Let's say you're taking your family out for a quick weeknight meal at the local family restaurant. You order a basket of chips and salsa to snack on while you wait for your burgers and fries to arrive. You wash it all down with a tasty chocolate malt.
It's an all-American meal, and without the legacy of indigenous American farming, you'd have almost no meal at all.
The potato comes from Peru, the tomato is native to western South America, the cacao in the chocolate malt came out of the Amazon, and the corn was domesticated in Southern Mexico.
Without these foods that are indigenous to the Americas, the only things on your plate are the wheat bun and the beef patty. Still delicious, but not quite a meal.
There are so many foods that we take for granted today that are products of the Americas, and they come to us through years of hard work by indigenous Americans cultivating the crops, learning new agricultural techniques, and coming up with recipes to transform the raw products into something delicious.
Take corn for instance: corn does not grow wild anywhere on Earth, and it never has! Somebody made it, on purpose, out of a scrubby Mexican grass called teosinte that produces a cob about the size of your thumb, and it took thousands of years to get it to where it is today.
That's not ancient people just eating whatever they could scrounge up; that's a full-fledged plant breeding program run by people who didn't have fancy labs and the internet, just hard work and hard-earned knowledge.
What's really fun about many of these foods is that they come with parties attached. Real, actual celebrations on the calendar, many of which are still being held somewhere to this day.
In this Dispatch, we're going to share the stories of seven foods that are indigenous to the Americas and are foods that we still enjoy today. For each food, we're going to go beyond the dry facts and share the stories of the parties and the people who celebrated them.
Let's go!
Chips & Salsa
Corn is one of the most important crops in the world, and it has one of the craziest origin stories going.
Corn started as a wild grass in southern Mexico called teosinte, which had tiny, hard seeds and looked very different from the corn we eat today. Thousands of years ago, people noticed that some teosinte plants had bigger, softer, or tastier seeds, so they saved those seeds and planted them the next year. By repeating this process over many generations, the plant started morphing into the corn we know today.
The seed clusters became larger, the kernels became easier to eat, and they stayed attached to a cob instead of falling to the ground. After roughly 9,000 years of careful farming, teosinte became modern corn.
Beyond the early genetic engineering, there was molecular gastronomy happening as well. Indigenous farming communities in southern Mesoamerica figured out how to transform corn into highly nutritious flour around 1500 BC by the process of nixtamalization.
Here's how it goes:
Corn cobs were dried and then the kernels were shelled from the cob. The dry kernels are very hard but, especially with smaller ears, they're easier to separate from the cob than fresh, wet kernels.
Those loose dry kernels would then be simmered in water mixed with an alkaline material - usually either wood ash or lime burnt from limestone - and then soaked overnight. This softened the kernels and loosened their tough outer skins. Once they were soaked, they were rinsed off, and the loosened skin was removed.
That softened kernel (now called nixtamal) was ground into masa, which could then be shaped into tortillas or tamales. In addition to making the corn easier to work with, the process makes niacin easier to absorb, adds calcium, and improves how humans can utilize the corn's proteins, which allows the people eating this corn to avoid pellagra, a serious niacin-deficiency disease.
Corn helped make the great empires of Mesoamerica run, empires like the Aztecs, and that's our party.
Hernán Cortés wasn't necessarily a paragon of virtue, but reading accounts of what he and his party found in modern-day Mexico is astounding. When he walked into the market at Tlatelolco (modern-day Mexico City) in 1519, he estimated sixty thousand people trading there in a day and figured the place was twice the size of Salamanca, Spain.
The market was laid out in streets, one kind of goods per street, which is a level of organization that stunned the Spanish more than the size did. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a foot soldier who had been around, tried to describe it in his memoir and basically gave up, saying he'd never finish if he told it all and that two days wouldn't be enough to see it.
The market was buzzing and full of all sorts of goods - not just corn but items like turkeys, squash, peanuts, chiles, cochineal dye, obsidian blades, and even chocolate whisks!
The Spaniards would take the corn home with them and start the plant's spread around the world. But they forgot to ask how to prepare it and never nixtamalized the corn, which led to significant outbreaks of pellagra in Italy and elsewhere, and would have serious consequences for populations that became dependent on corn as their main grain without that "one simple trick" of preparing it to free up the niacin.
