"Cooking the Native Way: Chia Cafe Collective." Book Review

COOKING THE NATIVE WAY, a New Book by Heyday publishing.

[Nyerges is the author of “Foraging California,” “Extreme Simplicity,” “The Self-Reliant Home,” and other books. For information on his books and classes, go to www.SchoolofSelf-reliance.com.]

We’ve all heard about how the indigenous people of Southern California lived off the land with a diverse diet, yet modern Americans seem to persist with the myth that the diet of the past was a survival diet of bland acorns and squirrels.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Undoubtedly, some native peoples of the past went hungry during times of drought.  After all, “store” was a verb, not a noun.  Yet, as the indigenous people have begun to tell their own stories, a fuller picture emerges of a diverse and healthful diet that could have been the envy of contemporary people just about anywhere else.

“Cooking the Native Way: Chia Café Collective” boasts 10 authors: Barbara Drake, Daniel McCarthy, Deborah Small, Leslie Mouriquand, Cindi Alvitre, Craig Torres, Abe Sanchez, Lorene Sisquoc, Heidi Lucero, and Tima Lotah Link, all of whom are long-time educators in Native American food, traditions, beliefs, and anthropology.  The full-color book is beautifully done, and if one were to buy it only for the pictures, you’d not be disappointed.

“Cooking the Native Way” is ostensibly a cookbook of native foods such as the acorn, cactus, mesquite, chia, yucca, nettles, and others. But it is so much more!

The authors begin by sharing their story of how their teaching about native foods, and compiling recipes, evolved into the Chia Café Collective organization.  You get an introduction to the people and the places where they teach, and why it’s important to preserve this heritage.

The Mother Earth Clan (Drake, Sisquoc, and Alvitre) share with the reader the clan rules to live by, which are guidelines for cultural survival and sustainability.  For example, all things are sacred and all things are alive.  Respect your elders by listening and learning.  Always be truthful.  Always give before you take.  What you do will come back to you, good or bad.

The photos are fantastic, and uplifting to see.  The section on Places introduces the reader to all the Southern California locations where the authors teach, with photos of their workshops.

The heart of the book is the Recipes section, beginning on page 60.  You learn about the key plants used by native peoples, how to prepare them into delicious dishes, and where to purchase them.  Some are commonly foraged in the wild.  The reader is also given the details of why these traditional foods are so good nutritionally. 

Since acorns are perhaps the single stereotypical food of native California, we are treated to everything we need to know about the acorns, such as how to remove the tannic acid, how to store them, the remarkable nutritional content, and how to turn the acorn flour into some amazingly delicious breads, cookies, and dumplings. 

A chapter on the popular chia seed explains the history of this seed in the native diet, and how to collect, and process it into different dishes.  Perhaps not widely known is that the commonly available chia seed (from Trader Joes, for example) is not the chia used in the past.  The native chia, sometimes called golden chia, is Salvia columbariae, whereas the commercially-available chia is Salvia hispanica.  The nutritional values of each is very similar, however.

In the section on prickly pear cactus, you learn how to select the nopales or cactus pads, how to clean them, and how to turn them into a variety of tasty dishes.  Details are also given for processing the cactus fruits, which are the closest thing to watermelon you’re going to find in the wild.

This is a refreshing book that is enjoyable to read, a pleasure to look at, and full of tried and tested recipes.  The philosophy throughout is reminiscent of other recent books that have attempted to record the diversity and beauty of native foods, such as “Ethnobotany Project: Contemporary Uses of Native Plants,” (by Blurb.com) which is a collaboration of nearly 30 authors, including the authors of “Cooking the Native Way.”  Another excellent book in this vein is “Enough for All: Foods of My Dry Creek Pomo and Bodega Miwuk People” by Kathleen Rose Smith, also by Heyday books.  

“Cooking the Native Way: Chia Café Collective” was published in 2018 by Heyday books in Berkeley.  It’s an 8 ½ by 11 format, 161 pages.