The World Traveling Spud

 

 

The World Traveling Spud

Unlocking the secrets of DNA has opened a new world of understanding about how past civilizations grew, moved around, and intermingled. Thanks to research into the human genome, we now know that Native Americans came into contact with Polynesian peoples as early as 1200 C.E.

But there's another way we know that Polynesians and people of the Americas came into contact. They shared their food, specifically, the sweet potato. Potatoes, like at least 50 percent of commonly used foods, arose in the Americas, in the "fertile crescent" of Peru.  But sweet potatoes have been a staple in Polynesia for more than 2,000 years.

Recent findings suggest that Polynesians traveled to western South America long before European contact. Not only did they learn about and adopt the sweet potato but they also intermixed with Native Americans in the Central and Southern continent. Polynesians were known for "island hopping" and covering vast areas of the Pacific region. 

Why haven't we known more about this before now? Well, as the journal PNAS Highlights writes, "the connectivities, transformations, and dynamism of traditional societies in many areas of the world continue to be underestimated for periods before European exploration."

Learn more at Sweet Potatoes: from the Andes to Polynesia in Science Magazine. 

King Frederick II Inspects the Potato Harvest

By Robert Müller - www.dhm.de, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3754769
 

The White Potato is a World Traveler Too

If the sweet potato originated in the Americas, from whence came other varieties? They also came from the same region, not Ireland, Germany, or even Idaho. They came by way of Spanish soldiers using an innovative tactic. Soldiers marching through Europe planted potatoes as they went, so there would be food for subsequent troops as well as for their return to Spain. 

But very few people in Europe knew what to do with potatoes. In Bavaria, they were grown for their flowers in ornamental gardens. Then, a visiting American named Benjamin Thompson developed a potato soup to be fed to the poor in Munich. From the late 1500s to the present day, interest and love of the "Earth Apple" has spread throughout Europe to the point where some countries have become dependent on it. 

With a caloric value 3.6 times as much as bread, potatoes soon surmounted grain as the food of choice for a traveling army. Peasants also benefited from the extra nutrition in potatoes, and lands grew more populous with healthier people and more children.  King Frederick the Great of Prussia was the potato's best marketer, issuing 15 Potato Decrees extolling its benefits and instructing his subjects on how to grow them. There was general widespread resistance at first because tasty recipes for potatoes hadn't been developed. But during two wars in the last half of the 1700s, growing potatoes prevented famines. In 1817, Germans bestowed the name Kartoffel on the potato to distinguish it from other plants growing underground. 

Today, Germans eat an average of 125 pounds of potatoes annually per person. No wonder the saying goes: "Potatoes make fries, chips, and vodka. It's like the other vegetables aren't even trying." 

My potato crop a couple of years ago

 

 

All Hail the Kale!

Kale: King of the Greens

Kale is an easy and pretty green to grow in your garden and heaps of it are on offer at farmers' markets. But even vegetarians shun it sometimes and it was thought to be fit for only cattle to eat (lucky cows!). 

In the past few years, we're growing and eating more kale. I was intrigued when my colleague Linnea Bjorkman gifted me a few large leaves from her beautiful garden. So I went to my bookshelf and pulled out Grow, Cook, Nourish by Darina Allen, a compendium of gardening advice and more than 500 recipes. 

 

I imagine you're thinking, "but what does kale taste like?" Granted, a leaf that's been hanging on the plant for a month might be bitter and fibrous, but the large leaves given to me were fresh and tasty. I could imagine them mixed with other greens in a salad, but for this first foray into kale eating, I wanted to cook them. 

Allen's book did not disappoint, with six recipes for kale. "Kale Stir-Fry with Asian Flavors" caught my eye and I selected the recipe to make as a side dish. It's easy, has few ingredients, and cooks up fast! 

If you don't have Darina's book, go to this link of easy vegan recipes for a similar one: https://www.glueandglitter.com/easy-kale-recipe/

However, the book's recipe adds sliced scallions, a chili pepper, a pinch of palm sugar, and a teaspoon of sesame oil at the end. Or you could omit the chili and use spicy sesame oil. 

