#Native American cooking

[twofeathertribe]

Sounds yummy

[assiraphales]

fuck it. fantasy old western au where zoro is a bounty hunter chasing down outlaws & pisses off the wrong sheriff at a saloon (axe hand morgan). he’s sent to the stocks, hours from dying from heat exhaustion under the hot desert sun, when young upstart monkey d luffy (in search of a stockpile of hidden gold that infamous outlaw gol d roger hid in the mountains) enters the scene guns literally a blazing

[inkmaze]

rewatching big eden w my head in my hands. wheres more media where the surrounding background is so devoid of homophobia/etc that its so chill to just have this quiet gay story w/o a single scene incl them having to justify or explain themselves, or any degree of hatred at them or other gays. n the town is not only chill they're actively trying to help them get together I'm. this aired in 2000 how do we not have. idk. more shit like this truly pretty casual chill regular relationship issues gay media

[boiledegghole]

fishie friday. the salmonids are picking mangos

[biophonies]

I come from a long line of people who raised hogs, smoked them in the earth as technique inherited from indigenous kin (who - more broadly - introduced the west to the method: more on that here!) and seasoned them beautifully.

so pork specifically meant a lot to my family... but it is also undeniably tied to hereditary health problems...

so here's a story on how we departed from that, what tradition even is, and what it means to me now ft the humble black eyed pea, for EATER!

some of my favorite panels:

find the recipe for Yoruba àkàrà in my new book, COOK LIKE YOUR ANCESTORS <3

[irawhiti]

colonisers in the last thousand years upon seeing literally any race of people for the first time: Good lord what the fuck is that. Yeah these guys are indians

[appalachianfuturism]

“The question led Barton to scholars like David Morgan and Kristen Gremillion, and obscure discoveries in places like Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, a 29,000-acre canyon system in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Before the Gorge finds, archaeologists “assumed that the peoples of this region just sat around passively, waiting for others to send them the gift of agriculture,” says Morgan, director of the National Park Service’s Southeast Archaeological Center. “But that simply wasn’t the case.”

Plant materials recovered by archaeologists in the Gorge in the 1980s and ‘90s led to a historical revision “that fundamentally alters how we think about indigenous peoples of the [precontact eastern U.S.],” says Morgan. A trove of ancient seeds debunked then-dominant theories “depicting early inhabitants as backwater nomads that didn’t acquire agriculture—and thus the markers of complex society—until after A.D. 1, when maize arrived from Mesoamerica.”

Gremillion, a paleoethnobotanist, chairs the Ohio State University department of anthropology and is the author of Ancestral Appetites: Foods in Prehistory. She started working in the Gorge around 1989, using techniques such as direct radiocarbon dating and high-magnification microscopy to study ancient caches of seeds, food stores, cooking refuse, and human feces. She found specimens buried under massive stone outcroppings and in caves—all in remarkable condition.

“We found things like 3,000-year-old sunflower heads and baskets full of seeds,” says Gremillion, who compares the digs to opening storage vaults. The finds were unprecedented, and old vanguard archaeologists were dismissive. “They said the materials couldn’t possibly be so old.”

Gremillion’s research proved them wrong; the region’s indigenous peoples had been farming for more than 5,000 years. The work helped establish the Eastern Woodlands as an independent center of prehistoric plant domestication and agricultural development—alongside areas like southeast Asia, Mexico, and the Fertile Crescent.”

[wakandamama]

So apparently I've been foraging and eating wild onions wit eggs my whole life because I am Native and not because I'm Black....

[hornswogglingpapergirls]

Made Chickasaw Indian Molasses Bread today (it’s very good and very simple, check it out) and made my own grape juice as step one for our tribes Iconic grape dumplings.

For the juice, you can buy grape juice or just get really small, dark grapes and boil them. Then you strain out the skins + remaining fruit flesh. It’s really delicious! I recommend trying it even if you don’t want grape dumplings.

[vestastable]

[prairie-tales]

Hopi basket, c.1800s.

Region: Arizona.

The Hopi are a Pueblo people, named for the are they inhabited. They continued the tradition of basketry that reaches back to the ancient peoples of the area. Basketry artefacts of the ancestors of the Pueblo tribes has been discovered ere, and these peoples have been dubbed the ‘Basket Maker Culture’ by archaeologists.

The trade network of the Pueblo extensive , and the decoration of goods was much influenced by contact with other cultures, including Mexican. Basket-making was exclusively carried out by women, whose wisdom and knowledge of the craft was essential for the making of quality bowls and baskets used and traded by the tribe. They understood the ecology of the surrounding area, and knew where the plants used in the making of the fibres could be found. They made assessments of the value of the materials and prepared them for specific uses. Many plants were used to make fibres from which the baskets were woven, including roots and grasses. The material chosen depended on the function of the basket – whether it needed to be particularly strong or water-retentive. Baskets were used for cooking until superseded by clay pots; the fibres were very tightly woven and any liquid they held would cause the material to swell and so retain it. Hot rocks were then put into the baskets to cook the contents.

Source: ‘Folk Art’, Susann Linn-Williams, pp. 182 – 83.