Now when you're enjoying chips and salsa and see "nixtamalized corn" on the ingredient list, you know that that's not some frankenfood, it's the legacy of thousands of years of indigenous know-how!
Succotash
Succotash is such a funny word, and I think many people only know it from Looney Tunes cartoons, but it's a real food with American Indian origins.
If you're not familiar with the food, succotash is corn and beans cooked together with something fatty added for flavor. The word is Narragansett, msickquatash, and got adopted into something easier to pronounce for our English-speaking tongues.
The dish is tasty, but the system that grew these foods together is quite impressive. Eastern North America is one of roughly ten places on the whole planet where human beings independently invented farming. Not learned it or stole it from neighbors, but actually invented it.
The crops they domesticated here on their own were squash, sunflowers, and a few you've probably never heard of, like marshelder and goosefoot. That was happening thousands of years before corn ever showed up. Corn and beans came later, working their way north out of Mexico. And rather than tossing out what was already working, farmers here folded the newcomers in and built something better than either piece on its own.
That something better is the system now known as "The Three Sisters," where corn is planted to stand up as a trellis, bean sprouts climb the trellis and put nitrogen back into the ground after the corn takes it out, and squash sprawls underneath, shading out weeds and holding moisture in the soil.
Together these crops provided balanced nutrition, both for the people harvesting them, and the soil that they grew from. It's a fantastically efficient system that predates modern cover crops and rotational planting by centuries.
The most famous party succotash may have attended is the 1621 harvest meal at Plymouth, where the Wampanoag and the English sat down together for three days.
May have is the key phrase in that sentence, because we're not really sure about what was all on that first Thanksgiving menu.
There is exactly one eyewitness account of this meal, a letter Edward Winslow sent home in December of 1621, and it names two foods. Four men went out fowling and came back with enough birds to feed the whole company for close to a week. And Massasoit's people, ninety of them, went out and killed five deer and brought them to the plantation.
That's it. That's the entire documented menu of the first Thanksgiving. Fowl and five deer.
Everything else you've heard is an educated guess based on what was in season and what people had growing, which means succotash probably was on that table, along with seafood, squash, and corn.
We can say what definitely wasn't there. Mashed potatoes, apple pie, and cranberry sauce were all impossible. No potatoes in New England yet, no wheat flour for a crust, and sugar was far too scarce and expensive to waste sweetening a cranberry.
For this year's Thanksgiving, mix up the dishes a little and add your own version of a succotash. It's a great way to add color and delicious vegetables to the mix, and you'd be sitting closer to that original table than the can of cranberry sauce is.
Maple Syrup
Real maple syrup is one of the world's great treats, but it's also some of the world's most brutal math, and that's why the bottle of sweetened corn syrup is the most common syrup you'll see on breakfast tables.
Real maple syrup takes roughly forty gallons of sap boiled down to make one gallon of syrup. Imagine trying to gather forty gallons of sap into clay buckets or birch-bark baskets. After allowing the sap to freeze overnight and skimming ice off the top, the sap would be transported to a large fire where it was then boiled down to produce maple syrup. It was hard work, but also, the sugar from the maple trees was worth it, because who doesn't love something sweet?
Getting that something sweet was cause for a party: the Maple Sugar Moon.
The Nishnabé people use thirteen moons as guideposts through the year, and because the weather and the woods vary so much from one community to the next, they don't all land on the same date. For many, the Maple Sugar Moon begins with the new moon in February or March, late winter running into early spring.
Whenever it arrives, American Indian tribes across the Midwest and Great Lakes regions would move their whole camps into the maple stands for the season. As we know, Midwest springs are cold, damp, and unpleasant, but the reward of tasting sweet maple syrup (probably the first sweet thing you've had since fall) makes it worth it. In fact, tribal sugarbush camps still run every March across the Great Lakes.
There's real wisdom in this as well. In one Potawatomi account, when the sap runs, that's the start of the new cycle of seasons and the new year. The first thing the earth gives you after winter is something sweet. I love that lesson.
Maple syrup had a prominent place in the cuisines of many indigenous populations, where it was used as a sweetener and a source of energy, and once the fur trade got going, maple sugar got shipped across the ocean to sweeten things for European royalty.
