The Three Sisters & Parched Corn

The garden and the grain that fed a continent, and the ash trick that made it whole food.

Why it is worth it

Corn, beans, and squash grown together (the Three Sisters, see Food) was the heart of Eastern and Southwestern farming: corn for the beans to climb, beans to feed the soil, squash to shade it. Dried, the three keep all winter and together make a near-complete diet.

Parched corn & the ash trick

1. Parched corn: dry-roast dried kernels in a hot pan until they puff and brown; they keep for months and travel as trail food, eaten dry or boiled soft.
2. Nixtamalization (the ash trick): simmer dried corn in water with hardwood ashes (lye) or lime, then rinse and rub off the hulls. This is not just for taste: it unlocks the niacin in corn, and peoples who ate corn this way never got the deadly deficiency (pellagra) that struck those who skipped it.
3. Grind the treated corn (hominy) wet for masa or dry for meal.

Acorns & Wild Nuts

The forest's grain crop, free for the gathering, once you leach the bitter out.

Why it is worth it

Acorns were a staple across much of the land: a fat- and carbohydrate-rich nut that drops by the bushel. Raw they are too bitter and astringent to eat (the tannins), but leached they become a sweet, nutritious flour. Hickory, walnut, butternut, hazelnut, and pine nuts add rich oils.

Step by step (acorns)

1. Gather sound acorns, shell them, and discard any wormy or moldy ones.
2. Grind the meats coarse.
3. Leach out the tannins: either tie the meal in cloth in running water for days (cold leach), or pour boiling water through it, changing the water again and again, until it is no longer bitter.
4. Dry the leached meal and use it as flour, or boil it into a mush.

Cattail & the Marsh Pantry

One plant gives you a vegetable, a flour, and a fire-starter all year round.

Why it is worth it

Cattail is the marsh supermarket. In spring the young shoots ("Cossack asparagus") eat like a vegetable; early summer the green flower spikes boil like corn on the cob; the yellow pollen is a protein-rich flour; and all year the starchy roots can be pounded in water to settle out a white flour. Wild rice, arrowhead tubers, and groundnut share the same wetlands.

Step by step

1. Spring: peel young shoots to the tender white core and eat raw or boiled.
2. Early summer: boil the green flower spikes and eat like corn; shake the later yellow pollen into a bag for flour.
3. Fall and winter: dig roots, crush them in water, let the starch settle, pour off the water, and dry the flour.

Inner Bark: Eating the Cambium

The thin living film under the bark that can carry you to the next meal.

Why it is worth it

Just under the rough outer bark of many trees is a thin, pale, moist layer (the inner bark and cambium) that is food. Pine, spruce, birch, poplar, aspen, cottonwood, willow, and slippery elm all carry it. Northern peoples ate it in the hungry weeks of early spring: it is carbohydrate and fiber that will keep you going when nothing else is up yet. The Adirondacks are even named for a word said to mean bark-eaters.

Step by step

1. In spring, when the sap is up, cut a window through the outer bark of a branch or a tree you can spare.
2. Peel it back and scrape off the soft, pale inner layer.
3. Eat it raw in a pinch, or dry it and grind it to a flour, or cut it in strips and boil it like noodles.

Birch & Maple Sap, Pine-Needle Tea

Tap a tree for clean drinking water, and brew the needles against scurvy.

Water from a tree

In early spring the sap rises, and birch and maple run almost-clear, lightly sweet water you can drink straight from the tree. Bore a shallow hole, set a carved spigot (a hollowed twig of sumac or elder works), and hang a pail. Birch especially gives a thin drinkable sap; boil maple down for sugar (see below). It is some of the cleanest water in the woods.

Pine-needle tea

A tea of green pine, spruce, or fir needles is loaded with vitamin C. In the winter of 1535 the Iroquoian people at Stadacona taught Jacques Cartier's scurvy-dying crew to brew a conifer tea, and it saved them. Steep a handful of chopped green needles in hot (not boiling) water.

Berries, Rose Hips, Sumac & Juniper

The wild sugars, the vitamin C, and the seasonings, with the ones that bite back.

Why it is worth it

Wild fruit carried the sweetness and the vitamins. Blueberries, chokecherries, serviceberries (Saskatoon), elderberries, and more were eaten fresh and dried into cakes or into pemmican (Chapter 10). Rose hips are packed with vitamin C. Staghorn sumac's red berry clusters, steeped in cool water, make a tart pink "lemonade." Juniper berries season meat and brew a tea.

Step by step

1. Dry surplus berries in the sun or by the fire into cakes for winter, or pound them into pemmican.
2. Rose hips: split, remove the irritating inner seeds and hairs, and dry for tea or syrup.
3. Sumac: soak the red berry clusters in cool water, strain through cloth, and sweeten.
4. Juniper: use a few dried berries as a seasoning or a light tea, not a meal.

Wild Protein & the Whole Animal

Weirs, snares, and even insects, and the rule that nothing is wasted.

Why it is worth it

Protein came from traps that work while you do other things. Fish weirs (a stone or stake fence that funnels fish into a basket or a holding pen) fed whole villages. Snares and deadfalls on game runs (see Hunting) take small game. And in hard times, insects (grasshoppers, grubs, crickets) are honest protein that many peoples harvested without shame. The iron law was respect: use the whole animal, meat, hide, sinew, bone, and fat, and waste nothing.

Step by step

1. Fish weir: set a low funnel of stones or stakes across a stream, narrowing to a basket or a trap pen; check it often.
2. Small game: set snares and deadfalls on the trails and feeding runs (Chapter 8), and run your line morning and evening.
3. Insects: roast grasshoppers and grubs dry; they grind into a protein meal.
4. Dress and use every part: smoke the meat, render the fat, keep the hide and sinew (Tools and Hunting).

Pemmican, Smoke & Dried Stores

How the wild harvest was made to last through a northern winter.

Why it is worth it

A good hunt or harvest only mattered if it kept. The old answer was dry it, smoke it, or render it. Pemmican (dried meat pounded with fat and berries, Chapter 10) was the great traveling and winter food, a Cree word and a Plains invention that the whole fur trade later ran on. Thin-sliced meat and split fish dried hard over a slow smoky fire. Berries dried into cakes. Fat was rendered and stored.

Step by step

1. Slice meat and fish thin and dry them on racks over a low, smoky (not hot) fire until hard.
2. Pound the dried meat to a powder and mix with an equal weight of rendered fat and dried berries; press into pemmican.
3. Dry surplus berries into flat cakes.
4. Store it all cool, dry, and wrapped, away from damp and animals.