Post by Okwes on Nov 29, 2005 12:16:57 GMT -5
Native Foods Nourish Again
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: November 23, 2005
www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/dining/23nati.html?pagewanted=1
Last week, Noland Johnson pulled the season's final crop of tepary
beans from the piece of desert he farms on the Tohono O'odham
Reservation, about 120 miles southwest of Tucson.
Reviving Recipes and Inventing New Ones
Forum: Cooking and Recipes
The beans look a little like a flattened black-eyed pea. The white
ones cook up creamy. The brown ones, which Mr. Johnson prefers, are
best simmered like pinto beans.
As late as the 1930's, Tohono O'odham farmers grew more than 1.5
million pounds a year and no one in the tribe had ever heard of
diabetes. By the time Mr. Johnson got into the game four years ago,
an elder would be lucky to find even a pound of the beans, and more
than half of the adults in the tribe had the kind of diabetes
attributed to poor diet.
While researchers investigate the link between traditional desert
foods and diabetes prevention, Mr. Johnson grows his beans, pulling
down 14,000 pounds this fall. Most will sell for about $2.50 a pound
at small stores on the reservation.
Mr. Johnson, 31, began farming beans partly as a tribute to his
grandfather, who died from complications related to diabetes. He
always saves some beans for his grandmother, who likes to simmer the
white ones with oxtail.
"I see my grandmother telling her friends, 'Yeah, I can get some
beans for you,' " Mr. Johnson said. "The elders, they're so glad to
see it."
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much as $9.50 a
pound for teparies online. Big-city chefs are in love with the little
beans, too, turning them into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised
local pork.
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural
erosion, they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and
finding allies in the nation's culinary elite and marketing experts.
One result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that
rejects oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon
from Alaska and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the
Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens
of squashes, beans, berries and melons.
Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built
from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn. At the
Mitsitam Cafe, opened last year in the National Museum of the
American Indian in Washington, cooks create dishes with roasted
salmon, chilies and buffalo meat.
At the Cave B Inn, a resort a couple of hours' drive east of Seattle,
Fernando Divina, the chef and a co-author of "Food of the Americas:
Native Recipes and Traditions," uses fresh corn dumplings, local
beans, squash and Dungeness crab to augment a sophisticated menu
meant to match wines from the resort's vineyards. Smoked whitefish
chubs from Lake Superior and sassafras gelée ended up on the table at
Savoy restaurant in Manhattan earlier this fall, and later this month
pine-roasted venison with black currants and truffled hominy will
star at a $100 indigenous foods dinner at the Equinox restaurant in
Washington.
Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures. "There's only
now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of what Native food can be,"
said the author Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes
about tribal food in many of her books and is working on a cookbook
with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
"You're talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine
has been whatever we could get for a long time," Ms. Erdrich said.
American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that
has yet to be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett
Oden, a chef who learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi
reservation in Oklahoma.
"You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese
or Mongolian barbecue, but you can't eat indigenous foods native to
the Americas," said Ms. Oden, who has been traveling the nation
filming segments for a 2006 PBS series titled "Seasoned With Spirit:
A Native Cook's Journey."
One item that won't be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy
circles of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are
eaten simply with sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian
reservations. That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is
wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved from food that was
hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal government
commodities, including white flour and lard - the two ingredients in
fry bread.
In a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota,
the poorest and one of the largest reservations in the country, Larry
Pourier, a film producer, is working on a healthier fast food. He is
developing a snack bar based on a recipe for wasna, a patty Lakota
elders used to fashion from the kidney fat and meat of bison mashed
with chokecherries. Over the next couple of months he will add other
dried fruits, grains and alternatives to the suet to make a modern
snack bar that is high in protein and low in sugar.
Reviving Recipes and Inventing New Ones
Forum: Cooking and Recipes
"I'm trying to keep it traditional, but in order for it to be
successful it has to taste good," Mr. Pourier said.
Eventually, Mr. Pourier and his colleagues at Lakota Express, the
economic development company behind the bar, want to manufacture an
entire line under the brand Native American Natural Foods. The idea
is that products from their tribe and others might be sold in special
American Indian food sections, the way kosher, Mexican or Chinese
products are grouped in many mainstream grocery stores.
"There are a lot of people trying to figure how to create a Native-
based food product and having a real struggle to find market access,
whether it's salmon or wild rice or teas or baked goods or corn
chips, whatever," said Mark Tilsen, who helped to found Lakota
Express. "By trying to build a brand, we can provide some market
access."
American Indians and Alaska Natives make up only about 1.5 percent of
the nation's population, and those people are spread among almost 600
tribes. Even in the largest tribes, knowledge of how to forage and
farm traditional food has faded.
