Cookbooks Highlighting Indigenous foodways are on the menu this season. The authors of three forthcoming titles—two from Big Five houses and one launching a university press series—spoke with PW about sharing their culinary traditions.
Oglala Lakota chef and restaurateur Sean Sherman is a pioneer in this space. His 2017 debut, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, written with Beth Dooley, focused on the cuisines of the Dakota and Minnesota territories and was a critical and commercial success. Its follow-up, Turtle Island (Clarkson Potter, Nov.), casts a wider net. Taking its title from a name used by some Indigenous peoples to refer to North America, the book, written with Tlingit journalist Kate Nelson and Kristin Donnelly, a recipe developer and copywriter, showcases Native foods across the continent.
“I want to highlight the immensity of the diversity of Indigenous peoples and cultures across North America and wipe away European colonial lines,” Sherman says. He sections recipes into 13 geographic regions—desert lands, northern forests, Mesoamerican highlands, etc.—as a nod to the 13 segments of a tortoise shell and the year’s 13 full moons. Recipes include tepary bean and squash chili, maple-chaga muffins with saskatoon berries, and sopes con aguate y chapulines. “Every region is special,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a ‘flyover state.’ Indigenous culture showcases true regionality.”
In Rooted in Fire (HarperOne, Nov.), private chef Pyet DeSpain, a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, celebrates the foods of her Native American and Mexican heritages. DeSpain grew up on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma and in Kansas City, Kans., dividing her time between her parents’ families, and her recipes draw on these multicultural influences: jalapeño bison jerky, mushroom and poblano wild rice with duck fat, maple and cinnamon blue corn mush. The book is about reconnection, she says. “It was in the kitchen, cooking with my grandma, where I found solace and home and happiness and joy. I found empowerment by leaning into my authenticity, and I want readers to feel that, too.”
Chef and filmmaker Adán Medrano’s The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook (Texas Tech Univ., Aug.) is the first book in a projected series, Indigenous Foodways of Texas and Northern Mexico, to be edited by the author, who also wrote 2014’s Truly Texas Mexican and 2019’s Don’t Count the Tortillas. “Everyone kept confusing the culinary traditions of the first peoples of Texas with Tex-Mex,” he says. “Those two books were successful in clarifying what people had misunderstood for so long.”
His new book emphasizes Texas Mexican plant-based traditions, “which could go back to the first earth ovens thousands of years ago.” Recipes like mesquite agua fresca, Jerusalem artichoke tart, cactus and pinto beans, and avocado and butter beans celebrate ingredients that have been all but forgotten, he explains. “I call it ‘generational amnesia’ in the book. Native Americans are beginning to rediscover traditional ingredients. We should not forget, and also take them to new places that are life-giving.”
All three authors welcome increased visibility for Indigenous cuisines. “The more cookbooks out there, the better,” Sherman says. “Because it’s not about one person; it’s about normalizing seeing Indigenous and Native American cultures out there, especially on land that we still live on.”
