My partner has been on a Navajo Indian reservation and some of the food was good but most was sort of bland. Sadly, after being driven to these reservations one of the staple foods in the diet became fry bread. It is not the healthiest.
Also, it is hard to have a restaurant selling traditional foods like squash when many tribes don’t grow it and eat it themselves, because well, it doesn’t grow in the desert.
But ya, can second, Fry Bread and really fatty mutton seem to be staples. Plus whatever everyone else eats (Burger King, lunchables and Gas Station Hot Dogs).
My theory is native squash just doesn't taste that good. Sort of like how Anglos switched from boiled parsnips (have you ever eaten that? I haven't) in 1200AD to French Fries and Pizza now.
I went to a Navajo buffet once. They did have a little traditional food (mutton, fry bread) but most was just mashed potatoes and stuff you might find at Golden Corral. The native stuff was not very tasty at all as I recall, (this was years ago) and I never went back.
There's lots of things you can do with parsnips...
Baked Parsnips With Fruit
Parsnip Pie
Parsnip Tart
Parsnip Wine
Parsnip-soffrito Soup
Parsnip-pecan Cake
Sauteed parsnip slices
Parsnip Latkes with Lox and Horseradish Creme
Maple Glazed Parsnips on Kale
Slow Cooker Parsnip and Apple Soup
Carrot, Parsnip and Potato Gratin
Carrot-Parsnip Bisque
Parsnip, Pear and Pecan Salad
Agave Roasted Parsnips
> Sort of like how Anglos switched from boiled parsnips (have you ever eaten that? I haven't) in 1200AD to French Fries and Pizza now.
I would guess parsnips (I don't know about boiled (only) though! Meh) are at least as common here in the UK as frites, as distinct from chips to any Briton.
But then squash (off the top of my head not sure if it'd be NM's export at any time of year though) and mashed potatoes (and to a lesser extent mutton, much more lamb) are perfectly popular here too, so not really sure what my point is.
Traditional varieties of squash absolutely grow in the desert. It's not super common on the Navajo res to my knowledge, but the Hopi and O'odham reservations have sustenance and large scale commercial farming.
But as a fun fact, the three sisters were often grown dryland on as little as a single rainstorm in pre-contact times. Some of those areas average around 40mm of rain a year.
Well I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing it out. My parents grew squash. I was forced to eat it so much in fact I still dislike it even though I know it’s healthy. We grew it in a continental climate, black soil, regular rain so I assumed automatically it needed those conditions.
I can definitely recommend the café in the Museum of the American Indian in DC. It's probably the best food on the National Mall (the only other real contender is the African-American Museum), and is a rare example of museum food actually being good enough to go to if you weren't already at the museum.
I think more native american restaurants would be wonderful. But my eyebrows lift at the idea of "native american cuisine". We're talking about dozens of distinct cultures that covered the entire continent, from the damp, mild ocean adjacent pacific NW to the deserts of the southwest to the grasslands of the midwest to the forests of the east and north east (and so, so much more). Nobody would seriously suggest that there's any possibility of a unified food culture across this range.
So, let regional native american restaurants bloom!
I can imagine NA cuisine being no more unified than Mexican, Tex-Mex, New Mexican, Oaxacan, California Mexican, et. al. are under the category of “Mexican”. I grew up on Tex-Mex and I was dumbfounded at the sight of a wet burrito?? But you learn and grow :) and I’m sure any emergence of NA cuisine would be similar.
There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food. Frybreads are a good example since they come directly from the reservation system and the typical ingredients provided by the government for cheap calories:
flour, beans, oil, "cheese", and some form of meat, sugar, etc. Despite the common name, it's a shared culinary heritage for many tribes in the US.
The real issue is that there's been very little widespread systematization of "traditional" indigenous cookery. We've started seeing that over the past few decades through the efforts of people like Lois Frank and many, many others, but it's a process.
> There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food.
Yes and this nearly amorphous identity is a tragedy that needs unbundling. Scratch the surface and none of it makes sense for any single pre-colonial culture on the whole continent.
There are like 300 recognized distinct pre-colonial cultures here at the US federal level, most of which were grandfathered in before a cutoff for the reservation system and additional ones each requiring an act of Congress for recognition, even more at the state level, and even more vying for recognition as they are just noticing and regrouping after ages of separation, in a combination of forced separation or lineage dilution.
I can’t help but think there might be a more subtle resurgence of Native American Cuisine with more “authentic” Mexican food becoming more mainstream outside of coastal California and ethnic enclaves, as well as a renewed interest for Bison meat (20 years ago it was pretty rare).
> There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food. Frybreads are a good example since they come directly from the reservation system and the typical ingredients provided by the government for cheap calories: flour, beans, oil, "cheese", and some form of meat, sugar, etc. Despite the common name, it's a shared culinary heritage for many tribes in the US.
At least this shared identity wasn't built over unmarked graves for children like elsewhere. [0] [1] [2]
> At least this shared identity wasn't built over unmarked graves for children like elsewhere.
Don't kid yourself; the American boarding schools for the Native Americans weren't much better than the Canadian ones, were they any better to begin with. In general, I'd be hard-pressed to declare Canada any better or worse in its treatment of indigenous peoples than the US was--they were both pretty appalling.
I remember when asking for “salsa” north of Denver resulted in your eggs being covered in ketchup - and having to get relatives to send me cans of hatch green chilies because pickled jalapeños were the only option in NYC.
Things definitely got better, you can go pretty much anywhere in the US and get real salsa now - thank you taco bell for educating people. Today I can buy hatch green chilis in the ethnic isle of most grocery stores in NYC (and you can always order them from Amazon or Walmart). In the northeast poblano peppers are in all the Mexican-ish dishes - huge upgrade from the pickled jalapeños and very close to the hatch chilies I grew up with. Some of the stuff I get at the taco trucks is even more exotic and really wonderful - I’m a big fan of Oaxacan cheese, wish I had discovered that years ago.
I think how it worked in pre contact times was you ate whatever you could get. Deer, squirrels, nuts, seeds from wild grasses, berries, tender hearts of succulents like agave, and if there was nothing else, the inner bark of pine trees.
The gourmet scene probably didn't exist much before the rise of agriculture.
HIAKAI in New Zealand has done really well taking indigenous (traditionally foraged) Māori ingredients and turning them into a fine dining experience. I'd love to see what a similar take could look like with Native Indian cuisine. https://www.hiakai.co.nz/food
Frankly the idea of discovering the palate of primarily locally foraged cuisine sounds exciting to me. I 100% want to know what talented chefs can do with agave hearts! How did native cuisine incorporate the wide varieties of berries in north america, in terms of color, texture, taste? It sounds like a whole philosophy of food that have no introduction to and I'd be excited to experience it.
The terms "Chinese food" and "Indian food" are similarly reductive/broad. They represent in the US a specific a new cuisine, a kind of curated fusion (eg chicken tikka masala). If your focus is on understanding the food of a place and people and how those things relate, this is a bad thing probably.
As the market grows it kind of gets undone - this is most obvious in America with maybe Japanese restaurants? Sushi, ramen, bbq are often entirely different restaurants. Except that, as the fusion represents a new cuisine, it can stick around on its own
Ramen is a fairly modern invention that was based around Chinese recipes with American wheat post-war. Its hard to call it a Japanese native food, but that's what we're going with.