It's a nice, simple recipe that invites you to experiment. I have made it into a full main dish by adding cubed tofu or chicken and vegetables. It is good over rice or scooped up in chapati or a tortilla. It shines alongside squash or stirred into a soup. 

Best of all, kale's benefits are many: it is packed with vitamins, phyto-nutrients, fiber, minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, folate, niacin, and antioxidants. You'll be hale if you eat kale--it truly deserves the title of superfood, as well as super tasty food!

Black Smoke Explores the Roots of Barbecue

 

Black Smoke Explores the Roots of Barbecue

Author Adrian Miller is too modest when he calls his recent book Black Smoke "a history of African Americans and barbecue." It's really a comprehensive and well-researched account of all of barbecue's roots, which also covers the indigenous peoples' uses of barbecue in the Americas. He includes a fascinating account of the Columbus expedition's second landing on the beaches of Cuba where they found several fires untended, with fish, rabbits, and "two serpents" cooking. The men fell upon and feasted on all but the serpents, which they found to be "disgusting" and later, they met up with the Taino people whose camp they had raided. The sailors confessed and the tribespeople rejoiced that the serpents (thought to be iguanas) were left alone. They could fish again and snare rabbits, but the iguanas were difficult to obtain.

 

After that, barbecue knowledge bounced from Native Americans to Black enslaved people to mainstream America. And Black people brought their own techniques from West Africa. Spanish colonizers contributed the pig. The cooking method served multiple purposes besides preparing food for eating; it also preserved food by drying and smoking. 

It's easy to see why Black Smoke won a James Beard award in 2021. It's well researched (23 pages of footnotes and bibliography!) and contains many illustrations and photographs. There are also 22 recipes, including The Sioux Chef Sean Sherman's Grilled Bison Skewers with Wojape, a sauce made from wild chokecherries with honey or maple syrup. 

In the photo below by August Schwerdfeger, Wikipedia Commons, Chef Sean Sherman forages for wild ramps. 

 

 

What Makes Mesa Verde So Green?

What Makes Mesa Verde So Green?

It is literally a "green mesa." This formation in the extreme southwestern corner of Colorado is in a high desert environment, yet it supports an amazing diversity of plant and animal life. In ancient times, it was the home of cliff dwellers, the Puebloan people who thrived and then disappeared mysteriously. Mesa Verde is a land of contrasts, myth, and surprising discoveries. 

How exactly did they thrive, these ancient Puebloan peoples, on this collection of three large mesas surrounded by deep ravines and canyons? Mesa Verde's geology offers clues. Deep in geologic history, the area was actually part of a vast inland sea. Sandy soils from beaches and shallow waters were deposited over a thick layer of shale, made from the hardened mud that was once sea bottom. Then, through geological uplifting, the mesas rose above the surrounding river bottom land and water runoff sculpted the valleys and canyons below. But the mesa surface, being relatively flat, absorbed rain water and snow, which percolated down until it met the hard shale. It then traveled horizontally, sometimes for years, until it seeped out of the mesa's vertical walls. These seeps were known to the dwellers, who carved out reservoirs in the shale to store the water, some of them as small as a ladle. 

The dwellers fashioned many water catchment structures to take maximum advantage of the water for growing food and satisfying their and their animals' thirst. Nearly 1,200 check dams and reservoirs have been discovered on the mesa, and extensive terracing was noticed after a series of wildfires uncovered numerous sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

Mesa Verdians practiced corn agriculture and grew "The Three Sisters": corn, squash, and beans. They domesticated turkeys, to which they fed corn. They foraged acorns, pine nuts, berries, and spring greens. Lower down, in the valleys, they practiced decrue farming, flooding the crops in the spring with runoff from the mountains and forests to the north. In fall and winter, they fished and hunted.

The people harvested and preserved their crops. Many of the structures in their cliff dwellings were devoted to food storage. The Puebloan people took basketry and pottery to a high art as well as the highest levels of functionality. Sadly, many of the pots and containers have been carried away by scavengers, but some beautiful examples are in the collections of museums ranging from the Denver Art Museum to the British Museum. 

