More Cooking: Frybread

This NYT article is on frybread, a kind of bread that is made by Native Americans. The central dynamic of the article is that it is both a deeply meaningful cuisine embraced by many because of the beloved family members who made it a particular way; and also because it comes out of their traditions of shared suffering; but also that it is often rejected by activists because it is not in fact a traditional Native American food at all. It is a food that was developed after the United States government removed many of them from their lands and traditional foodways, one that they had to figure out from whatever dry good supplies the government put in their box.

Southerners will notice many parallels with our own cornbread debate. Also a few with our debate about biscuits, e.g., everyone's grandmother made the best ones and no one else does it quite right. Mine made them with bacon grease from yesterday's bacon, and served them with today's bacon, from which she reserved the grease for tomorrow's biscuits. She had a little tin she'd pour the hot grease into as she served the bacon, and tomorrow if you got up to watch her cook she'd scoop grease right back out of it to mix with the flour, baking powder, salt, and milk.

Cornbread, though, is where the big regional issue arises. Ask a Southerner if cornbread should be sweet, for example. There are passionate differences, but they really come down to questions about what kinds of materials were available in the very hard times either on the frontier or, later for the Deep South, after the Civil War. Appalachian Southerners deny that sweetness is at all appropriate, because sugar was not to be had in the hard times. Deep South Southerners, especially Black Southerners, insist that it is only proper if it is a bit sweet -- because sugar cane was relatively easy to come by in the wetter, hotter regions further South. Cotton grew better there also, which is why the black population came to know that particular kind of cornbread rather than the dry sort served in the mountains.

But of course this kind of hardship is where what I was just calling an essential cultural food develops. It is, I gather, why the Jews still eat certain foods at certain holidays -- in memory of hard times, some of them thousands of years ago. 

There's a place over on the Cherokee reservation that serves frybread with chili, chili being another food whose proper composition is hotly debated. The Eastern Band of Cherokee will have learned this frybread some other way, since they were never removed (in spite of significant efforts by the Federal government). I haven't had the stuff, so I don't know how either their frybread or their chili will sort along the debatable lines, but I will have to ride over and try it sometime.