Soba is made of buckwheat so its really an very different type of dish, but Ramen used to be just called "Chinese Soba", since wheat based noodles are very different from rice or buckwheat.
Ramen specifically uses wheat noodles. "Modern Japanese Ramen" took Chinese recipes that used wheat noddles and used them to great effect during the American occupation with extremely cheap wheat prices (compared to other choice). You can be damn sure without cheap American wheat, Ramen would have stayed as Chinese Soba
It's one of those things that make people uncomfortable because history is messy.
Ramen (and Japanese-style breads, among other dishes) were popularized during and after the American occupation, in which American wheat flooded the Japanese market in unprecedented quantities.
I’m Indian and don’t see any problems with all Indian being mushed together into a single place. Honestly that’s par for course even in india, pretty much most restaurants label themselves as “multi cuisine” and make 5 different genres of Indian and fusion food. The question is if they’re still true to heart and make it taste good.
Not at all. In India, a Punjabi restaurant won't sell dosas and vice versa. Cuisines are incredibly local and the recipes change wildly depending on where you eat.
The only exception is 'mom and pops veg restaurant' where the dishes are a Hodge podge of everything they can make. But these 'vanilla' dishes are usually there to pander to the customer and subpar. Their best dishes are usually the local speciality.
Another exception is national chains like Haldirams, which make 'mediocre everything' and should not be a yardstick for anything indian. (Nothing against haldirams. Their Santra barfi is the best in the world as long as you buy it in the original nagpur location. They also run a few one-off speciality restaurants in Nagpur, which are quite good. But their national chain is meh)
The sub-cuizinization of Indian food is already happening in the US. Godavari is an exclusively Udipi chain. Annapurna? in SJ and Kathakali in Seattle are top tier maharashtrian and Keralite restaurants. You now have Kathi and chat places with 1 page menus and cuisines from neighboring countries (Bangladeshi, Nepali, Srilankan) are finally being recognized as distinct.
As a person for whom food is primary hobby, the idea that Indian or Chinese food gets put under one umbrella makes me rather annoyed. It does a disservice to the culture of civilizational behemoths.
Assuming you're in tech, just ask any Indian coworker. They probably know the best ones. Be clear in wanting to eat non-white-people Indian food and specify the region. Usually finding an Indian from that region is ideal.
Truth is, that you probably want to get invited to an Indian potluck. Apart from Punjabi and street food, most other Indian cuisines do not have a well developed restaurant culture. So, the most authentic food is often home style cooking. With no offense to 2nd generation Indian-Americans, it is the 1st generation immigrants who will recreate their regional cuisine most faithfully.
I don't know many bay area restaurants, since I don't reside there. I've visited once, that's it.
Some regional cuisines to check out:
* Maharashtrian / Mumbai - The Vadapav & Misal are iconic, but there is a lot more to this. Stir fried legumes (matki) is another personal favorite.
* Konkan - Saltwater seafood heavy. My favorite are the coconut marinated crustacean preparations. Bombil (snakefish) is my comfort food, but near impossible to source in the US.
* Indo-chinese - Inchin's Bamboo Garden is a reliable chain. Really interesting cultural exchange. Chili Paneer, Chicken Machurian and Szechuan (that is the cultural correct & technically incorrect spelling for Sichuan) rice go great together.
* Chaat - An explosion of flavors. Every region does it differently, but Mumbai (Bombay) is the only one that does it right. Usually a combination of heterogeneously mixed chutneys and textures. Sweet with Spicy. Yogurty and crispy. The most delightful of Indian cuisines. (sorry Delhi, you're second. Some other places put carrot in their chat, and I hope those heathens marry people who order their steak well done)
* Kerala / Malabar - Parotta, Appam and goat curries are my favorite. Chili Beef is probably India's most iconic beef dish.
* Mughlai - Not Punjabi. Real Mughlai food takes a clay oven and charcoal. It also takes a lot of human effort and time. Most Indian places in the US cut corners. A perfect Biryani is epitomizes this cuisine, but finding the right Biryani place is an active challenge. Kababs and grilled tikka are their most visible, but a rabdi-shahi tukda is the most opulent version of a tres-leches cake that you can imagine. (sort of)
* Nepali - Not Indian, but I LOVE their momos (dumplings). Ironically, Nepali restaurant food is the closest thing to authentic homestyle food I've had in the US. They seem to care less about making the traditional british-american dishes and their cooking seems more rooted in how 'mom used to make it'.
This only starches the surface of the many cuisines that India has to offer. But, it's an HN comment not a blog post. (I just got an idea for a blog post series )
so I agree with you on the Punjabi food, but there's some commonalities that I've found people enjoy between different regions of south asia. Friends from Pakistan that had never been to a Sri Lankan restaurant before very much enjoyed the dosa places we went to, and the authentic spicy (4 out of 5 on a spicy level?) dosa fillings were similar in many ways to some of the spicier pakistani foods...
The core culinary approach and ethos is identical across the subcontinent. I'd say it extends as far as Eastern Africa, Bhutan, Malaysia and Thailand. (not Vietnam tho)
It is the core approach to cooking. I would contrast it with Latin (French, Spanish, Italian) cooking.
The idea with Latin cooking, is to get the highest quality ingredients that go together really well. It is about a small set of ingredients that play-off-of each other to highlight the strengths of each. The musical analogy, would be a 3 piece band, where you can hear every instrument.
Indian cooking is about a feeling of oneness, derived from the combination of many. 30 different ingredients come together to become 1 flavor that is its own thing. The individual disappears in favor of the creation of a new whole. The musical analogy here, would be a big orchestral composition. You never pick out the individual instruments. Yet, it evokes a single emotion and a singular atmosphere. Indian & similar cooking starts with incredibly complex base ingredients. My family's chilli powder recipe contains 8 different types of chillies and a total of 37 ingredients. This powder goes on to become 1 of a dozen spices that form the flavor base of the final dish. The whole doesn't taste of the ingredients, by design. Xiaoxing wine or Sambal Olek are similar complex base ingredients in the other cultures I mention.
You have to approach each style from a completely different mental state. Having started cooking only once I moved to the US, I became a pretty good western cook, but I could never figure out how to cook Indian food. It is only after about 4 years, that I realized that you can't approach Indian cooking from a western perspective. I now understand why my mom used vague instructions and cues instead of a rigid recipe. I am still a much better western cook than an Indian one, but that's fine cuz I just get my Indian friends here to cook their mom's recipes for me.
Are you saying that the commonality between the cuisine is the level of heat in the dish? That's like saying Irish food is as spicy as Swedish food so they are pretty similar.
I’m talking about the reality in a place like Chennai India. Among restaurants that serve Indian food here the majority label themselves “multi cuisine” meaning you will find south, north and indo Chinese dishes in all of them. They’re definitely not bad. I wouldn’t necessarily go there for the best rumali roti in town but they’re good stuff anyway.
Other than Punjabi and chaat no other Indian sub cuisine gets too many special restaurants at least here.
I’m not saying that this is the best way. I prefer specialized restaurants as well, but Foreign folk get introduced to ethnic food in steps and step 1 is a compression of an entire nations diversity into a single menu. Ones only hope is they do it a decent service. This will naturally let people pursue specialized cuisines from there as is happening with Chinese cuisine in most big metropoles in the US and I’m sure will happen with Indian over time as well.