In modern times, we got used to cheaper syrups instead of the real thing, but maple seems to be having a comeback. Maple syrup has a lower glycemic index than white sugar and carries antioxidant compounds that plain sugar doesn't. It is also still sugar, with comparable calories and carbs, so call it a better swap rather than a health food.
Even if you don't want to swap in maple syrup for white sugar in your coffee, it's worth having your own Sugar Moon party full of fluffy pancakes and decadent maple syrup. Any excuse for a fun party with delicious food in the Spring is a good one, right?
Wild Rice
Wild rice soup is a Wisconsin staple. This creamy soup with shredded chicken (or maybe turkey) and dark, wild rice is a delicious way to warm up on a cold Wisconsin day.
While we call this food "wild rice," it's actually not rice at all! It's an aquatic grass, Zizania palustris, or what the Ojibwe call manoomin. And if you have only ever had the uniform black stuff out of a grocery box, hand-parched lake rice is a different product. It's lighter, nuttier, cooks faster, and a real delicacy.
This delicacy is the reason why Ojibwe people are in Wisconsin at all! The Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa) started out on the Atlantic coast, and their legends tell of an instruction to travel west until they found the place where food grows on the water. They stopped when they found it. That was the pristine lakes of Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the surrounding areas.
The wild rice party is happening really soon! August, in Ojibwe tradition, is the Rice Making Moon, the one that signals the harvest is coming, and it has always been a time for celebration. The wild rice harvest itself runs late August into September, and is still done in the traditional way in many places.
Two people will head out on a canoe, with one person propelling the canoe through the rice bed, and the other person bending the rice (grass) stalks over with a pair of smooth cedar knockers. As they tap the rice (grass), the ripe grain falls into the boat. There are rules from the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission that govern how this process occurs: cedar sticks can be no longer than 32 inches, and the boats no longer than 18 feet.
While it sounds a little inefficient, allowing most of the grass to stay standing and having seeds fall into the water is purposeful. What falls in the water reseeds next year's bed. What stays on the stalk feeds the ducks and whatever else comes through. It's proto-sustainable agriculture, with this year's harvest engineered to feed next year's, which is all the rage in modern farming.
True wild rice, manoomin, is in trouble right now. It's nearly gone in Michigan and about a third of the stands across Wisconsin and Minnesota are gone, from changed water levels, water quality, and a warming climate. The more we can do to preserve our water supply, the better for this gem of an indigenous food.
Jerky
It's fun to think that jerky is called jerky because a cow was such a jerk it got turned into beef jerky, but that's not why.
The origin of the word actually comes from the Quechua people (indigenous to the Andes mountain area in South America) who called dried meat "ch'arki". The Spanish wrote it down as charqui, and the English turned it to jerky.
Real Andean "ch'arki" is not the packaged stuff that you can find in an American gas station as a road trip snack, it's salted harder and dried harder than what we consume now. That salted, dried preserved meat would then be rehydrated and cooked into a stew.
Andean peoples, and later the Inca, would create the ch'arki by taking advantage of the super high mountain altitudes they lived in. Meat would go out on a rack and freeze solid during the cold nights. During the day, the intense sun and dry air would pull the water straight out of the meat. Basically freeze-drying without modern machinery.
We're used to jerky being a road snack, and, in some ways, it always has been. The Inca empire stocked roadside inns called tampus with llama ch'arki so travelers had something waiting for them at the end of a long day. The state also kept warehouses called qullqas along those same roads, stuffed with ch'arki, dried potatoes, and grain, with the whole inventory tracked on knotted strings because there was no writing system to track it on. A national food reserve, run on string.
The method of transport has changed over the years, but the love of jerky has stayed strong!
Bison Burgers
Have you ever had a bison burger?
There are some true believers in the qualities of bison compared to beef. Bison are native to the Americas, they're leaner than beef, and have a little bit sweeter flavor. Bison will also dry out on you if you cook it like beef, and the animals are much bigger and harder to wrangle than cows.
Whereas one person can generally herd and process a domesticated cow, getting meat from a massive herd of wild bison is a totally different endeavor, and this is where the party comes in.
Welcome to the Plains, where tribes engaged in communal hunting and processing of bison. The bison hunt was a coordinated operation involving the whole community, followed by everybody eating and everybody working, because a bison is an enormous amount of animal to break down before it turns rotten.
