Home › Playing Indian › Playing Indian

Playing Indian

IN COOKING OUTDOORS Sooner or later we have to acknowlour everlasting debt to the original American, the Indian, for it was from tribes along the New England coast that our white squaw mothers first learned to make chowders, baked beans, succotash, Nantucket squantum and such; to stew huckleberries; use sassafras for flavor; properly employ ferns, wild mushrooms, wild grape vine buds, tendrils, etc. And although we didn't cling to pemmican after the first few centuries of trekking through the wilderness with skins packed full of it, we still use it on long hiking trips and in northern hunting expeditions as the handiest of rations.

And when it comes to cooking big fish whole, no better methods have been devised by self-styled civilized man than the Indian way of burying them in hot ashes in a jacket of moist clay (see "Clay Pigeon" Fish under Cooking the Catch) or barbecuing them in such a splendid native fashion as that which sounds like slew-eat-um in the language of Northwestern Indians.