Researching
traditional foods led them to the revelations of an archaeological
dig in Kentucky.
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Ingredients that underpin
the cuisine include pitseed goosefoot (left), a type of physalis
known as ground cherries, among other names (center), and
sunflowers pressed into oil (right). Matt Lavin/CC BY-SA 2.0;
Flavio Coelho/Getty Images; Seamus Tout-Coeur/FOAP/Getty Images)
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In March, a few weeks before COVID-19 shut down the country, chef
Nico Albert and her longtime mentee, chef Taelor Barton, met at
Duet Restaurant + Jazz to discuss plans for their upcoming Native
American dinners and culinary classes.
Each November for the past two years, Albert has turned the menu
at Duet Restaurant + Jazz into full Native American fare. While
the seasonal, New American food that Albert serves year round has
made the 140-seat eatery one of Tulsa's most beloved fine-dineries,
it is this menu of contemporary Native dishes, available only during
Native American Heritage Month, that truly stands out. Locals and
regulars flock to the restaurant, and Cherokee and other tribal
members come from as far away as Michigan or Seattle. The offeringswhich
include persimmon frybread pie made with Pawnee heirloom corn and
crispy, sumac-crusted snapper with roasted squash, wild greens,
sweet corn hazelnut sauce, and pickled blueberriesroutinely
sell out.
The women, both members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, were
slated to lead historical-foraging and Spring Onion Dinner experiences
about pre-colonial foodways and matriarchal roles, and cook suppers
of traditional Cherokee foods for local museums and historical societies.
They were also discussing possibilities for this year's November
menu at Duet. (Barton may be a guest chef.) Of course, it should
continue to feature contemporary Native American food, whose presence
at a fine-dining restaurant remains rare and special. But might
it also debut their effort to restore one of North America's oldest
regional indigenous cuisinesone that has been almost completely
lost, and is rarely referenced outside the pages of archaeology
journals?
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Albert's seed-crusted
venison chop with roasted squash, Pawnee-blue-corn grits,
and green-chile herb sauce (left) and Albert speaking at a
dinner (right). (courtesy of Nico Albert)
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Barton suggests doing at least one entréeperhaps rabbit
legs seasoned with dried sassafras leaves and braised with cedar
fronds in wild sunflower oil, served over a bed of quinoa-esque
pitseed goosefoot grains and the plant's sautéed leaves (reminiscent
of kale) and okra-like milkweed seed pods.
If that happens, it will be the first time such tastes have been
publicly available in at least 1,000 years, and one more step toward
their shared goal of launching a restaurant to showcase it and other
historic Native foods.
Barton and Albert stumbled upon the ancient cuisine essentially
by accident. The two met in 2011 at an event on the future of traditional
Native American foods. Albert gave a talk arguing for a chef-led
revitalization that would educate eaters, foster cultural awareness,
and preserve foodways through use. An industry of tribal farmers,
foragers, caterers, and restaurateurs could, for example, grow,
sell, and serve dishes with wild rice, a cherished Native ingredient
long grown along the Great Lakes but displaced by boaters and home
owners who
see it as a weed.
Barton, then a student at the Oklahoma State University School
of Culinary Arts, was impressed.
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Taelor Barton at the
2019 Intertribal Food Summit preparing hickory nuts for kanuchi,
a traditional Southeastern dish her grandmother taught her.
(courtesy of Taelor Barton)
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"That was a turning point," she says. The truth hit her hard: Undermined
by displacement and centuries of cultural assimilation, indigenous
foodways were careening toward extinction. The hope, which motivates
a number of increasingly prominent Native chefs, was that creating
a nation of diners interested in Native American food would provide
resources to maintain them.
"We've inherited this rich, beautiful history centered in a deep
respect for nature and the sustenance it provides," says Albert,
echoing the punchline from her 2011 talk. "Our traditional foodways
are the embodiment of that relationship. To lose them is to lose
the essence of our cultural identity."
The women became friends, and Albert soon hired Barton to cook
under her at the first of various Tulsa restaurants. They researched
historic Native foodways, visited tribal elders to document culinary
traditions, explored obscure cookbooks (such as 1951's Cherokee
Cooklore), and used what they learned to craft contemporized
dishes.
By 2015, the two were putting on Native dinners for local non-profits,
museums, and educational organizations. Regional chefs such as Brad
Dry joined the effort, and Sean Shermanwho won a James Beard
Foundation Leadership Award in 2019 for his efforts to revitalize
and boost awareness around indigenous food systems in a modern culinary
context encouraged them to join national discussions around
defining Native American cuisine.
