Iroquois and Other Native American Cooking

For anyone interested in Native American cookery and recipes, check out this site of Native American recipes. The site includes two corn soup recipes from Iroquois or other Northeastern Native groups that I’ve copied in here.

Oneida Corn Soup

Corn
Water
Wild rice
Wild greens
Venison

Cook corn in water with bits of venison, wild edible greens like cowslip, ferns, or milk weed and a handful of wild rice.

My Disclaimer: Do not start collecting wild greens to cook this soup if you do not know what you are doing. Store-bought greens should substitute nicely.


Winter Corn Chowder

Yield: 1 pot

1 1/2 c Dried corn
6 sl Bacon
4 c Milk
1/2 ts Salt
3 c Broth
2 c Chopped onion
2 ts Sugar

Rinse corn and combine with broth in saucepan; bring to boil. Remove to heat and allow to stand for 2 hours, then cook for 45 minutes. Cook bacon in skillet until crisp. Drain. Cook onion in drippings. Add to corn mixture and simmer 5 minutes. Add milk, sugar, and salt; sprinkle with
bacon.

Notice that while the first recipe utilizes ingredients that would have been available to Native Americans for quite some time before contact with Europeans, the second recipe demonstrates cultural change in foodways resulting from Native contact with Euro-American culture with the inclusion of Old World ingredients – in fact everything but the corn and salt would have been unavailable to Native Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. (I’m assuming the “broth” is chicken, beef, or pork stock – venison stock could have been available prior to European contact.)

Another interesting food and recipe site is specific to Tuscarora cooking. The Tuscarora are one of the six tribal groups of the League of the Iroquois – historically the last of the six to join.

Food, Culture History, and Globalization

Foodways are a critical component of any culture. What people eat, and the ways they acquire and prepare food offer important insights on a culture in general. Likewise, as cultures change through time, foodways change as well - new foods are added (e.g. the "Colombian Exchange" and introduction of New World foods, like chiles, maize, most beans, or potatoes, to the Old and Old World foods, like pork, rice, or chickpeas, to the New); new preparations are introduced (e.g. frozen entrees); while at the same time, old foods and preparations ("gopher soup" in Pensacola - see below; grinding corn by hand in Mexico) may become rarer or fall to the wayside altogether.

This Food Time Line provides a fun and insightful window on global cultural history, including especially some of the major cultural changes and changes to food ways in the context of the globalization of the last 5 centuries.

For perspectives on how things have changed and stayed the same in our local area, check out the link to the "Pensacola Souvenir Cookbook" from 1900. I myself was intrigued by the two gopher soup recipes (where for those not familiar with, perhaps now archaic, local lingo, the gopher in question is not a mammalian gopher [those don't exist around here] but the gopher tortoise).