Strangely enough there were tribes that refused to eat the same foodstuff as their neighboring tribes. People are funny about how they differentiate themselves from others.
The Californian Native Americans prided themselves on being fit and not eating fatty foods, subsisting off acorns and wild grasses, where as the Pacific northwestern natives threw fat feasts known as potlatch.
The notion that there’s a common indigenous cuisine from the Americas is of course untenable. But there’s a commonality of cultural experience and history that binds a lot of native people and peoples together in a way that’s important. And may be more important than the particular fare offered at a particular restaurant.
I welcome regional native restaurants too, but I also welcome solidarity among
BIPOC and think that deserves celebration as well.
Doesn't the commonality only really go back to the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s and onwards? Everything I read would suggest that before then, the different cultural groupings across north America would not have really seen themselves as particularly connected to each other, certainly not across large distances.
If that's true (and I don't know if it is), then celebrating the commonality doesn't seem quite so obvious a thing to do.
On the one hand, it would be an incredible experience to eat what the natives ate.
On the other hand, what they ate was tied up with the rest of their culture, especially hunting, gathering, and farming it themselves. And Professor You're-Nothing-But-Disease-Vectors-To-Me (also recently featured on Hackernews) had an interesting point about the commodification and commercialization of that which was sacred to Native Americans (talking about tobacco, not food). So maybe Native American restaurants should be not a thing. Maybe they will do nothing but corrupt the meaning food has in their society.
I feel like Native American culture and people are almost unknown to most Americans.
“Let’s not do that out of respect.” seems distantly/ unintentionally isolating and hiding a whole people / cultures out of fear of getting something wrong.
It's hard for it to be unknown, as we have so many place names from Native languages. Around here, we have Snohomish, Skycomish, Issaquah, Duwamish, Sequim, Tacoma and even Seattle. Many, many words in American English came from Native tongues.
It's a legitimate concern. It will inevitably lead to some amount of "museum-ification"... It's ultimately up to the restauranteer, they will have to decide for themselves if preserving a sense of reverence towards their culture and its food is worth accepting the opportunity cost of not running such a business.
They have casinos now though. Also food (in my view) is shared heritage of humanity. It's never been static, diets change and we eat the best thing we have at the time. Including native peoples. I'm not sure food is a sacred tradition no one can emulate. Unless it's really not tasty then I'm ok leaving it as a sacred tradition in which I won't participate.
To me there’s a big difference between mass commercialization of American Indian foods and having more American Indian restaurants.
I don’t think anyone thinks having a “Panda Express but for Indian food instead of Chinese” is a good idea. But if there’s a demand for Indian food, or if someone can create that demand, it’s a great opportunity for Indians to go and create some successful restaurants. Of course, someone has to figure out what exactly it is you serve at those restaurants. There’s been some work to define that on the fine dining end, which ends up looking like creative dishes that use indigenous ingredients, and on the diner/dive end of things, which is pretty much fry bread tacos and chili. When it comes to that middle zone, it’s hard to define something that’s both authentic and has good marketing. You can make shit up and do something along the lines of Mitsitam’s chocolate seared wild boar (listed as being from the “northern woodlands”, a region where chocolate does not grow) or you can serve actual Indian food like fry bread tacos, which is just going to remind all your white patrons that Indians mostly live in ghettos with little access to healthy food. I think it’s going to take some smart chefs to create menus that both market well and have genuine ties to American Indian cultures.
I think there’s also room for Indian-owned companies to dominate the cured meats market. Any Indian company in that space would have a great story to tell around their product. There’s no reason people should be buying Jack Links beef sticks and not what would essentially be the same product but with American Indian ownership and branding.
Another vouch for Salmon and Bannock.
Mr. Bannock is a North Vancouver food truck, often does some interesting fusion things.
Kukum Kitchen in Toronto seems to have closed over the pandemic, but I previously enjoyed their food, and their website is still up - I hope they are able to reopen.
Salmon and Bannock was on my very short must-do list when I visited Vancouver (bonus: it's near a construction site for the new Broadway subway line). It's more of an indigenous-inspired fusion menu sourced from indigenous-owned suppliers, but that pretty much matches the wider picture. The only cultures that are not dynamic and adaptive are dead cultures.
I would go there again. Book a table in advance, they only have 4 of them.
I took a class freshman year on ethnology of native American tribes.
At one point the professor was talking about Athabaskan tribes and what they ate. Pretty much all animal, especially during winter.
So I asked him how that worked, because according to health authorities we were supposed to be eating 5 fruits and vegetables a day. His response was they ate a lot of part that we don't usually eat from animals in modern times. Organ meats and even the contents of the stomach. Which presumably covered what was nutritionally needed.
Not just that. Its the fact that much nutrition breaks down in a short period of time. If you eat it fresh, you can salvage the required vitamins and nutrients before it goes away
This is also the case of the Native American in the far north AKA Eskimos, where their diet consisted largely on Seafood protein. They would eat a lot of the Bissell route to get important trace nutrients that were necessary in their protein-rich diet.
It’s hard to really envision what any “authentic” American Indian ethnic cuisine would look like.
Most of what people ate prior to modernization was really, really gross by the standards of modern restaurants because decisions were driven by limited ingredients and limited fuel. Most of what anyone ate at that time was boiled and, outside of regions with easy access to spices, unseasoned. When the rest of the world was developing modern food cultures, American Indians were being subjugated and, later, forcibly assimilated by American colonizers. The only really good recent food invention from American Indian cultures has been fry bread which, while delicious, lacks something in sophistication. There are lots of good indigenous mesoamerican dishes but they’ve been assimilated into mainstream Mexican cuisine. No one thinks of chili verde as a “Native American food.”
Look at Wikipedia’s article “Indigenous cuisine of the Americas”. How many of this dishes under the North America subheading would you actually want to eat? Probably fry bread, maybe fish or meat jerky or pemmican, and definitely maple taffy.
Everything else is either an ingredient or not very good. I have tried Jonnycakes and they are a step down from cornbread. My mom talks about occasionally eating “mush” (acorn porridge, which would have been called t’epna by her grandparents) as a kid. She describes it as “pretty bad.” Everyone in her family far preferred the version of the dish that was invented in the 20th century, “Frito mush,” which is pretty much Frito pie but with soggy Fritos.
What you’re left with is modern attempts to make new dishes featuring the ingredients pre-assimilation American Indians were using. Mitsitam in DC is doing this, and I like their food (or, at least, liked - I haven’t been there in years and reviewers say it’s gone down hill). It’s stuff like “Indian tacos”, “seared boar”, and “salmon chowder.” The only thing there any Indians I know would eat day-to-day is Indian tacos, and I think there are literally no ingredients in those which are native to America except maybe some of the spices in the seasoning (they are regular Tex-mex tacos, with ground beef and the packets of seasoning, but made on fry bread instead of tortillas). I think this is probably the right way to go about doing American Indian cuisine, but it’s just not going to be recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine in the way that Italian and Chinese cuisines are. Instead, it’s going to look like traditional ingredients prepared with modern American and occasionally modern Mexican cooking techniques. Without knowledge of the history, that seems like it’s “inauthentic” or “westernized”, but really it’s all we’ve got. Well, that and frybread.