Scouts would locate herds by reading tracks, discerning the weather, or using community knowledge about grazing patterns, seasonal migrations, and water sources. Before horses were widely available (they had gone extinct in the Americas thousands of years earlier and only came back with the Spanish), communities relied on carefully coordinated group hunts to drive bison toward natural cliffs, fenced enclosures, or narrow corridors where the animals could be killed more safely.
As horses spread across the Plains, mounted hunting became increasingly important. Skilled riders could move alongside a running herd and shoot arrows at close range, while horses also made it easier to search greater distances and transport meat and hides.
Even as hunting became easier with the introduction of the horse, the processing stayed a monumental task. Carcasses had to be butchered quickly, with meat cut into strips for drying and fat rendered for storage or mixed with dried meat to make pemmican.
Hides became robes, clothing, bedding, containers, and tipi coverings, while bones, horns, sinew, and other parts were turned into tools and household goods. A successful hunt would lead to feasting, storytelling, dancing, visiting, and celebration.
If you've ever volunteered at a charitable event like an Oktoberfest or church festival, you know how it goes at the end. A mixture of relief that the "hard work" is over, a knowledge you need to clean up, but a desire to have a little fun with the people you worked so hard with to get the task completed.
I imagine the processing of buffalo was a lot like that feeling!
Cedar Plank Salmon
I find it slightly crazy that you can now buy salmon on a cedar plank as a standard item in a grocery store. Usually in the food business, we'd consider the wood a risk to put splinters in the protein, but not so in this case.
The cedar plank isn't just a modern trick to get you to spend more money on salmon. Coast Salish and Chinook people were splitting salmon onto cedar planks and stakes around open fires long before anybody sold you a kit, and it is still the best way to cook a salmon fillet. The moist wood keeps the fish from drying out and, as a bonus, it adds a rich flavor to the fish when it's finished cooking.
I was astounded to learn that the people of the Pacific Northwest were able to build permanent, thriving societies with monumental art and complicated politics without ever planting a field. They lived on fish and on what the coast gave up.
We just talked about how the people of the East were one of only ten groups on the planet to invent agriculture on their own. And every version of history I was ever taught said farming was the key to building a civilization. Then the Northwest coast stands there as the exception, because if nature's bounty is bountiful enough, and theirs absolutely was, you don't need farming at all.
These people would show their gratitude for that bounty with what else but a party, and I want to highlight the sacred tradition of the First Salmon Ceremony practiced by many of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
Held in conjunction with the spring salmon run, a First Salmon Ceremony welcomes the first fish of the season like a visiting dignitary. There is a formal speech, often a blessing and drinking of the water, and then the first fish is cooked and shared out so that everyone present gets a bite. Then the bones go back to the water.
These feasts are still held today, teaching respect for the environment and a connection to the land that anybody could learn something from. Some are open to the public, so if you're interested in witnessing one of these ceremonies, search for one and go!
Back at That Restaurant
We started this Dispatch with your family at a table on a weeknight. Chips and salsa in front of you, burgers and fries on the way, a chocolate malt to wash it down.
Sit back down there for a second, because after reading this, you hopefully have a little different viewpoint on that meal.
You now know that basket of chips is the finish line of a nine-thousand-year breeding program that turned a scrubby grass with thumb-sized cobs into one of the most important crops on the planet.
You're now thinking that maybe a bison burger would be nice to try instead of the beef burger, and you're probably grateful you're not herding thundering bison off a cliff to get it!
You might be curious whether a maple syrup milkshake would be tasty or just too much, and you may be thinking about stopping at the gas station on the way home and asking if they have any "llama ch'arki" for a late-night snack.
Hate to break it to you, but you'll probably get a weird look and be pointed to the beef jerky section if you do ask for that llama stuff.
I hope you enjoyed coming to those little realizations, and I hope the stories in this episode made you interested in trying some of these indigenous foods.
It's so easy to get started!
Search the internet for a vendor who offers real wild rice from Wisconsin. Then get some and make a soup with the real stuff and tell your whole family that wild rice is actually grass, not rice.
Seek out a local maple syrup vendor and try that maple syrup milkshake!
Shake up the Thanksgiving routine with a sensational succotash!
We're so fortunate to have these incredible foods native to our great land. It's nice to appreciate their backstory, but it's even better to eat them, so go forth, get cooking, and enjoy.
Cheers!
Nick
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