Ojibway Dream

My wife is a tremendous cook. She’s creative in the kitchen and can conjure fabulous meals out of whatever she finds in the larder. Unlike me who seems perpetually condemned to the same old unenlightened throw-it-in-a-pot and watch it boil philosophy, she’s a whiz. We eat well because of that. We’re not wealthy people at all, but out suppers are inventive, nutritious and fun.
Lately she’s been working through a cookbook that features recipes for four-ingredient meals.
It’s fabulous. The flavors that come from those recipes and from her determined effort to find satisfying, low cost meals means that our suppers have been verging on the spectacular lately. We still buy the same stuff. It’s the preparation and the inventiveness that turns it all around.
I once put tuna in my Kraft dinner and thought it was creative. Or sliced wieners. Other times I’ve put the jelly on the toast before the peanut butter and on one memorable occasion I threw kidney beans in with hamburger, onions with a spoonful or two of chili powder and called it fabulous. Gourmet I’m not but I do love to eat.
There’s something to be said for the old phrase ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’ I don’t know how much merit that actually has but I do know that a good spread definitely gets my attention. It had to have been a native person who came up with that. At my age there’s a definite plethora of bannock bellies among my First Nations pals. As former athletes we like to call it “the coach’s profile.”
We like to eat. Many times at gatherings and feasts I’ve watched as native men piled on the food. The two tier system seems most popular; you can just never seem to get enough on one go-round on the plate. You can’t rely on a horizontal accumulation to satisfy you – you have to go vertical. Heaping’ helpin’ is a First Nations phrase. It must be. There’s solid evidence to back it up.
There are a lot of people who have asked me over the years ‘what do Native people eat?’ Well, aside from the potential for great one-liners in response to that question we do have a definite cuisine. Just thinking of it makes me hungry. As people in touch with the land we developed our diet from what was available. That meant a lot of game, berries, vegetables, herbs and fruit.
But like everything, the things we consume changed. With the advent of sugar and bleached flour, salt and numerous spices we left the land-based cuisine and took up colonial chow. Still, there’s a definite and unmistakable native cuisine that makes me slather to think of it.
For me there’s nothing like a can of Spam, fried and mixed with eggs liberally sprinkled with cheese, canned potatoes, a hunk of bannock baked on a stick over a fire and slathered with jam washed down with a mug of campfire coffee with the grounds still in. Of course, it needs to be consumed outside while sitting on a log. Mmm. You’re getting awful close to the path to my heart with that meal.
Even if there was it something you could offer that would come close to that it still wouldn’t measure up to that same bannock made on a stick that you shred off bite by bite and dip in a roiling stew made of rabbit, leeks, corn, potatoes and squash. That’s just the plain truth of things. Add a pinch or three of pepper and your on your way to gastronomic paradise.
Well, a pickerel, gutted and packed in clay and tossed into the fire comes awful close too, as long as there’s greens and wild mushrooms in a cast iron skillet tossed over a flame. If you chase that with blueberries and then wash it all down with dark, strong Ojibway tea and then a smoke to share with the Spirits, you might just come close to perfection too.
But then again, a nice moose rubaboo properly done with flour, water and maple syrup with bannock for dipping is hard to resist at the best of times provided there’s a cob of corn roasted on the fire with the husk still on and water from the river cold and rich with the mineral taste that reminds you of rocks and lakes upstream. Again, eaten outside with waves of heat from the fire pressing against you make sit unforgettable.
Yes. We have a cuisine beyond Kraft dinner and sardines. The longer you’re away from it the more you remember that the way to an Ojibway man’s heart isn’t through his stomach – it’s through his recollections. My wife in the kitchen is building some great memories too. We get to eat together after all.