Sean Sherman (co-author of the sioux chef's indigenous kitchen) has a good talk on the history and their modern attempts here: https://vimeo.com/463609426
Native Americans were eating boiled potatoes and potatoes in stew (and maybe roasted or baked potatoes). There was no dairy to make mashed potatoes and no abundance of cooking oil to make fried potatoes. Everything else comes after colonization.
Americans were also eating flint corn and sweet corn (although it was much less sweet than modern sweet corn). Flour corn was mesoamerican and dent corn was made by colonizers. So you’d get corn in boiled and in stews and maybe roasted, and you’d get jonnycakes (although they wouldn’t be like modern jonnycakes), but most of the corn dishes we eat today are based off of mesoamerican cuisine (save for cornbread, which is probably inspired by Jonnycakes but is made with dent corn as well as wheat flour and chemical leavening).
So we have a lot of American Indian ingredients and even some dishes inspired by American Indian dishes, but nothing which is culturally distinct as American Indian food.
"dishes" require some form of transmission - people teaching their children how to make them, writing down recipes.
It's tough to maintain that continuity when writing is expensive or nonexistent, and the people who survived contact with Europeans were repeatedly forcibly resettled in different parts of the continent.
Corn/potatoes are an ingredient, they make a relatively bland restaurant dish with just what native flavoring you could add. We're now also expanding to the even larger definition of "Native American" to refer to groups of people's over 2 continents e.g. modern potatoes were the ones from Chile directly not the descendents that spread north naturally. Corn was a lot more like the corn of today but again as an ingredient not a dish (think of the number of corn dishes that start with butter for example).
> The only really good recent food invention from American Indian cultures has been fry bread which, while delicious, lacks something in sophistication.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the origin of frybread is steeped in subjugation as well. Indians were forced off of productive land, and were given flour and lard to survive on. Frybread is basically what you can make out of that.
I’m not really Indian myself (didn’t grow up in the culture/my mother’s tribe) so I don’t think it’s my place to say whether it’s a good idea to include it in modern American Indian cuisine.
I will say that other oppressed groups have successfully integrated foods that came out of hardship into their cuisines - think matzah and components of Soul Food.
I wouldn't quite put matzah in the same boat as "food that came out of hardship", as the exodus is a founding myth & even if partially based on true events these events happened about 3500 years ago. Furthermore Jews today don't consider it as a tragedy (unlike e.g. the more recent and much more historical events commemorated by Tisha B'av).
I read an article recently about Native American cuisine, and from what I gathered from that, Native Americans themselves are incredibly divided as to whether or not to include frybread in these kind of restaurants for that reason.
From what I've heard, even a lot of the modern "Mexican" dishes are heavily influenced by contributions from the Conquistadors and others. Citrus, cilantro, livestock, dairy, rice, onions... none of these are native to the Americas.
Authenticity in food from any culture is always dicey because of heterogeneity and change over time. It doesn't matter if you're talking about Native American/American Indian cuisine, German, Japanese, or whatever. So in that sense I think authenticity culinarily speaking is a red herring, something that doesn't exist.
What does exist is inspiration from traditions and ingredients, and I think that certainly applies. Even if it might be foolish to pursue what constitutes an "authentic" Native American cuisine, it's probably worthwhile and a good idea to think about what we want from Native American cuisine, or where we want it to go, where Native Americans want it to go. If Native American chefs are experimenting and bringing something new, that's Native American cuisine.
Ingredients are a powerful thing, too. There is a lot of convergence between ecological conservation and researching and exploring Native American ingredients, in the sense that there are many forgotten and useful crops and food sources to be explored and maybe developed. Pawpaws are one example that's received attention, one of many possibilities. The promise there is increasing dietary and agricultural diversity, to say the least of improving our understanding of history and anthropology.
Yaupon is another interesting example in this regard. The scientific name for this plant reflects European American ignorance about it and its use, an ignorance that drastically affected assumptions about it until relatively recently. It's basically a weed, but one that could be an agricultural crop like tea or coffee, or -- to make a more direct comparison, being botanically closely related -- mate.
I guess at some level I don't disagree with you, but maybe see authenticity as a moot point at some level? I don't care what's "recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine" because that's often inaccurate, outdated, or unmeaningful anyway. Inspiration and knowledge from Native American foods of the past, however it's used in the present, seems like a win-win to me.
> Instead, it’s going to look like traditional ingredients prepared with modern American and occasionally modern Mexican cooking techniques. Without knowledge of the history, that seems like it’s “inauthentic” or “westernized”, but really it’s all we’ve got.
mixing up and confusing south-of-the-border indigenous culture with 'hispanic' and north-of-the-border indigenous culture as 'native american' probably doesn't help this much, dishes aside
Wouldn't the same apply to Hawaii? Which it would be hard to argue they don't have ethnic cuisine.
This makes me curious. At what point does a culture start to to mature it's "cuisine"? Is it driven by commerce? Can family cooking alone drive cuisine forward?
>> Everything else is either an ingredient or not very good. I have tried Jonnycakes and they are a step down from cornbread.
> Wouldn't the same apply to Hawaii? Which it would be hard to argue they don't have ethnic cuisine.
Not to say the GP is right, but I was in Hawaii a few years ago and the native food wasn't especially common. IIRC, there were only a few places that served poi, which used to be the staple food, and I had to specially seek it out. Plate lunches were everywhere by comparison.
Hawaiians are different than North American Indians, since, IIRC, the Hawaiians remained independent until much more recently. It's plausible that more of their traditions survived into modern times where preservation of such traditions seems to be a higher priority.
I'm distantly Native and have had a mild interest in Native foods for a while.
Sadly it seems most of the Native pre-Colombian foodways are long gone (in the U.S. at least). There's some wonderful exceptions though, lots of Tex-Mex style foods are direct descendants of native foods. The foods that are kept as Native foods in many areas are often created out of the hardships that came post-Colombian, and often post resettlement.
For example, I spent some time in the Navajo nation and one of the main traditional foods is Frybread -- a tradition that started after resettlement when lard and flour were brought in by the U.S. government to fend off starvation -- and is common on other reservations as well. There's some decent hearty food that's since been built off of fry bread. Is it "Native food?" Or is it food made by Native Americans, who often are trying to modernize folkways and tap into locally available ingredients?
To be honest, pretty much everywhere is post-Colombian now. You can get tomatoes, peppers, corn, squash, and potatoes (among other things) pretty much anywhere on the planet. And the converse is true, as the mass of Euro-Asian-African foodways have spread across the Americas just as well.
Some videos of native foods from the Cherokee people, a tribe that's been putting tremendous efforts into preserving their language, and culture. A few people have even been identified as Cherokee national treasures for their traditional food knowledge.
You would be interested in following Chef Karlos Baca (Diné) who is also generally interested in decolonization of food and has some really interesting things he puts
together.
Honestly, I think frybread is something that Native Americans would do well to forget and cut largely from their diet, aside from special occasions.
It's basically a funnel cake, with all the unhealthy implications. I would no more associate funnel cakes with respect-worthy Native American food than I would with good American food.
