Indian Dinners

"Indian dinners" have become a tradition in themselves over the years. Enjoyed by the local Cherokee community as well as outsiders, an Indian dinner usually includes fried chicken, potatoes, hominy, cabbage, wild greens, bean bread with fatback, herb tea, and fruit cobbler. These represent long-standing Cherokee foodways, which are different from "powwow chow" with it ubiquitous and delicious fry bread. These traditional Cherokee foods and preparation methods have long influenced southern cooking and Appalachian fare. What would we do without beans and cornbread?

Today’s Indian dinners balance unique Cherokee tradition with food familiar to most Americans. Fried chicken represents wild turkey and other game (and the frying technique comes from African Americans in the South). Potatoes, domesticated by Native American horticulturalists in South America, have long been a standard in the southern mountains. Hominy, usually associated with southern cooking, was actually developed by Cherokee women who leached water through hardwood ashes to create lye, in which they soaked their Cherokee corn-a genetically unique maize developed over centuries. A specially woven basket facilitated rising the hominy in running water. Wild greens, picked in season, go with the meal; ramps and sochan in the spring, sweet can and creasies in the summer. The unique Cherokee bean bread is formed from unbolted corn meal and cooked pinto beans, then wrapped in cornhusks and boiled like a dumpling, resulting in a solid cake. Most people season their bean bread with a little bit of grease from fried fatback. In the fall, chestnut bread is made in the same way, using chestnuts instead of beans, sweetened with maple syrup, and wrapped in hickory leaves. Herb tea varies with the season-sassafras in the spring, spicewood and mint in the summer. Fruit cobblers also change with the season, but blackberry dumplings remain a favorite year round.

Many Cherokee women prepare these foods at home for their families. When someone in the community needs money for medial coasts or a sports team needs to travel, women work together to prepare these meals for sale at lunchtime events, advertised in the local paper and by word of mouth. In recent years, the Cherokee chapter of the North American Indian Women’s Association has been making Indian dinners for visiting groups and festivals to help fund their activities and cultural programs.

Reprinted online by permission of the publisher.