Efforts like the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which harvests
and sells rice from the lakes in northern Minnesota, are helping to
keep that knowledge alive. The project, run by Winona LaDuke, is part
of an effort by food activists and chefs to save traditional American
Indian foods and cooking methods.
Mr. Johnson's tepary bean farm has its roots in Native Seeds/SEARCH,
a Tucson-based organization that Gary Nabhan, a professor at Northern
Arizona University, founded to preserve native plants in the
Southwest and northwestern Mexico.
Last year, Mr. Nabhan started RAFT, which stands for Renewing
America's Food Traditions. The coalition of seven nonprofit food,
agricultural and conservation organizations has published a "red
list" of 700 endangered American foods, including heritage turkeys
and Louisiana Creole cream cheese.
Several dozen items are tied directly to Indian tribes, including
wild rice and the tepary, said Makal? Faber, who tends the list as
part of her work with Slow Food USA.
During the first week of December, members of the RAFT coalition,
including the culinary organizations Slow Food and the Chefs
Collaborative, will gather at the annual Tohono O'odham Community
Action basket makers and food summit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix
to discuss how to expand the list of endangered foods and figure out
ways to nurture American Indian cuisine in the Southwest.
People involved say the evolution won't work without chefs.
"Having people at a high-end restaurant buy some of this makes it
available for the rest of the community that it originally came
from," said Patty West, a forager who works at the Northern Arizona
University's Center for Sustainable Environments and is an organizer
of the December food workshop.
John Sharpe, the chef at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz., devises
as much of his menu as he can from local tribal foods. About four
times a year, he is lucky enough to get a delivery of Navajo Churro
lambs from a small, scrappy breed that was almost extinct. The
animals are smaller than most commercial breeds and have very little
fat. Mr. Sharpe, who has often paired chops from the lambs with
tepary beans, will roast legs from four carcasses he received last
week with wild local herbs, and serve them on his Thanksgiving buffet.
He also borrows from Hopi traditions, turning tepary beans, roasted
corn, a little French mustard and some olive oil into a dip that
echoes a traditional Hopi dish. He uses thin Hopi piki bread, made
from ground blue corn and cooked like a crepe, for dipping.
"Do the Hopis like it?" asked Mr. Sharpe, who will be at the December
workshop. "They kind of laugh at it, but they love it. They
say, 'This is a crazy white man who likes our food.' "
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: November 23, 2005
www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/dining/23nati.html?pagewanted=1
Last week, Noland Johnson pulled the season's final crop of tepary
beans from the piece of desert he farms on the Tohono O'odham
Reservation, about 120 miles southwest of Tucson.
Reviving Recipes and Inventing New Ones
Forum: Cooking and Recipes
The beans look a little like a flattened black-eyed pea. The white
ones cook up creamy. The brown ones, which Mr. Johnson prefers, are
best simmered like pinto beans.
As late as the 1930's, Tohono O'odham farmers grew more than 1.5
million pounds a year and no one in the tribe had ever heard of
diabetes. By the time Mr. Johnson got into the game four years ago,
an elder would be lucky to find even a pound of the beans, and more
than half of the adults in the tribe had the kind of diabetes
attributed to poor diet.
While researchers investigate the link between traditional desert
foods and diabetes prevention, Mr. Johnson grows his beans, pulling
down 14,000 pounds this fall. Most will sell for about $2.50 a pound
at small stores on the reservation.
Mr. Johnson, 31, began farming beans partly as a tribute to his
grandfather, who died from complications related to diabetes. He
always saves some beans for his grandmother, who likes to simmer the
white ones with oxtail.
"I see my grandmother telling her friends, 'Yeah, I can get some
beans for you,' " Mr. Johnson said. "The elders, they're so glad to
see it."
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much as $9.50 a
pound for teparies online. Big-city chefs are in love with the little
beans, too, turning them into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised
local pork.
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural
erosion, they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and
finding allies in the nation's culinary elite and marketing experts.
One result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that
rejects oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon
from Alaska and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the
Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens
of squashes, beans, berries and melons.
Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built
from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn. At the
Mitsitam Cafe, opened last year in the National Museum of the
American Indian in Washington, cooks create dishes with roasted
salmon, chilies and buffalo meat.
At the Cave B Inn, a resort a couple of hours' drive east of Seattle,
Fernando Divina, the chef and a co-author of "Food of the Americas:
Native Recipes and Traditions," uses fresh corn dumplings, local
beans, squash and Dungeness crab to augment a sophisticated menu
meant to match wines from the resort's vineyards. Smoked whitefish
chubs from Lake Superior and sassafras gelée ended up on the table at
Savoy restaurant in Manhattan earlier this fall, and later this month
pine-roasted venison with black currants and truffled hominy will
star at a $100 indigenous foods dinner at the Equinox restaurant in
Washington.
Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures. "There's only
now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of what Native food can be,"
said the author Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes
about tribal food in many of her books and is working on a cookbook
with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
"You're talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine
has been whatever we could get for a long time," Ms. Erdrich said.
American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that
has yet to be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett
Oden, a chef who learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi
reservation in Oklahoma.
"You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese
or Mongolian barbecue, but you can't eat indigenous foods native to
the Americas," said Ms. Oden, who has been traveling the nation
filming segments for a 2006 PBS series titled "Seasoned With Spirit:
A Native Cook's Journey."
One item that won't be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy
circles of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are
eaten simply with sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian
reservations. That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is
wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved from food that was
hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal government
commodities, including white flour and lard - the two ingredients in
fry bread.
In a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota,
the poorest and one of the largest reservations in the country, Larry
Pourier, a film producer, is working on a healthier fast food. He is
developing a snack bar based on a recipe for wasna, a patty Lakota
elders used to fashion from the kidney fat and meat of bison mashed
with chokecherries. Over the next couple of months he will add other
dried fruits, grains and alternatives to the suet to make a modern
snack bar that is high in protein and low in sugar.
Reviving Recipes and Inventing New Ones
Forum: Cooking and Recipes
"I'm trying to keep it traditional, but in order for it to be
successful it has to taste good," Mr. Pourier said.
Eventually, Mr. Pourier and his colleagues at Lakota Express, the
economic development company behind the bar, want to manufacture an
entire line under the brand Native American Natural Foods. The idea
is that products from their tribe and others might be sold in special
American Indian food sections, the way kosher, Mexican or Chinese
products are grouped in many mainstream grocery stores.
"There are a lot of people trying to figure how to create a Native-
based food product and having a real struggle to find market access,
whether it's salmon or wild rice or teas or baked goods or corn
chips, whatever," said Mark Tilsen, who helped to found Lakota
Express. "By trying to build a brand, we can provide some market
access."
American Indians and Alaska Natives make up only about 1.5 percent of
the nation's population, and those people are spread among almost 600
tribes. Even in the largest tribes, knowledge of how to forage and
farm traditional food has faded.
Efforts like the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which harvests
and sells rice from the lakes in northern Minnesota, are helping to
keep that knowledge alive. The project, run by Winona LaDuke, is part
of an effort by food activists and chefs to save traditional American
Indian foods and cooking methods.
Mr. Johnson's tepary bean farm has its roots in Native Seeds/SEARCH,
a Tucson-based organization that Gary Nabhan, a professor at Northern
Arizona University, founded to preserve native plants in the
Southwest and northwestern Mexico.
Last year, Mr. Nabhan started RAFT, which stands for Renewing
America's Food Traditions. The coalition of seven nonprofit food,
agricultural and conservation organizations has published a "red
list" of 700 endangered American foods, including heritage turkeys
and Louisiana Creole cream cheese.
Several dozen items are tied directly to Indian tribes, including
wild rice and the tepary, said Makal? Faber, who tends the list as
part of her work with Slow Food USA.
During the first week of December, members of the RAFT coalition,
including the culinary organizations Slow Food and the Chefs
Collaborative, will gather at the annual Tohono O'odham Community
Action basket makers and food summit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix
to discuss how to expand the list of endangered foods and figure out
ways to nurture American Indian cuisine in the Southwest.
People involved say the evolution won't work without chefs.
"Having people at a high-end restaurant buy some of this makes it
available for the rest of the community that it originally came
from," said Patty West, a forager who works at the Northern Arizona
University's Center for Sustainable Environments and is an organizer
of the December food workshop.
John Sharpe, the chef at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz., devises
as much of his menu as he can from local tribal foods. About four
times a year, he is lucky enough to get a delivery of Navajo Churro
lambs from a small, scrappy breed that was almost extinct. The
animals are smaller than most commercial breeds and have very little
fat. Mr. Sharpe, who has often paired chops from the lambs with
tepary beans, will roast legs from four carcasses he received last
week with wild local herbs, and serve them on his Thanksgiving buffet.
He also borrows from Hopi traditions, turning tepary beans, roasted
corn, a little French mustard and some olive oil into a dip that
echoes a traditional Hopi dish. He uses thin Hopi piki bread, made
from ground blue corn and cooked like a crepe, for dipping.
"Do the Hopis like it?" asked Mr. Sharpe, who will be at the December
workshop. "They kind of laugh at it, but they love it. They
say, 'This is a crazy white man who likes our food.' "