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Go-Gruntum-Leechum
Send young bucks into glades-gather tender wild leek while dew is still on them. Strip and wrap in damp rockmoss until sun again grows old man and leans toward West. Take then, tender-firm ball of lettuce and break into golden-green morsels size of young squaw's wonder-eyesmix in tribal stone bowl with broken sticks of buried sunray (carrot) and three sweet fire-flower (pimiento), to this now add crushed wild leek together with juice of green berry (olive oil) and liberal dash of soured wine of wild huckleberry grape (wine vinegar), add three times finger pinch of sea snow (salt) and with sweet-birch ladle, stir and turn heap plenty.
Serve with white sour-curd from milk of bison-cow and plentum spirit of harvest grain (beer) - this is great feast of Huckleberry Indian Tribe.
Playing Indian with a purpose, we'll say, and for those who wish to carry it farther, and there are millions of us who do, all the way from Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls to frazzled bank presidents and fed-up dowagers, there is always pemmican.
Beneath the invented dialect this is a plain tossed salad: ramps, head lettuce, carrot and pimiento in an oil-and-vinegar dressing, served with cottage cheese and beer. The only real technique is the long rest given to the leeks.
- Wild leek means rampsAllium tricoccum, the wild leek or ramp, is the whole point of the dish — sharper and more garlicky than a scallion. Two or three bulbs with their leaves, crushed and chopped, will season a large bowl; substitute a mix of scallion and one small garlic clove if you cannot get them.
- Harvest ethicallyRamps are slow to reproduce and are now regulated or off-limits in some parks and jurisdictions; digging whole patches is what caused the restrictions. Cutting one leaf per plant, or buying from a market, gives the same flavour.
- The moss wrapWrapping the leaves in damp moss for the rest of the day (the text is vague about whether the sun in question is the same day's or the next) is simply keeping them cool and humid so they do not wilt — a wet cloth or a bag with a damp paper towel in the cooler does the same. It is not a cure or a ferment, so there is no need to hold them if the salad is going together sooner.
- Fire-flower is pimientoThree pimientos means three of the small, thick-fleshed sweet red peppers usually sold roasted in jars; a 4 oz jar, drained and cut in strips, is roughly the practical equivalent. Fresh roasted red pepper works and tastes better.
- Buried sunrayOne large carrot, cut into short sticks rather than grated — the text specifies broken sticks, which hold their crunch against the dressing.
- Dressing proportionsNo quantities are given for the oil and vinegar. Three parts olive oil to one part wine vinegar, about 6 tablespoons of dressing total for a large head of lettuce, is a workable reading of the "liberal dash" of vinegar the recipe asks for. "Three times finger pinch of sea snow" is somewhere between a third and three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt depending on how large a pinch you take; add it to the dressing, not the leaves.
- Sour-curd from the bison-cowCottage cheese, plain and full-fat. Spoon it alongside rather than stirring it in, or it slicks the leaves and dulls the vinegar.
- YieldOne head of lettuce with these additions serves four as a side, two as a camp supper with the cheese and bread.
This belongs to a long-running genre of American camp cookery that dressed ordinary recipes in mock-"Indian" speech, a habit that ran through Boy Scout and summer-camp literature from the early twentieth century into the 1950s and which the book's own closing sentence names outright as "playing Indian." The dish itself is honest woodland cooking: ramps are one of the first edible greens in eastern North American forests, gathered in Appalachian and Great Lakes communities for generations and celebrated in spring ramp suppers that continue today. The dressing — olive oil, wine vinegar, jarred pimiento, cottage cheese, a bottle of beer — is pure mid-century grocery store, which is the tell that the vocabulary is costume rather than record. Pemmican, invoked at the end, was a genuine Indigenous provision of dried pounded meat and rendered fat, adopted by fur traders because it kept for months, and it had become camp-craft shorthand for authentic wilderness food by the time this was printed.