Food History

I have a shocking case of insomnia, so I’m doing Tuesday’s post now and I’ll do Monday’s post late Monday and then everyone will be entirely confused except me. I never get confused. And yes, this is one of those occasions when truth lies in every sentence but the last one. I did intend to write a Tuesday post on a book Kaaron Warren (horror writer extraordinaire) brought me from Fiji and I didn’t intend to get insomnia.

Let me avoid more confusion and move to cool stuff.

When Kaaron said she was bringing me two Indian cookbooks from Fiji for my collection, my immediate response was “Fijian Indian - how cool!” “No,” she said, “American Indian. First Nation. Just bought in Fiji.” She gave me them both at Conflux (where she was one of the guests) but I’ve been too besotted with that Regency Gothic Banquet and its recipes to reach the cookbooks till now.

The full title is Native Harvests. Recipes and Botanicals of the American Indian. It has good credentials, being prepared under the auspices of the American Indian Archaeological Institute.

This is important. There are a lot of pop books out there that are really fun, but not terribly reliable. Checking the Acknowledgements or the Foreword of a book is essential to work out just how far an author can be trusted to have solid resarch underpinning everything.

This is a nice introduction to the subject and has enough detail for many purposes. It goes through all the native plants and their major uses - not just for food, but for cosmetic and medicine and chewing gum. It also has a section alerting the reader to plants of the poisonous variety. It has pencil sketches scattered throughout to help wild harvesters identify what to eat and what to avoid, and it has plenty of recipes.

There are better cookbooks for regions or specific groups. The book’s main flaw, in fact, is that it’s talking about America rather than a cultural group and America has never had just one American Indian cuisine. If you own this, though, you can then seek out cookbooks for the different regions and the different cultures.

The organising principles are half use of ingredients and half botanical. A book with a solid botanical base is always a handy addition to a library. The botanical listing can be checked against Mrs Grieve’s Modern Herbal, if you have a need to find out botanical overlap between the Old World and the New (If the Americas are the New World, then what on earth is Australia? The super-new superimposed on the super-old?)

Native Harvests is mostly about vegetables, but it does have other recipes. Turtle soup is there (and I must compare Kavasch’s recipe to English historical recipes some day) and there are five oyster recipes.

I won’t give you sample recipes this time round (unless you really, really want them) because I’m all recipe’d out after my Regency fling. There will be a second American Indian cookbook from Kaaron, that I’ll look at sometime soon - and maybe I should haul a third from the depths of my library to give you a bit of a range. I want to do this (and I coveted those books so very much) because there’s a bunch of popular misinformation out there about the only civilisedv cuisines coming from Europe and Asia and North Africa. These books aren’t the same as reconstruction of prehistoric food from 6,000 years ago - there have been fascinating and sophisticated foodways in the Americas for a very long time. I don’t understand them yet, but getting hold of good books can only help.

food history, American Indian, First Nations, wild harvesting, foodways, Kaaron Warren