Attending events like 2018's Native American Cuisine Symposium
and the 2019 National Native Food Sovereignty Summit brought separate
but mutual epiphanies: Albert and Barton realized most modern Native
cuisines, including their own, are pastiche-like. Without formal
precedents or pre-colonial records, chefs have to rely on clues
from early European descriptions, old cookbooks, and extant tribal
foodways from around North America.
"On one hand, that's led to a fantastically creative culture of
interpretation and cross-pollination," says Albert. On the other,
menus often pair foods from radically different cultureslike,
say, Floridian Seminoles and Southwestern Navajos.
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Albert (right) shows
Barton (left) how to scald a pig's fur to loosen it for removal
and roasting. (courtesy of Taelor Barton)
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There was also a problem of mixing historical eras. Chefs like
Sherman focused on decolonizing their cuisines by using only ingredients
present in the Americas before 1492. Others featured adaptions stemming
from colonial influences, displacement, and cultural assimilation.
Like echoes of a lost heritage, the latter pointed to a land-based
ethos of foraging, gardening, and seasonal ingredients. But the
picture was murky at best.
Citing the success of hyper-regional modern cuisines, Albert and
Barton wanted to do something more Cherokee-specific. They began
to focus on pre-European foodways from traditional Cherokee lands
in the central and southeastern Appalachian Mountains, and surrounding
areasterritory where the Cherokee lived until they were forcibly
relocated by the U.S. government over the Trail of Tears in the
mid 1800s.
The chefs' historical reconstruction began with scholarly books
and papers, then calls and emails with historians, archaeologists,
and paleoethnobotanists. They learned about iterations of Three
Sisters farming methods, which had proliferated throughout
what is now the eastern United States by about 1300. They discovered
reclaimed varieties of indigenous heirloom corn, beans, squash,
watermelon, and pumpkins.
Still, they wondered, what came before?
The question led Barton to scholars like David Morgan and Kristen
Gremillion, and obscure discoveries in places like Kentucky's Red
River Gorge, a 29,000-acre canyon system in the Daniel Boone National
Forest.
Before the Gorge finds, archaeologists "assumed that the peoples
of this region just sat around passively, waiting for others to
send them the gift of agriculture," says Morgan, director of the
National Park Service's Southeast Archaeological Center. "But that
simply wasn't the case."
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Excavations at Cold Oak
Shelter in Kentucky revealed signs of intricate plant domestication
in BC times. (courtesy of Kristen Gremillion)
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Plant materials recovered by archaeologists in the Gorge in the
1980s and '90s led to a historical revision "that fundamentally
alters how we think about indigenous peoples of the [precontact
eastern U.S.]," says Morgan. A trove of ancient seeds debunked then-dominant
theories "depicting early inhabitants as backwater nomads that didn't
acquire agricultureand thus the markers of complex societyuntil
after A.D. 1, when maize arrived from Mesoamerica."
Gremillion, a paleoethnobotanist, chairs the Ohio State University
department of anthropology and is the author of Ancestral Appetites:
Foods in Prehistory. She started working in the Gorge around
1989, using techniques such as direct radiocarbon dating and high-magnification
microscopy to study ancient caches of seeds, food stores, cooking
refuse, and human feces. She found specimens buried under massive
stone outcroppings and in cavesall in remarkable condition.
"We found things like 3,000-year-old sunflower heads and baskets
full of seeds," says Gremillion, who compares the digs to opening
storage vaults. The finds were unprecedented, and old vanguard archaeologists
were dismissive. "They said the materials couldn't possibly be so
old."
Gremillion's research proved them wrong; the region's indigenous
peoples had been farming for more than 5,000 years. The work helped
establish the Eastern Woodlands as an independent center of prehistoric
plant domestication and agricultural developmentalongside
areas like southeast Asia, Mexico, and the Fertile Crescent.
"The importance of these finds cannot be overestimated," says Morgan.
They pointed to stable residential patterns, ideas about land ownership,
and developed economies. To tribes that lived in semi-permanent
villages within defined territories and grew canny agricultural
complexes of crops.
Of particular interest to Barton was the nature of those crops.
All were native to southeastern North America and had been refined
for culinary purposes. The majorityalong with the cuisine
they underpinnedhad been lost to history. Today, most are
considered weeds.
"These gardens were radically different from those described by
early Europeans," says Gremillion. So too, the foods that came from
them.