At best it's a recent implanted/necessity food item that has provides some vague connection with difficult times and history but is not a true cultural heritage, and at worst it keeps people now in obesity and unhealthy diets -- and Native Americans could use all the cultural help to free themselves of those problems.
Flame away as insensitive, but these are realities.
I don't know that I disagree. It tastes great, makes an excellent pizza base, but may be one of the densest forms of calories you can make from scratch. A few people are pushing to go back to a more tortilla style way of cooking. But the perception that "this is our food and needs to be preserved as part of our identity" is going to be hard to shake.
> To be honest, pretty much everywhere is post-Colombian now.
Not only that. Post-Colombian food _is_ an integral part of many countries’ cuisine now.
Italian food without tomatoes is nigh unthinkable. And potatoes form the base for so, so many countries.
There are other influences too. The aubergine was first cultivated in South and East Asia but today it’s a staple in the Mediterranean and Middle East as well.
At some point one has to stop thinking of indigenous food sources as the only way to form a countries’ cuisine.
It is also interesting to realise just how little time has to pass in order to make a practice inseparable from a people. Some aspects of Italian coffee culture are quite recent, for example.
Yes. To suggest otherwise is to insist that cuisine (or any other tradition) must be somehow frozen at a specific point in history in order to be "authentic".
Even if that is an acceptable assertion, what would be that specific point? Does a British recipe have to predate the Romans to be traditional?
not only that, but pizza comes from a long tradition in many countries of making foods using bread that double as a plate! It's certainly come a long way.
I just discovered "pide" [0] from a local restaurant which is roughly the same thing from the next region over.
There's a neat pattern around the eastern Mediterranean where lots of cultures eat roughly the same foods (because they have been exchanging cultural concepts along with their trade goods and humans for millennia) but because of parallel historical tensions, each culture is vitriolically convinced that they invented their foods.
Thanks to your post, I just discovered that something I always requested my grandmother to make was called "frybread".
Here in Argentina we call it "tortas fritas", and it's been consumed since forever here and in Chile, where it's known as "sopaipillas". I don't know about countries to the north, but if it's on the other hemisphere, it would make sense it's known throughout the entire American continent.
In Texas they're called Sopapillas and standard issue tex-mex dessert. It' usually served warm, dusted with sugar, and with a side of honey for dipping. I don't think i've ever had them any other way, i guess it's hard to improve on perfection.
Cultures evolve, and that includes their cuisines. In general, I think the only sensible approach is to track that - so if a given culture grows to recognize something as their signature dish, and so do their neighbors, then it is indeed theirs, regardless of its origin and history. Which means that frybread is, indeed, a Native American dish.
There's a new Native American restaurant in Oakland called Wahpepah’s Kitchen - next to the Fruitvale BART station - and it's absolutely fantastic. Well worth a special trip.
Indian Pueblo Kitchen
Located inside the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
2401 12th St NW Albuquerque, NM 87104
505-724-3510
https://indianpueblokitchen.org/
Here in Oakland we have Cafe Ohlone (https://www.makamham.com/cafeohlone) which has been featured in the New York Times and I can personally attest creates a Michelin-worthy dining experience. On the fusion side, Wahpepah's Kitchen (https://wahpepahskitchen.com/seasonal-restaurant-menu) in Fruitvale offers blue corn waffles, sweet potato tostadas and bison meatballs. I haven't been to it yet but it's on my shortlist.
There's a good deal of interest in reviving first people's cuisine and culture. I'm grateful to live in a community that where the people have kept their history alive, despite centuries of discrimination (including involuntary disbanding of the tribe by congress: https://www.dailycal.org/2021/11/05/political-erasure-of-the...)
I make it a point to go to the one in DC @ the National Museum of the American Indian every year when I play tourist for a day. Another great resource that I've found on post Eastern Agricultural Complex foodways is Buffalo Bird Woman's book written in 1917, "Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indian". It explains the growing, harvesting, preparation, and storage techniques of their main crops. Very interesting book & I would highly recommend it: https://archive.org/details/agricultureofhid02wils/page/n9/m...
Native American restaurants that serve anything close to local traditional foods are incredibly difficult to find.
Few years back I spent many days driving through Arizona and New Mexico, including long stretches through Apache, Hopi, Kaibab Paiute, Navajo, and Zuni lands. Sure, there are places to eat in Second Mesa, Window Rock, and the other points along the way. But even completely ignoring Denny's and Subways kind of options and going out of my way to find more traditional options, none of the restaurants I found seemed at all local cuisine. A few food items were labeled "Indian X" or "<tribe> Y" but they lied. Even those were more likely to contain ground beef, sour cream, melted cheese, and other obviously non-traditional ingredients you could just as easily find at a Denny's in Nashua, NH. No matter how aggressively you label them "Navajo Pancakes," if they're just buttermilk pancakes, that's missing the point. Mutton stew, cornbreads, squash, or anything else that might have been out of the American mainstream? Nada. None to be found.
In my experience, most of the places you find when driving through the desert southwest are focusing on survival. You're not going to find much that doesn't appeal to the widest audience possible at the lowest cost possible.
I think this may have to do with the availability, price, and restrictions around food safety. Most of those places are out in the middle of nowhere, have an audience that cannot afford $20 for unusual meat, and if they wanted to hunt elk to have on the menu, they would run a large risk if the meat was tainted or had prions or whatnot.
Usually the food they cook is what the tribe does eat. Things have just changed over time.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadMy partner has been on a Navajo Indian reservation and some of the food was good but most was sort of bland. Sadly, after being driven to these reservations one of the staple foods in the diet became fry bread. It is not the healthiest.
Also, it is hard to have a restaurant selling traditional foods like squash when many tribes don’t grow it and eat it themselves, because well, it doesn’t grow in the desert.
But ya, can second, Fry Bread and really fatty mutton seem to be staples. Plus whatever everyone else eats (Burger King, lunchables and Gas Station Hot Dogs).
My theory is native squash just doesn't taste that good. Sort of like how Anglos switched from boiled parsnips (have you ever eaten that? I haven't) in 1200AD to French Fries and Pizza now.
I went to a Navajo buffet once. They did have a little traditional food (mutton, fry bread) but most was just mashed potatoes and stuff you might find at Golden Corral. The native stuff was not very tasty at all as I recall, (this was years ago) and I never went back.
They should be roasted, preferably in duck fat, and are delicious :)
I guess you could call that boiling of a sort.
Canada produces 5000 tons of parsnips a year! At least as of 2015 or so.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/parsnip
There's lots of things you can do with parsnips...
...I guess that's about all.I would guess parsnips (I don't know about boiled (only) though! Meh) are at least as common here in the UK as frites, as distinct from chips to any Briton.
But then squash (off the top of my head not sure if it'd be NM's export at any time of year though) and mashed potatoes (and to a lesser extent mutton, much more lamb) are perfectly popular here too, so not really sure what my point is.
But as a fun fact, the three sisters were often grown dryland on as little as a single rainstorm in pre-contact times. Some of those areas average around 40mm of rain a year.
I haven't been yet but I'd like to try it sometime.
https://goo.gl/maps/id2R9byxQcm57uK7A
So, let regional native american restaurants bloom!
The real issue is that there's been very little widespread systematization of "traditional" indigenous cookery. We've started seeing that over the past few decades through the efforts of people like Lois Frank and many, many others, but it's a process.