[seychellse]

“hurr hurr hee hee British ppl don’t know how to cook and their food is so bland bc they don’t know how to use spices even tho they stole em from the worl trolololol” Americans who have never left their country and have never read a single history book I beg you to for once shut Up. Abeg

[crafty-culinary-creations]

Native frybread (long-standing family recipe): made 12-3-2024

[jackiealpers]

Sean Sherman cider braised turkey thighs-Yellowstone cookbook by Jackie Alpers Via Flickr: The relationship of Indigenous tribes to their land is a central theme in the Yellowstone TV series and I am honored to include Sean Sherman’s recipe for Cider Braised Turkey Thighs from his James Beard award winning cookbook, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen in The Unofficial Yellowstone Cookbook. A portion of the sales of my cookbook will be donated to NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), promoting Indigenous foodways education and access. Visit natifs.org/ to learn more and make a dontation.

[jayjtheunsispiciousmelodicathem]

I think what's important to remember about cooking is that, like it or not, a dish exists in a certain context, that will affect how it's made or sometimes even enjoyed.

Mother cuisine, cultural exchange, availability of ingredients (which in turn is dictated by geography and how developed a country is), technology available, amount of people being cooked for, hell, even just the exact form of housing someone lives in (and the exact kitchen they're in), and not to mention the cook's and consumers' taste (which, unlike with books, games, or movies, there is actually accounting for) and abilities - it all affects how people cook

I could bring up xeno-american cuisines compared to the xeno cuisine's country of origin as a very fine example here, but I'm actually gonna bring up a very simple example of how my own cooking has changed with the change of circumstances I live in:

So I'm an autistic, Polish college student (italian studies), who lives in a dorm. The moment I moved into the dorm, the context of my cooking has changed DRASTICALLY: I have only two pans and one pot, three knives, a bunch of latex and wooden spatulae and other tools (including tongs), three bowls, a few instances of tupperware, a colander (this one will be relevant), at first no fridge but roommate secured a small one and is nice enough to share it with me, I buy ingredients as I need them in small quantities and using them as soon as possible, have to use a communal kitchen (which is sordid a lot of the time) with a gas stove (until I moved into the dorm I only used induction) that's relatively far away from my room (meaning I have to put everything I need for a dish into a bag or a box and carry it over in one or two goes).

It's inconvenient to cook for me in the dorm to say the least, but I cook anyway because I know how to, and honestly in the long run it's cheaper for me than McDonald's, and definitely way more healthy

Now, one of the dishes I cook the most often, because of how simple yet tasty it is, is spaghetti aglio e olio (living up to my major lmao).

Now, a typical recipe for SAeO is: boil pasta, fry minced garlic in olive oil (depending on recipe: also add chili flakes), save a tablespoon of pasta water and drain the pasta, mix herbs and spices into the pasta, and then toss the pasta with the garlic oil and the tablespoon of pasta water in the pan.

the first time I made SAeO it was exactly that way, and you know what it was like to me? Tedious. I hated the thought of losing any of the noodles to the dirty sink, so instead of putting the colander in the sink and pouring the contents of the pot into the colander, I began holding the colander above the pot, and fishing out the pasta with tongs (also makes it easier to use the pasta water too!), but it was still tedious to do. Not to mention the colander meant one more thing to wash before eating (communal kitchen = it's annoying when you leave your stuff there for too long), and one more thing to pack into a plastic bag when preparing for cooking and going back to the room.

So you know what I started doing instead? I simply fish the pasta out of the pot with tongs, and put it directly into the pan with the garlic oil (where I also put the herbs and spices because it brings out more of their flavours and aromas) with no draining. It achieves the same effect as saving that spoon of pastawater, while being more convenient in the context I find myself in, and in the long run in probably any other context I might find myself in (I still do that when I come home for holidays, because it's simply so much more convenient).

Now, if I have any Italian followers, I'm sorry if this method is unorthodox or otherwise inauthentic, but that's simply the adaptation I made in the context I found myself in, and the final result tastes just as good using either method!

Same goes for ingredient substitutions - if I can't get pancetta for my carbonara, I'll just use one of the many Polish wędliny (smoked meats), because that's the context I find myself in, and it will taste just as good as it would if I used pancetta.

I do not claim my versions of dishes to be authentic, of course, I only want to make it clear, that all the changes I make to the original dish stem from the context I found myself in.

There is one joke-anecdote I've read somewhere that went a bit like this: Someone makes a roast for their guests and they ask why did they cut off the ends of the roast meat before cooking. The host answers "oh, that's because how my mum did it, and that's how she taught me to do it!" So the guests asked the host's mum, and she said "oh, that's because my mum did it, and that's how she taught me to do it!" This continues a few generations back, until one of the fore-grandmas answers "that's the only way it would fit in the pan for me"

It's very possible that his ancestor's ancestors did the roast WITHOUT cutting off the ends, but because that one fore-grandma's pan happened to be smaller than her ancestors', she had to adjust her method.

And I think that sums up everything about cooking, really. You cook with what you have, what tools you have, what you know works, what you find out works et cetera, et cetera. And as long as you don't fight others on what's "authentic" and what's "fake", and instead focus on saying "oh, I tried to do it this way recently, and it was so much easier/tastier/less messy/etc" it's 100% fine.