Barton wasn't just learning about a few forgotten ingredientsshe
was rediscovering an entire food culture. When ancient Greeks and
people around the Mediterranean were pressing olives into olive
oil, tribes in the Eastern Woodlands were cultivating sunflowers
and marsh elder to make cooking oil. Like rice farmers in ancient
China, the ancestors of the Cherokee grew amaranth, maygrass, erect
knotweed, and barley for pseudo-cereals and grains. Hog peanut and
other bean-like fruits played a role similar to soybeans. Sugar
was unknown in the Americas, so sweet tastes came from a slew of
berries and fruits, including American black nightshade, savory
ground cherries, and other interesting oddities. (Or at least they
seem odd today.)
While squash, sunflowers, and berries remained staples, other crops
were replaced by foods like corn, beans, and tomatoes from South and
Central America. Archaeologists speculate they were abandoned because
harvesting the tiny seeds and grains was tedious and labor-intensive.
But that doesn't mean the older foods weren't tasty. Basically, says
Gremillion, the new foods were easier to grow and brought better yields,
which is why they eventually dominated agriculture throughout parts
of Europe, Africa, and Asia, replacing longtime local staples.
Barton recognized the lost foods' culinary potential immediately:
It was as if, in a world without olive oil, where the only olive
trees were wild ones, she was the only chef learning about the ingredients
used a millennium ago around the Mediterranean. She shared her research
with Albert, who found it equally exciting. Combined with other
Eastern Woodlands traditionslike nose-to-tail butchery techniques,
meats from wild game, unique approaches to fermented foods, and
the use of rare varieties of heirloom vegetables, fruits, and spicesthe
crops could lay the foundations for an unprecedented historic cuisine.
Barton says fully relaunching the cuisine will take time. As with
other rare native foods, "the biggest problem you face with something
like this is sourcing [ingredients]."
For instance, while pitseed goosefootsometimes called lambsquarters,
or pigweedproduces broccoli-like flowers and quinoa-esque
seeds, you won't find it at farmers' markets. "You're having to
track down the seeds, establish demand, convince farmers to grow
these plants that haven't been grown for food in centuriesand
all of that's going on at more-or-less the same time," says Barton.
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Albert's Red Lake Nation
wild-rice fritters with smoked trout, cranberry black-walnut
relish, and charred wild-onion vinaigrette (left). A wild
rice stalk on the Mississippi River In Brainerd, Minnesota
(right). (courtesy of Nico Albert (left). Bradley Olson/EYEEM/Getty
Images (right)
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To make it happen, Albert and Barton are developing partnerships
with local Native American farmers and chefs, and organizations
such as the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank, Pawnee Seed Preservation
Project, and Sean Sherman's North American Traditional Indigenous
Food Systems program. Barton is talking with the Eastern Band of
Cherokee Indians about founding a specialty farming collective.
The work is continuing through the pandemic, and the chefs are confident
it will eventually yield a restaurant.
"The response to Native American items on the menu at Duet has
been incredible," says Albert. "Most people have never seen or experienced
anything like this. And it's really encouraging, because, once they've
had a taste, they typically want more."
Albert and Barton plan to use events like Duet's Native American Heritage
Month dinners to prime the waters for, and continue telling the story
of, their ancestral Eastern Woodlands cuisine.
"Native dishes always come with a story," says Albert. At Duet,
she trains servers to teach patrons about ingredients and traditional
uses. For instance, an appetizer of smoked trout and manoomin
fritters (made with indigenous wild rice) topped with cranberry
relish and finished with a drizzle of charred scallion vinaigrette
is prefaced by an explanation.
"Manoomin, which literally translates to 'good berry or grain,'
is the word Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region use for
wild rice," says Albert. The long, dark brown to black pseudo-grain
has been used for upward of 12,000 years. It's sourced from tribal
agricultural cooperative Red Lake Nation Foods.
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From left to right: Barton's
boyfriend and Muscogee Creek Nation citizen Daniel Taylor
and chefs Taelor Barton, Bradley Dry, and Nico Albert at the
end of the day of cooking and filming for a BBC show. (courtesy
of Taelor Barton)
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Barton hopes to partner with Albert to expand the approach at an
Eastern Woodlands-themed restaurant. She envisions prix fixe meals
that are both educational and reminiscent of a small ceremony.
"On one hand, it's about recalling the symbiotic relationship we
once had with the land, plants, and animals that sustain us," and
trying to replicate that in the context of a modern restaurant,
says Barton. On the other, "we want to teach people about these
incredible traditions and foodways."
The meals will help tell the story of one of North America's oldest
regional cuisinesand transport eaters deep into the past,
to 1492 and beyond. As Cherokee, the women say such meals offer
a way to celebrate, affirm, and change perceptions around the ingenuity
of their ancestors.
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