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. 

8 comments:

  1. Before I enjoy a food, I always check to see whether activists approve of it, just to be safe.

    Re cornbread: I have no views about what was traditional or authentic in any time or place and wouldn't care if I did know. It happens that I dislike the taste of sugar in cornbread, enough to pass on a dish of cornbread if it's sweet. No need to browbeat my host, it's just time to find some other dish to concentrate on. A sweet cornbread with icing might be a nice dessert cake, but not something with any appeal during the middle of a meal.

    It naturally follow, however, that anyone who likes the wrong kind of cornbread is a white supremacist.

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  2. Anonymous8:20 PM

    I love frybread, especially at the bottom of a Navajo Taco (fry bread, refried beans, taco meat, [leafy green garbage], cheese, chopped tomatoes, and salsa. Not good for you, but very, very filling and good tasting!

    RedQuarters cornbread is a tiny bit sweet. Mom's family comes from Louisiana and East Texas. Dad's family didn't make cornbread. They made biscuits or "light bread."

    LittleRed1

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  3. Well, if it makes you feel better the activists would be absolutely incensed by my attempting to find common ground among different strains of humanity by raising the comparison (although perhaps a few of them would recall that the Cherokee Nation joined the Confederacy in war against the Union). They'd prefer the difference, and the grievance.

    The common ground is sometimes steadier. I'll bet you I'll like frybread, and I know a Cherokee who likes my biscuits.

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  4. Frybread is wonderful. For my taste, just about any cornmeal product is great. My mother-in-law made hot-water fried cornbread. My grandmother made a kind of corn pancake thing that was wonderful.

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  5. Sugar in the recipe makes it a corn cake not bread. Period. Full stop.
    Biscuits are made with lard...of which, bacon grease is the top of the line stuff. Kinda like regular gas vs premium. 0>;~} My mom, however, could never get the commissary to stock it, so we had to settle for Crisco. And, as for saving bacon grease, I have used the same ceramic dish that my parents used for (mumblety mumblety) years now. Everything is better with bacon -- grease, meat or smell. Or as a local restaurant's motto goes, "You either love bacon, or you're wrong."
    heh

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    Replies
    1. You're talking about Corn Pone then.

      Personally, I like my cornbread a little sweet. But I also liked my late friend's Mexican Cornbread, made with some jalapeno and habenero peppers. It had a bite to it, but was great with Chili.

      He also made "Beer Bread", which just substitutes beer for the normal liquid in the batter.

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  6. I love bacon and would cheerfully make biscuits with it, but if it's not handy I'm happy to use butter. When I make dumplings I use the skimmings from the chicken stock, which are half broth and half schmaltz. For pie dough I like lard but am happy with butter, or 50/50. For cornbread, I use any kind of cooking oil, but I'd use butter at need.

    My husband likes to melt the bacon fat with a little vinegar, pour it on a plate, and mop it up with the biscuit.

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  7. I always brush molten butter on top of the biscuit, after it comes out of the oven and right before serving. I do often use lard for short crust pies, especially the meat pies made for Christmas.

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