Btw, If anyone knows any pre-Columbian restaurants for Italian and Indian cuisines, let me know.
Yes and this nearly amorphous identity is a tragedy that needs unbundling. Scratch the surface and none of it makes sense for any single pre-colonial culture on the whole continent.
There are like 300 recognized distinct pre-colonial cultures here at the US federal level, most of which were grandfathered in before a cutoff for the reservation system and additional ones each requiring an act of Congress for recognition, even more at the state level, and even more vying for recognition as they are just noticing and regrouping after ages of separation, in a combination of forced separation or lineage dilution.
> There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food. Frybreads are a good example since they come directly from the reservation system and the typical ingredients provided by the government for cheap calories: flour, beans, oil, "cheese", and some form of meat, sugar, etc. Despite the common name, it's a shared culinary heritage for many tribes in the US.
At least this shared identity wasn't built over unmarked graves for children like elsewhere. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mas...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/world/canada/mass-graves-...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-grav...
Don't kid yourself; the American boarding schools for the Native Americans weren't much better than the Canadian ones, were they any better to begin with. In general, I'd be hard-pressed to declare Canada any better or worse in its treatment of indigenous peoples than the US was--they were both pretty appalling.
It was....and not just children's graves, either.
Maybe for you. I, for one, will never accept rice in a burrito.
Things definitely got better, you can go pretty much anywhere in the US and get real salsa now - thank you taco bell for educating people. Today I can buy hatch green chilis in the ethnic isle of most grocery stores in NYC (and you can always order them from Amazon or Walmart). In the northeast poblano peppers are in all the Mexican-ish dishes - huge upgrade from the pickled jalapeños and very close to the hatch chilies I grew up with. Some of the stuff I get at the taco trucks is even more exotic and really wonderful - I’m a big fan of Oaxacan cheese, wish I had discovered that years ago.
The gourmet scene probably didn't exist much before the rise of agriculture.
As the market grows it kind of gets undone - this is most obvious in America with maybe Japanese restaurants? Sushi, ramen, bbq are often entirely different restaurants. Except that, as the fusion represents a new cuisine, it can stick around on its own
I may be mistaken, but Ramen (as noodles in broth with toppings) strikes me as a fairly obvious dish once you have a kind of noodle and broth.
Ramen specifically uses wheat noodles. "Modern Japanese Ramen" took Chinese recipes that used wheat noddles and used them to great effect during the American occupation with extremely cheap wheat prices (compared to other choice). You can be damn sure without cheap American wheat, Ramen would have stayed as Chinese Soba
It's one of those things that make people uncomfortable because history is messy.
So your history lesson isn't uncomfortable but wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_the_Occupation_of_Japa...
Ramen is newer, but definitely is something that the Japanese care about and identify with.
The only exception is 'mom and pops veg restaurant' where the dishes are a Hodge podge of everything they can make. But these 'vanilla' dishes are usually there to pander to the customer and subpar. Their best dishes are usually the local speciality.
Another exception is national chains like Haldirams, which make 'mediocre everything' and should not be a yardstick for anything indian. (Nothing against haldirams. Their Santra barfi is the best in the world as long as you buy it in the original nagpur location. They also run a few one-off speciality restaurants in Nagpur, which are quite good. But their national chain is meh)
The sub-cuizinization of Indian food is already happening in the US. Godavari is an exclusively Udipi chain. Annapurna? in SJ and Kathakali in Seattle are top tier maharashtrian and Keralite restaurants. You now have Kathi and chat places with 1 page menus and cuisines from neighboring countries (Bangladeshi, Nepali, Srilankan) are finally being recognized as distinct.
As a person for whom food is primary hobby, the idea that Indian or Chinese food gets put under one umbrella makes me rather annoyed. It does a disservice to the culture of civilizational behemoths.
Truth is, that you probably want to get invited to an Indian potluck. Apart from Punjabi and street food, most other Indian cuisines do not have a well developed restaurant culture. So, the most authentic food is often home style cooking. With no offense to 2nd generation Indian-Americans, it is the 1st generation immigrants who will recreate their regional cuisine most faithfully.
I don't know many bay area restaurants, since I don't reside there. I've visited once, that's it.
Some regional cuisines to check out:
* Maharashtrian / Mumbai - The Vadapav & Misal are iconic, but there is a lot more to this. Stir fried legumes (matki) is another personal favorite.
* Konkan - Saltwater seafood heavy. My favorite are the coconut marinated crustacean preparations. Bombil (snakefish) is my comfort food, but near impossible to source in the US.
* Indo-chinese - Inchin's Bamboo Garden is a reliable chain. Really interesting cultural exchange. Chili Paneer, Chicken Machurian and Szechuan (that is the cultural correct & technically incorrect spelling for Sichuan) rice go great together.
* Chaat - An explosion of flavors. Every region does it differently, but Mumbai (Bombay) is the only one that does it right. Usually a combination of heterogeneously mixed chutneys and textures. Sweet with Spicy. Yogurty and crispy. The most delightful of Indian cuisines. (sorry Delhi, you're second. Some other places put carrot in their chat, and I hope those heathens marry people who order their steak well done)
* Kerala / Malabar - Parotta, Appam and goat curries are my favorite. Chili Beef is probably India's most iconic beef dish.
* Mughlai - Not Punjabi. Real Mughlai food takes a clay oven and charcoal. It also takes a lot of human effort and time. Most Indian places in the US cut corners. A perfect Biryani is epitomizes this cuisine, but finding the right Biryani place is an active challenge. Kababs and grilled tikka are their most visible, but a rabdi-shahi tukda is the most opulent version of a tres-leches cake that you can imagine. (sort of)
* Nepali - Not Indian, but I LOVE their momos (dumplings). Ironically, Nepali restaurant food is the closest thing to authentic homestyle food I've had in the US. They seem to care less about making the traditional british-american dishes and their cooking seems more rooted in how 'mom used to make it'.
This only starches the surface of the many cuisines that India has to offer. But, it's an HN comment not a blog post. (I just got an idea for a blog post series )
The core culinary approach and ethos is identical across the subcontinent. I'd say it extends as far as Eastern Africa, Bhutan, Malaysia and Thailand. (not Vietnam tho)
The idea with Latin cooking, is to get the highest quality ingredients that go together really well. It is about a small set of ingredients that play-off-of each other to highlight the strengths of each. The musical analogy, would be a 3 piece band, where you can hear every instrument.
Indian cooking is about a feeling of oneness, derived from the combination of many. 30 different ingredients come together to become 1 flavor that is its own thing. The individual disappears in favor of the creation of a new whole. The musical analogy here, would be a big orchestral composition. You never pick out the individual instruments. Yet, it evokes a single emotion and a singular atmosphere. Indian & similar cooking starts with incredibly complex base ingredients. My family's chilli powder recipe contains 8 different types of chillies and a total of 37 ingredients. This powder goes on to become 1 of a dozen spices that form the flavor base of the final dish. The whole doesn't taste of the ingredients, by design. Xiaoxing wine or Sambal Olek are similar complex base ingredients in the other cultures I mention.