About the mysterious disappearance of the cliff dwellers, modern Puebloans have an answer: "We're still here." They say that the residents of Mesa Verde simply migrated to other places, including settlements in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. The appearance of similar pottery and basketry confirms this. Puebloans, and their culture, continues today.

Fair Farro

 

Want to celebrate spring with edible plants? Try this amazing Spring Farro Salad, with the freshest of spring greens and edible flowers paired with shelf-stable ingredients like jarred artichoke hearts and farro, an ancient grain loved by the Egyptians and Romans. In fact, farro is an overarching name for three grains from which wheat evolved: farro piccolo (einkorn), farro medio (emmer), and farro grande (spelt).

 

 

 

And here are four more satisfying farro recipes: https://www.npr.org/2013/10/02/227838385/farro-an-ancient-if-complicated-grain-worth-figuring-out

 

When cooking farro, be sure you know if your product is semi-pearled, pearled, or whole grain with the bran intact. The latter needs to be soaked overnight before cooking.

 

Another delicious spring farro salad has been created by Whole Grains Council/Oldways. Find the recipe here.

A Biblical Vegetarian

 A Biblical Vegetarian

By After Briton Rivière - Manchester City Art Gallery, Public Domain

In the Old Testament Book of Daniel, the visionary and prophet who was taken to Babylon to serve at the court of Nebuchadnezzar with three other young men, refused to eat the rich food and wine of his captors and called for a diet of vegetables and water instead. But his guards were afraid that the four men would start looking unhealthy on such a diet and the king would notice this and have the guards punished.

 

Daniel asked the guards to grant his wish for a vegetarian diet for 10 days and then see if there was any appearance of undernourishment. The guards were surprised that he and his friends looked healthier and better nourished than any of the other young men at court after the trial period.

 

Those of us who would like to follow Daniel’s example are discouraged when we survey the veggies on offer at the typical grocery store.  Even natural food stores carry a disappointingly small range of edible plants. About a week ago, the New York Times published an article lamenting that kale is “so 2010.” 

 

But it goes on to explain that the 15-year-old company Adaptive Seeds offers 14 different types of kale seeds, some of them blends and crosses. The company started when Sarah Kleeger and her partner Andrew Still journeyed to nine Northern European countries with climates similar to the U.S.’s, returning with 800 different varieties of vegetable seeds not commercially available here.

 

Some of the kales include showy ones like North Star Polaris, a ferny kale, and Bear Necessities, which looks like seaweed. Adaptive Seeds’ catalog also offers jewels like Transylvanian sorrel, salad burnet, bladder campion, alexanders, stalkless celeries, orach, and a lettuce called Doucette d’Alger.

 

Brassicas are the plants that give twice. Biennial, they will sprout again about this time in the spring with asparagus-style sprouts that have flower buds on them, called “raab”. These are even more prized than the original crop.

 

Are grains like amaranth and quinoa vegetables? Adaptive Seeds classifies them so because of their edible leaves. Plus, they are so beautiful that Kleeger calls them “edible ornamentals or edimentals.” If you have a subscription to NYT, you can read more here.  

 

Sea Vegetable Salad

Sea Vegetable Salad

This recipe marries vegetables from land and sea. I obtained the arame from a store called Natural Grocers, very much like Whole Foods. 

Dressing:

2 T. soy sauce

2 T. rice vinegar

1 T. mirin

1 tsp. sesame oil

2 T. grated ginger

Salad:

1/2 cup dried arame

1/2 cup red bell pepper, minced

1/2 cup chopped scallions

1/2 cup carrot, minced

1/2 cup English cucumber, sliced

1/2 cup bamboo or coconut shoots

1 T. sesame seeds, toasted 

Assembly:

Soak the arame in water for 30 minutes. Drain and squeeze out excess water. Mix ingredients for dressing. Arrange ingredients and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Drizzle with dressing.