The rich history of Native American cuisine

FOOD FOOD HEALTH & HOMINY

Hominy prepared by cooking in a pan with butter and seasoned with salt and pepper.

Self-taught Cherokee chef Nico Albert shares the history and challenges of Native American food.

STORY & PHOTOS BY ERIC BOLL | DESIGN BY JOSIE RILEY

American food culture is a melting pot of cooking techniques and recipes; however, Native American cuisine and cooking techniques may often be lesser known.

That is something Nicole Albert, executive chef and owner of Burning Cedar Indigenous Foods, wanted to change when she opened her own catering and consulting company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Albert, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a self-taught chef who credits her mother and family for inspiring her love of cooking.

Albert did not consider a career in cooking until she got a job working in a restaurant as a teenager.

“I kind of just worked my way around the different jobs in a restaurant until I landed in the kitchen and fell in love with professional cooking,” Albert says.

Eventually Albert would open Burning Cedar to bring Native American cuisine to the Tulsa area through her catering and consulting company. Albert, however, has faced some trouble sourcing ingredients for recipes as Native Americans have faced trouble opening farms and selling traditional crops.

“In the hundreds of years since the beginning of colonization, Indigenous people have been removed from their food sources. We haven’t had access to land to grow our traditional crop, we haven’t had access to the resources you would need to build a food supplying business,” Albert says. “So, we’re trying to restore the health and wellness of our own people through building the supply chains that we need to have those foods.”

The push to restore these supply chains and traditional farming methods are a part of the food sovereignty movement, which has gained popularity in Indigenous circles. Food sovereignty is a movement with the goals of ending reliance on corporations for food and the promotion of local and sustainable farming.

As for why Albert chose to specialize in Native American recipes, beyond the fact that it is what she grew up with, she cites the history and relationships Native Americans have with their ingredients. She explains how many tribes have saved their seeds for generations and that the diversity in ingredients used between tribes ensures that every tribe has their own unique ingredients and dishes.

Some of this diversity can be found in the Three Sisters farming technique where corn, beans and squash are grown together, also commonly known as companion planting. Different tribes would use different varieties of corn, beans and squash depending on the environment, which resulted in a wide array of dishes that used the Three Sisters.

“We have such a long history with all of these ingredients that they are more than just corn or fish. They are actual ancestors to us,” Albert says. “So that gives a significance to the meal that you don’t get with your hamburger and fries.”

For example, the word for corn in the Cherokee language, “selu,” is not just the word for the plant. Selu is the name of an actual person, the Corn Mother, the Cherokee first woman who sacrificed herself to give her children the gift of corn.

When asked to recommend a dish, Albert suggests that more people should try hominy, which is a nutritious way of preparing corn that makes it healthier.

“The hominy making process is something that was developed by our ancestors. It’s taking field corn, which has a very hard thick outer shell which you have to remove to unlock the nutrients inside the corn,” Albert says. “So, our ancestors developed a way to do that by simmering the corn in an alkali solution. So, they used wood ash from our campfires, the ash of hardwood has that basic alkali property which allows it to have a chemical reaction with the proteins in that outer shell of the corn.”

The preparation process, called nixtamalization, can be traced back to the Indigenous people of Mexico. Hominy can be eaten both on its own and used to create tortillas and other dishes.

In Athens, hominy can be found at Walmart and Kroger on East State Street with numerous recipes online for how to prepare and incorporate hominy into meals. For more information on Native American cooking, check out www.burningcedar.com or the Toasted Sister Podcast. b