You have to approach each style from a completely different mental state. Having started cooking only once I moved to the US, I became a pretty good western cook, but I could never figure out how to cook Indian food. It is only after about 4 years, that I realized that you can't approach Indian cooking from a western perspective. I now understand why my mom used vague instructions and cues instead of a rigid recipe. I am still a much better western cook than an Indian one, but that's fine cuz I just get my Indian friends here to cook their mom's recipes for me.
Other than Punjabi and chaat no other Indian sub cuisine gets too many special restaurants at least here.
I’m not saying that this is the best way. I prefer specialized restaurants as well, but Foreign folk get introduced to ethnic food in steps and step 1 is a compression of an entire nations diversity into a single menu. Ones only hope is they do it a decent service. This will naturally let people pursue specialized cuisines from there as is happening with Chinese cuisine in most big metropoles in the US and I’m sure will happen with Indian over time as well.
The Californian Native Americans prided themselves on being fit and not eating fatty foods, subsisting off acorns and wild grasses, where as the Pacific northwestern natives threw fat feasts known as potlatch.
These would be wildly different restaurants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashrut
I welcome regional native restaurants too, but I also welcome solidarity among BIPOC and think that deserves celebration as well.
If that's true (and I don't know if it is), then celebrating the commonality doesn't seem quite so obvious a thing to do.
Definitely worth a visit if you are in the greater Phoenix area.
On the one hand, it would be an incredible experience to eat what the natives ate.
On the other hand, what they ate was tied up with the rest of their culture, especially hunting, gathering, and farming it themselves. And Professor You're-Nothing-But-Disease-Vectors-To-Me (also recently featured on Hackernews) had an interesting point about the commodification and commercialization of that which was sacred to Native Americans (talking about tobacco, not food). So maybe Native American restaurants should be not a thing. Maybe they will do nothing but corrupt the meaning food has in their society.
“Let’s not do that out of respect.” seems distantly/ unintentionally isolating and hiding a whole people / cultures out of fear of getting something wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_ind...
"or describe items of Native American or First Nations life and culture"
I don’t think anyone thinks having a “Panda Express but for Indian food instead of Chinese” is a good idea. But if there’s a demand for Indian food, or if someone can create that demand, it’s a great opportunity for Indians to go and create some successful restaurants. Of course, someone has to figure out what exactly it is you serve at those restaurants. There’s been some work to define that on the fine dining end, which ends up looking like creative dishes that use indigenous ingredients, and on the diner/dive end of things, which is pretty much fry bread tacos and chili. When it comes to that middle zone, it’s hard to define something that’s both authentic and has good marketing. You can make shit up and do something along the lines of Mitsitam’s chocolate seared wild boar (listed as being from the “northern woodlands”, a region where chocolate does not grow) or you can serve actual Indian food like fry bread tacos, which is just going to remind all your white patrons that Indians mostly live in ghettos with little access to healthy food. I think it’s going to take some smart chefs to create menus that both market well and have genuine ties to American Indian cultures.
I think there’s also room for Indian-owned companies to dominate the cured meats market. Any Indian company in that space would have a great story to tell around their product. There’s no reason people should be buying Jack Links beef sticks and not what would essentially be the same product but with American Indian ownership and branding.
One thing they don't do is corrupt. There is not 100% "good" principle/attribute set against which all cultures have a clear yardstick.
It wasn’t until I moved that I realized that most Americans have more exposure to a long list of foreign cultures than Native Americans.
https://www.salmonandbannock.net/
The Yakama tribe in central Washington has a visitors center with a restaurant: https://www.visityakima.com/member-general.asp?ID=79
Kukum Kitchen in Toronto seems to have closed over the pandemic, but I previously enjoyed their food, and their website is still up - I hope they are able to reopen.
I would go there again. Book a table in advance, they only have 4 of them.
At one point the professor was talking about Athabaskan tribes and what they ate. Pretty much all animal, especially during winter.
So I asked him how that worked, because according to health authorities we were supposed to be eating 5 fruits and vegetables a day. His response was they ate a lot of part that we don't usually eat from animals in modern times. Organ meats and even the contents of the stomach. Which presumably covered what was nutritionally needed.
Most of what people ate prior to modernization was really, really gross by the standards of modern restaurants because decisions were driven by limited ingredients and limited fuel. Most of what anyone ate at that time was boiled and, outside of regions with easy access to spices, unseasoned. When the rest of the world was developing modern food cultures, American Indians were being subjugated and, later, forcibly assimilated by American colonizers. The only really good recent food invention from American Indian cultures has been fry bread which, while delicious, lacks something in sophistication. There are lots of good indigenous mesoamerican dishes but they’ve been assimilated into mainstream Mexican cuisine. No one thinks of chili verde as a “Native American food.”
Look at Wikipedia’s article “Indigenous cuisine of the Americas”. How many of this dishes under the North America subheading would you actually want to eat? Probably fry bread, maybe fish or meat jerky or pemmican, and definitely maple taffy.
Everything else is either an ingredient or not very good. I have tried Jonnycakes and they are a step down from cornbread. My mom talks about occasionally eating “mush” (acorn porridge, which would have been called t’epna by her grandparents) as a kid. She describes it as “pretty bad.” Everyone in her family far preferred the version of the dish that was invented in the 20th century, “Frito mush,” which is pretty much Frito pie but with soggy Fritos.
What you’re left with is modern attempts to make new dishes featuring the ingredients pre-assimilation American Indians were using. Mitsitam in DC is doing this, and I like their food (or, at least, liked - I haven’t been there in years and reviewers say it’s gone down hill). It’s stuff like “Indian tacos”, “seared boar”, and “salmon chowder.” The only thing there any Indians I know would eat day-to-day is Indian tacos, and I think there are literally no ingredients in those which are native to America except maybe some of the spices in the seasoning (they are regular Tex-mex tacos, with ground beef and the packets of seasoning, but made on fry bread instead of tortillas). I think this is probably the right way to go about doing American Indian cuisine, but it’s just not going to be recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine in the way that Italian and Chinese cuisines are. Instead, it’s going to look like traditional ingredients prepared with modern American and occasionally modern Mexican cooking techniques. Without knowledge of the history, that seems like it’s “inauthentic” or “westernized”, but really it’s all we’ve got. Well, that and frybread.
Starting with the obvious - potatoes and corn.
Native Americans were eating boiled potatoes and potatoes in stew (and maybe roasted or baked potatoes). There was no dairy to make mashed potatoes and no abundance of cooking oil to make fried potatoes. Everything else comes after colonization.
Americans were also eating flint corn and sweet corn (although it was much less sweet than modern sweet corn). Flour corn was mesoamerican and dent corn was made by colonizers. So you’d get corn in boiled and in stews and maybe roasted, and you’d get jonnycakes (although they wouldn’t be like modern jonnycakes), but most of the corn dishes we eat today are based off of mesoamerican cuisine (save for cornbread, which is probably inspired by Jonnycakes but is made with dent corn as well as wheat flour and chemical leavening).
So we have a lot of American Indian ingredients and even some dishes inspired by American Indian dishes, but nothing which is culturally distinct as American Indian food.
It's tough to maintain that continuity when writing is expensive or nonexistent, and the people who survived contact with Europeans were repeatedly forcibly resettled in different parts of the continent.
I love Jonnycakes! I grew up on them though, which may be swaying my opinion.
As well as being lacking in nutrition.
