Food History

This is the second book my friend Kaaron brought me from Fiji.

Carolyn Niethammer’s American Indian Food and Lore has some similarities to Kavasch’s Native Harvests. The biggest is that it also focuses on recognising foodstuffs through botanical descriptions and pencil sketches. Or maybe the biggest is that Niethammer has taken great care with her research.

I particular adore her notes. Books with notes and footnotes are books you can check out. I can’t stress how important it is (even though I don’t always use notes and footnotes myself) – every single note gives you a source or an explanation and enables you to find out how the writer has made the decisions they have made. American Indian Food and Lore would be a valuable addition to a foodie’s bookshelf for that alone.

Why is the capacity the check things so important? Because we all propagate myths and traditions and work from assumptions. It’s part of who we are.

If we can check out what assumptions have been made and where those myths and traditions come from, we can address them and redress them if they need addressing or redressing. We may entirely love a bunch of ideas now, but in twenty years time people change and culture changes. This sort of book retains its usefulness when we change and our cultures change, because the notes and scholarship mean we can update it and check it out.

All books can be placed in time one way or another, but some become relics of that time and only useful for a few years. Niethammer’s book will be around and useful for a long time.

It is a bit more anthropological in approach than most cookbooks. Take the entry on corn. Before the recipes, Niethammer gives 3 pages on the role of corn and tells two Zuni tales, a Tewas tale and information on the Papagos planting ceremonies. The fiction writer/teacher in me has noted down this volume as a really handy source for teaching writers how food traditions and foodways operate in non Western cultures. Niethammer doesn’t try to be all-inclusive, but she is very clear in her descriptions.

I wish she had attributed all the places these recipes were collected from, but as I said in the other post, to understand American Indian cooking you need to understand a whole bunch of cultures. I doubt that a single book can contain everything.

You need a recipe, don’t you? Just one. This book is worth owning for yourself, not sampling a recipe here and there. I chose this recipe in particular for Kate, as a thank you for her photographs.

Fried squash blossoms

½ cup flour
1 cup milk
dash of salt
½ tsp chili powder
oil
1 quart squash blossoms

Mix together flour, milk, salt and chili powder. Heat oil in pan. Dip blossoms in batter and deep fry until crisp.