No Fry Bread: Bringing Indigenous and Homesteader Foodways into the Contemporary Kitchen

Abstract

No Fry BreadBringing Indigenous and Homesteader Foodways into the Contemporary Kitchen S. Margot Finn (bio) The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen By Sean Sherman and Beth Dooley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Pp. 226. Illustrations, resources, index, notes. $35.95.) The Perennial Kitchen: Simple Recipes for a Healthy Future By Beth Dooley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Pp. 248. Illustrations, resources, index, notes. $27.95.) The Good Berry Cookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods By Tashia Hart (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2021. Pp. vii, 220. Illustrations, index. $24.95.) The Steger Homestead Kitchen: Simple Recipes for an Abundant Life By Will Steger and Rita Mae Steger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 168. Illustrations, index. $27.95.) One of my great-grandmothers was born in rural southern Japan and eventually acclimated to colonized Hawai'i, while another fled the potato famine in Ireland to ultimately raise mostly sons and horses and teach Sunday school in rural western Nebraska. What, if anything, would all of my great-grandmothers recognize as food? Four recent cookbooks focusing on regional, regenerative, and Indigenous foodways in Minnesota largely set the thornier issues of the heritage part of heritage cooking aside. Regardless of personal grandparentage, they suggest readers can look to the Native American foodways and smallholder farming traditions of the upper Midwest for guidance on how to grow, hunt, and forage the makings of a delicious diet without courting chronic disease or exacerbating climate change, to name two of the main scourges blamed, at least partially, on the SAD. Beth Dooley either wrote or co-authored three of the four cookbooks, which are stuffed with full-page color photographs, mostly of the recipes as prepared or in suggested serving arrangements. Amaranth crackers are shown arrayed on a wood cutting board around a darker wood bowl piled with pale whitefish and white bean spread and a handful of bright green watercress (The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, p. 61). Each of the Dooley trio also includes at least two photographs of foraged ingredients, lovingly cupped in creased or dirt-speckled hands. 1 The fourth cookbook is dedicated specifically to wild rice, referred to throughout and henceforth by the Anishnaabeg word "manoomin." Written by Tashia Hart of the Red Lake Band of the Ojibwe Nation, The Good Berry Cookbook is an oversized softcover crowded with high-resolution close-ups of foraged ingredients [End Page 84] in situ and hands included in shots primarily to establish scale, more reminiscent of a field guide than a gourmet magazine. The first of these four was published in 2017, Chef Sean Sherman's self-proclaimed "breakout book," which bills itself as a "delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories" (inside front cover). His recipes are divided into four main sections: "Fields and Gardens," featuring the three sisters corn, beans, and squash and pre-colonial grains like teosinte, amaranth, and hominy; "Prairies and Lakes," emphasizing wild rice, cattails, fish, duck, rabbit, bison, venison, and elk; "Nature's Sweets, Teas, and Refreshing Drinks," highlighting edible flowers, chestnuts, sunflower milk and seeds, maple syrup, berries, and sumac; and "The Indigenous Pantry," with recipes for wild rice and acorn flours, stocks made from wild rice, corn, cedar beans, and a range of meats, and instructions for preserving mushrooms, herbs, and meats with smoke, salt, and heat. In the two final sections, Indigenous chefs feature recipes that include ingredients native to their regions, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Ontario, Canada, as well as seven suggested menus celebrating the moons of different seasons with the ingredients then abundant. From the inside cover's insistence that there are "no fry bread or Indian tacos here" (which, since Indian tacos are typically American-style taco fillings served on fry bread, essentially reads: no fry bread or fry bread here), to the special box in the introduction on "(NOT) Fry Bread," Chef Sherman insists on defining the Indigenous as only that which preceded colonialism (p. 9). Anything Native people learned to cook and eat after colonization is declared "outdated," and only a return to an uncolonized past can reclaim Indigenous cuisine for "modernity...