Native American Recipes

Recipes and information on Native American food. This is the food and recipes of food eaten preinvasion upto and including current popular Native American food.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Squash Blossums Anishinaabeg Style



1 egg yolk
2 cups ice-cold water
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 2/3 cups white flour

Whip the egg yolk and baking soda into the water in a large dipping bowl. Sift in the flour, mix well. Batter should be thin, rather watery, run easily off a spoon. It should be used no more than 10 minutes after made, i.e. still bre quite cold when it hits the frying oil. Dip blossom, twirl to coat thoroughly, Turn after 1 minute and
fry 1 minute longer, lighter gold than the cornmeal coating in the Pueblo version. Sprinkle with sifted powdered sugar while still draining and hot from the oil. Keep warm in oven. Alternatively: omit sugar, serve with small dipping bowls of or berry syrup.
Traditionally, the flowers were used in soups and stews in 2 ways. In the commonest, they were thickeners -- put in at the beginning, the fragile flowers cooked away into the broth and had no individual identity. Put in near the end, they were heated through, softened a bit (especially th female blossoms, which have tiny squashes or
pumpkins forming at the stem end) as a sort of vegetable -- although the rest of the soup or stew was likely to be full of dried berries, so maybe I should say as another fruit.
Up north here, these fritters were traditionally made with pumpkin and squash flowers too. No chile or cumin was used, and about 1/2 tsp (or no) salt. A batter of flour would be more likely to be used than cornmeal if there was a good trade supply of it, because although some corn was raised, it was nowhere near as much as in the southwest, and a bit farther north of the Great Lakes, the growing season is too
short for curcurbitae.
The blossoms were most often eaten as a sweet with maple syrup or sprinkled with maple sugar -- and that's still a great way to eat these fritters, too -- blossom-beignets. You can also sprinkle them with sifted powdered sugar, as with New Orleans beignets.

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