I will say that other oppressed groups have successfully integrated foods that came out of hardship into their cuisines - think matzah and components of Soul Food.
And Al-pastor tacos are effectively Sharwarma kebabs introduced by Lebanese immigrants in the mid 20th century!
What does exist is inspiration from traditions and ingredients, and I think that certainly applies. Even if it might be foolish to pursue what constitutes an "authentic" Native American cuisine, it's probably worthwhile and a good idea to think about what we want from Native American cuisine, or where we want it to go, where Native Americans want it to go. If Native American chefs are experimenting and bringing something new, that's Native American cuisine.
Ingredients are a powerful thing, too. There is a lot of convergence between ecological conservation and researching and exploring Native American ingredients, in the sense that there are many forgotten and useful crops and food sources to be explored and maybe developed. Pawpaws are one example that's received attention, one of many possibilities. The promise there is increasing dietary and agricultural diversity, to say the least of improving our understanding of history and anthropology.
Yaupon is another interesting example in this regard. The scientific name for this plant reflects European American ignorance about it and its use, an ignorance that drastically affected assumptions about it until relatively recently. It's basically a weed, but one that could be an agricultural crop like tea or coffee, or -- to make a more direct comparison, being botanically closely related -- mate.
I guess at some level I don't disagree with you, but maybe see authenticity as a moot point at some level? I don't care what's "recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine" because that's often inaccurate, outdated, or unmeaningful anyway. Inspiration and knowledge from Native American foods of the past, however it's used in the present, seems like a win-win to me.
mixing up and confusing south-of-the-border indigenous culture with 'hispanic' and north-of-the-border indigenous culture as 'native american' probably doesn't help this much, dishes aside
This makes me curious. At what point does a culture start to to mature it's "cuisine"? Is it driven by commerce? Can family cooking alone drive cuisine forward?
> Wouldn't the same apply to Hawaii? Which it would be hard to argue they don't have ethnic cuisine.
Not to say the GP is right, but I was in Hawaii a few years ago and the native food wasn't especially common. IIRC, there were only a few places that served poi, which used to be the staple food, and I had to specially seek it out. Plate lunches were everywhere by comparison.
Hawaiians are different than North American Indians, since, IIRC, the Hawaiians remained independent until much more recently. It's plausible that more of their traditions survived into modern times where preservation of such traditions seems to be a higher priority.
(To the GP) Aren't Jonnycakes European?
Sadly it seems most of the Native pre-Colombian foodways are long gone (in the U.S. at least). There's some wonderful exceptions though, lots of Tex-Mex style foods are direct descendants of native foods. The foods that are kept as Native foods in many areas are often created out of the hardships that came post-Colombian, and often post resettlement.
For example, I spent some time in the Navajo nation and one of the main traditional foods is Frybread -- a tradition that started after resettlement when lard and flour were brought in by the U.S. government to fend off starvation -- and is common on other reservations as well. There's some decent hearty food that's since been built off of fry bread. Is it "Native food?" Or is it food made by Native Americans, who often are trying to modernize folkways and tap into locally available ingredients?
To be honest, pretty much everywhere is post-Colombian now. You can get tomatoes, peppers, corn, squash, and potatoes (among other things) pretty much anywhere on the planet. And the converse is true, as the mass of Euro-Asian-African foodways have spread across the Americas just as well.
Some videos of native foods from the Cherokee people, a tribe that's been putting tremendous efforts into preserving their language, and culture. A few people have even been identified as Cherokee national treasures for their traditional food knowledge.
https://youtu.be/GSBBEYtMPNU
https://youtu.be/kJyYYsEBUWM
https://youtu.be/dKO2UrWwOSw
https://youtu.be/o52BCTqrX_U
https://youtu.be/z_u54Vgv6Z0
https://youtu.be/orW1Gcy3otE
https://youtu.be/laV4uG-iBD4
It's basically a funnel cake, with all the unhealthy implications. I would no more associate funnel cakes with respect-worthy Native American food than I would with good American food.
At best it's a recent implanted/necessity food item that has provides some vague connection with difficult times and history but is not a true cultural heritage, and at worst it keeps people now in obesity and unhealthy diets -- and Native Americans could use all the cultural help to free themselves of those problems.
Flame away as insensitive, but these are realities.
while i agree, please eat a funnel cake if you've never had one before :) Preferably, at a county fair while waiting in line for a ride.
Not only that. Post-Colombian food _is_ an integral part of many countries’ cuisine now.
Italian food without tomatoes is nigh unthinkable. And potatoes form the base for so, so many countries.
There are other influences too. The aubergine was first cultivated in South and East Asia but today it’s a staple in the Mediterranean and Middle East as well.
At some point one has to stop thinking of indigenous food sources as the only way to form a countries’ cuisine.
It is also interesting to realise just how little time has to pass in order to make a practice inseparable from a people. Some aspects of Italian coffee culture are quite recent, for example.
Even if that is an acceptable assertion, what would be that specific point? Does a British recipe have to predate the Romans to be traditional?
So I understand the desire to rediscover pre-contact food.
Or so I would imagine. I know little about this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trencher_(tableware)
There's a neat pattern around the eastern Mediterranean where lots of cultures eat roughly the same foods (because they have been exchanging cultural concepts along with their trade goods and humans for millennia) but because of parallel historical tensions, each culture is vitriolically convinced that they invented their foods.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0%C3%A7li_Pide
Here in Argentina we call it "tortas fritas", and it's been consumed since forever here and in Chile, where it's known as "sopaipillas". I don't know about countries to the north, but if it's on the other hemisphere, it would make sense it's known throughout the entire American continent.
Be careful, though, the article can trigger an uncontrollable salivating and induce an urge to ravage the fridge.
Here: https://goo.gl/maps/732xKjHDUwQsWzcGA
There's a good deal of interest in reviving first people's cuisine and culture. I'm grateful to live in a community that where the people have kept their history alive, despite centuries of discrimination (including involuntary disbanding of the tribe by congress: https://www.dailycal.org/2021/11/05/political-erasure-of-the...)
Surely this is the Mexican/Aztec classic pozole?
Few years back I spent many days driving through Arizona and New Mexico, including long stretches through Apache, Hopi, Kaibab Paiute, Navajo, and Zuni lands. Sure, there are places to eat in Second Mesa, Window Rock, and the other points along the way. But even completely ignoring Denny's and Subways kind of options and going out of my way to find more traditional options, none of the restaurants I found seemed at all local cuisine. A few food items were labeled "Indian X" or "<tribe> Y" but they lied. Even those were more likely to contain ground beef, sour cream, melted cheese, and other obviously non-traditional ingredients you could just as easily find at a Denny's in Nashua, NH. No matter how aggressively you label them "Navajo Pancakes," if they're just buttermilk pancakes, that's missing the point. Mutton stew, cornbreads, squash, or anything else that might have been out of the American mainstream? Nada. None to be found.
Usually the food they cook is what the tribe does eat. Things have just changed over time.
Edit: pasted the wrong link. Correct: https://delawaretribe.org/product/lenape-indian-cooking/
Prior: https://delawaretribe.org/blog/2013/06/27/foods-eaten-by-the...
Some of the recipes use European or modern ingredients, some seemed older than that. It’s pretty interesting and very accessible.