Rabbit trails on seasonings

Following up on the obvious question from a few days ago I looked at some AmerIndian recipes, and ran across this recipe: three sisters soup. The 3 sisters are of course corn (support), squash (keeps down weeds and pests), and beans (climbs on corn, helps nitrogenate the soil). FWIW, using modern strains for these plants may not work very well--the corn grows taller than it used to, I suppose, and you need to use pole beans rather than bush beans.

There is no one authentic recipe for this soup : it can be made, and is made, in a variety of ways, with different combinations of ‘sisters’. Recipes have been passed down through generations in tribes, and have become more modernized in the process. My version uses chicken broth and fire roasted tomatoes for a flavorful broth, potatoes for their satisfaction factor, jalapeño and chipotle powder for a little kick of heat, and black eyed peas because I love them. FYI tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers are all indigenous crops, native to the Americas.

The tomatoes and potatoes didn't make it up from Central America until after Columbus, of course. I'm not sure why--maybe the intervening territory wasn't great for them? Just for fun, look at the ingredient list. Generations of tribal cooks were adaptable.

1. olive oil: olives came from Syria
2. garlic: there were wild species harvested here
3. onion: wild species harvested here
4. chicken broth: Asia, no chickens (or no surviving ones) until Columbus
5. fire roasted tomatoes: South America and Mexico, only made it north after Columbus
6. red potatoes: South America, only made it north after Columbus
7. zucchini and/or summer squash: Central America, squash widely cultivated
8. corn: Central America-- reached Great Plains before 1000AD, widespread
9. black-eyed peas: Africa (other beans were native: green, wax, lima, pinto, etc)
10. jalapeño: Mexico, some trading and cultivation in southwest but not elsewhere
11. chipotle powder: see jalapeno
12. bay leaf: Asia, there's a distantly related species in Oregon
13. cumin: western Asia
14. salt: AmerIndians made or traded for this
15. pepper: India

There's apparently some dispute, but given that most of pre-Columbian North American Indians didn't have cookware suitable for oil frying, it seems likely that frying was an innovation. They could easily have come up with vegetable or animal oils--and did. They traded fish oil in the NorthWest (and made slave raids to get workers to process the oil).

What on that list, that was actually indigenous to the Americas, could be easily traded? Dried peppers, the Oregon laurel, and salt. Other things known to have been used as seasonings: juniper berries, dried roots of wild ginger, dried ramps, but some of these have easy equivalents. Salt's essential, though, and not always easily gotten--that we know they did trade.

But getting back to the question about empires, what did the Cahokians eat? Lots of kinds of meat, and quite a variety of plants--though some of the relics in the pit may have been from plants they used. corn, bottle gourd, squashes, sunflower, sumpweed, lambsquarters, maygrass, knotweed, several kinds of nuts and fruits--grapes, persimmons, strawberry, plum, bramble, elderberry, black haw, mulberry, and nightshade... And amaranth, purslane, "panicoid grasses" (a huge family), carpetweed, and spurges--ok, they wouldn't have eaten that one, except as medicine and I'd be dubious of it even then. I'd never heard of a lot of these, but I think most of them are local to the Cahokia area. Seasonings probably wouldn't have been used in sufficient quantities to show up in the relics. Maybe one day we'll find residues in pots. The Cahokians didn't write any cookbooks. Even if they'd been literate, they might not have needed to. They were big, but not that big.

Little barley? I've seen that stuff. I remember reading about wheat when I was very young and asking my parents if the stuff in the yard was wheat. It wasn't.