Foodstuffs of Native Americans - Part 2: Wild Plants

November is Native American Heritage Month, so I thought it would be neat to go through some of the plant foods that were cultivated and eaten by Native Americans.  I started with plants that you may not have known were first domesticated in the Americas; in this section, I'll talk about some of the plants I study - wild plant foods.

Wild food plants:

Camas-

 My advisor studies camas. Camas is a member of the lily family, and like other lilies, it has a bulb.  This bulb was the focus of Native American subsistence.  These bulbs have complex carbohydrates that broke down into a sweeter, simpler sugar after long, slow heating - the same process that goes on when you caramelize onions. They were cooked in earth ovens, which is the same idea as crock-pot cooking, kind of like a pig roast or barbacoa that would take several days.  Once the camas was fully cooked, they could be cooled, kneaded into loaves and stored for consumption later. 

Sotol/Agave/Yucca-

These are different kinds of plants, but the same parts were all cooked the same way, also in an earth oven.  They were especially important in west Texas (and other parts of the Southwest North America and Northwest Mexico).  The heart - think of the heart of an artichoke - had to be cooked low and slow to break down carbohydrates and toxins.  Fresh, a bit of sotol root can be used like soap, and is just as edible.  While camas and related root foods are probably responsible for many of the burn rock middens across central and east Texas, the farther west one moves across the state, the more likely sotol and similar plants were cooked in earth ovens.

Acorns -

 

 NPR recently did a piece on acorns as a food resource! Acorns are what first got me into this game ... coming around to Raman spectroscopy has kind of been a winding road.  Anyway, they hold a special place in my heart.

Despite what some people think, acorns were used across North America, not just limited to Californians (where they are still used today, predominantly as a ceremonial food).  Outside of California, where they were a staple, they tended to be more of a back-up resource.  Most varieties of acorns are full of tannins, which have to be removed before people can eat them.  Tannins in large quantities are toxic - they will basically 'tan' your internal organs and prevent you from absorbing nutrients.  While there are several different ways to process acorns, they were generally ground into a flour and then soaked until the water ran clear.  The flour could then be used in a number of different dishes - added as a thickener to soups, as a kind of bread, mixed in pemmican, and so on.

Hickory nuts -

After tasting fresh hickory nuts, I've decided they are actually my favorite nut.  You can access an excellent article here: Ethnobotany of Ku-Nu-Che: Cherokee Hickory Nut Soup by Gayle Fritz. If processed properly, they have some of the highest caloric returns of any nut.  Rather than cracking the nut and eating the meat raw, various southeastern groups would pound the nuts into a kind of paste, which was then boiled.  The shell would then float to the top (which doesn't work with either walnuts or acorns - I tried).  After an extended time boiling, the nut meat would separate - the oil floating on top, and the rest dissolving into the water creating a kind of milk.

Pecans -

The interesting thing about pecans is that they don't appear outside of North America.  If you go over to Europe, traditional pecan pie is marketed as "American Pecan Pie".  I think that's pretty neat.  Anyway, because of that, when the first Spanish explorers came to North America, they referred to pecans as walnuts - making it difficult to for modern researchers to figure out if they were talking about pecans or actual walnuts.  If you're interested in finding out more, there's a good academic article (behind a pay wall) Pecan Food Potential in Prehistoric North America by DH Hal. They were probably processed in a similar manner as hickory, being boiled for oil, though it is much easier to crack a pecan and extract the meat compared to the other hickories.

Other plants!

Lots of other nuts were important, including: walnuts, hazelnuts,and  American chestnut. So many other fruits were important, including variety of plums, cherries, grapes, berries, and persimmons.  Other root foods included the bulbs of lilies and onions, arrowroot, lotus, cattail, and prairie turnip.  Many different parts of desert plants were used, such as the prickley pear cactus, where both the pads and fruit were used; in addition to the hearts of the Sotol/Agave/Yucca the flowers and fruit were eaten.