"Every Wednesday Knoephla Soup" reads the board at Doc's Cafe, Enderlin, N.D. The board also lists, along with six kinds of pie, four kinds of kuchen. And there is fleischkueckle on the menu.
According to my copy of Bill Sherman's "Prairie Mosaic," Enderlin is not exactly the heartland of the Germans from Russia. Country hereabouts was settled by Norwegians and Germans, with admixtures of Anglo-Americans and others.
So what's the reaction of Enderlinians to the German-Russian specials in the cafe? "We're converting them," says Daryl Doktor, co-proprietor of Doc's with his wife Bonnie.
Bonnie and Daryl lived 21 years in Turtle Lake, where Bonnie had grown up a Roth and where Daryl was for 18 years the city engineer. Daryl had grown up in the Goodrich area. Both their mothers were great cooks in the farm-wife, German-Russian tradition.
Daryl's mother also had run a cafe in Goodrich, Bonnie had worked in the cafe at Turtle Lake, and she wanted to have one of their own. That led them to purchase and reopen the cafe in Enderlin in 1996, relocating there with the younger two of their three children, the twins Stacey and Stewart.
Daryl's mother, Parliane, came with them to get the place started and baked all the kuchen. After she went back to Goodrich, Bonnie's mother, Bertha, then took over the kuchen baking; she drove down from her home in Bismarck once in a while to whip up 40 or 50, no problem. These are wonderful kuchen with delicate yeast crust and smooth filling.
It's the knoephla soup that has become the object of a sort of cult, however. Groups are driving in for it from long distances. Stranger yet to tell, the high school kids of Enderlin got hooked on it. Led astray by the twins, they began cutting out on school lunch every Wednesday to take up a regular table at Doc's and eat the knoephla soup. This is creamier-than-average knoephla soup, with less evidence of chicken base.
The recipe? "It's in our heads," say the proprietors.
The knoephla soup tradition got started incidentally; Bonnie and Daryl just needed a soup to fill Wednesday's slot in the weekly rotation, and they pulled that one from the card file in their heads. The Wednesday when I dropped in, Bonnie was stirring a summer pot of knoephla soup, which looked like maybe 10 gallons. Then Daryl showed me the winter soup pot, which looked like about 20.
Before noon all tables in the main room of the cafe were taken, but there was still space in the back room. The crowd this Wednesday was all local, along with a few kin visiting from out of town. A town the size of Enderlin, especially a town with an industrial payroll like Enderlin's, needs a good, solid cafe, and Enderlin has one.
In the morning Bonnie works out front while Daryl cooks breakfast orders. Before midday the waitresses take over out front, and Bonnie takes up duties in the kitchen. It seems as if maybe Daryl's role in the cafe recedes through the day, partly because he says he likes outdoor work, and partly, I think, because Bonnie is formidably competent in the kitchen.
On the wall beside the kitchen entrance is the Hall of Fame--snapshots of hundreds of Enderlin folk cut out and pasted into a great collage, sort of like an aerial view of an outdoor rock concert, only with more intelligent faces overall.
Before leaving I asked Daryl if they ever intended to serve a lutefisk supper for the sake of Enderlin's Norwegians, and he said no. He said, "Our fans aren't big enough to blow the smell out."
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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse, (701) 231-6136
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