THE COOKBOOK TEST #0013: SURVIVAL FOOD: NORTH WOODS STORIES BY A MENOMINEE COOK

INSTALLMENT #0013 (PAID) / WISCONSIN IN THE REAR VIEW / FOOD, STORIES, AND STORIES ABOUT FOOD / WILD RICE WITH SQUASH / BAKED ONIONS

Dear Subscribers,

Welcome to the second of my Thanksgiving-proximate reads of culinary books that address the indigenous American perspective. I don’t want to get preachy about this stuff - it’s really easy, particularly as a white person, to get head-splittingly solemn and self-flagellating when it comes to the forced colonization of the United States - but the story right is up there with slavery and the fight against British rule when it comes to understanding the good, bad, and tremendously complex history that makes up this country’s DNA.

Also (and this is more fun) there’s an entire Native American cuisine hiding in plain sight that would educate, enrich, and better feed all of us if we were just willing to read, research, and listen a little bit. There’s a reason that much of the world looks at America as a culinary wasteland, and that’s because we’ve fallen so far out of touch with the fish, wild game, and native plants that could be defining the seasons and flavors of our food. Before European Americans crash-landed on these shores, there were myriad traditions driven directly by the land and its bounty, not relentless maximized commercial agriculture and (eventually) factory-made industrial food.

Last week I wrote about Iroquois Foods and Food Preparation, which was a time capsule from 1916, featuring preserved-in-amber stories and methods of contemporaneous and pre-colonial agriculture and cooking methods. This week, something connected but very different: SURVIVAL FOOD: NORTH WOODS STORIES BY A MENOMINEE COOK by Thomas Pecore Weso. Weso, who died this year, came of age on northern Wisconsin’s Menominee Indian Reservation in the 1970s, and his memories (in many ways) line up with my own Madison-in-the-1980s memories - a lot of locally made sausage, polka on the radio, supper clubs, and a mix of German and Italian culinary culture. Weso’s memories diverge from my own in a lot of ways - his are rural and small town memories, dominated by hardscrabble jobs, government commodity foods, and connections to elders, the seasons, and the land that I have no real analogies for.

Weso’s writing is plainspoken, funny, thoughtful, and by turns spiritual and profane. It’s a mix of anecdotes that range from “practical steps for catching and preparing red sucker fish” to “that time in 1608 when the northern tribes had a summit and put together a medicine bag of such ferocious power that it could have destroyed the white invaders, but its power and evil were such that it couldn’t be controlled, so it was never actually used on the white invaders” to “when we worked on the highway crew, roughly half of us were drunk all the time, while the other half were high.” There really isn’t much of a filter, and that’s what makes Survival Food such a good read.

at your service,

James

SURVIVAL FOOD: NORTH WOODS STORIES BY A MENOMINEE COOK
BY THOMAS PECORE WESO
Wisconsin Historical Society Press / 289 pages  / 2023 / $25

Survival Food is interesting because it’s one part cookbook, three parts memoir, one part history, and one part multidisciplinary exploration of its setting, northern Wisconsin. It seems likely that the author, Thomas Pecore Weso, wasn’t trying to follow a template or emulate another book he’d read - Survival Food is too shaggy, unpredictable, un-self-conscious and interesting to be a knock-off of another work.

The culinary aspects of the book (and its predecessor, Good Seeds) are hit or miss - some stories revolve around food, some stories come to a climax or conclusion with the presentation of a recipe (which may or may not relate to the action at hand) and some stories have nothing to do with food whatsoever. Survival Food really isn’t a cookbook per se - it’s a memoir with culinary tendencies. Moreover, those tendencies tend to be documentary rather than aspirational - if the author grew up eating tuna fish sandwiches (and he did), you’ll get a bog standard recipe for tuna fish sandwiches at the conclusion of a mostly unrelated chapter. Recipes are, in equal measures, challenging and inspirational foods with direct connections to hunting or foraging (the use of bear, squirrel, sumac, and milkweed pods, for example), straight-up middle American fare (think pizza burgers or cheesy potatoes), or Mexican and other cuisines that have been adapted for reservation life in northern Wisconsin.

Weso isn’t trying to impress his reader with exotic or inaccessible fare; he’s documenting a life lived deeply together with his family and friends on a reservation in the Upper Midwest.

WILD RICE WITH SQUASH

Our garden is pure chaos, which is 50% because that’s the way we like it and 50% because we’re too disorganized to get it under control. Last year, as a result of some of the many seeds we flung in various places, we harvested four pumpkins just in time for Halloween. This year, instead, we ended up with about half a dozen large butternut squash. It’s another good outcome - we love to use butternut squash for soup, kaddo (a sweet-and-savory Afghan-inspired squash appetizer) and Thanksgiving sides.

Minnesota is wild rice country, so the idea of combining wild rice with butternut squash was instantly appealing to me. I hit Eastside Food Co-op in the Northeast neighborhood of Minneapolis and grabbed a pile of wild rice from the bulk foods section for this recipe, and grabbed one of our garden squash, too.

One of the nice things about this recipe is that a good chunk of the work can be frontloaded - I made this as a Thanksgiving side, but I cooked the wild rice and squash the day before. Preparation the day of consisted of a quick soak of the dried currants and then about 10 minutes in a saucepan to bring together and season the butter, dried currants, wild rice, and squash. This recipe filled a valuable Thanksgiving niche: food that is fairly light and makes you feel good after you eat it. 

Wild Rice with Squash
From Good Seeds

½ cup dried, sweetened cranberries (I used dried currants, which worked great)
4 Tbsp butter or oil, divided
3 cups cooked wild rice, salted
3 cups cooked and peeled winter squash (cut into 3-inch chunks)
Salt and pepper to taste

Soak cranberries 15 minutes in ¾ cup water and drain, reserving water. Heat a large skillet to medium high and add 3 tablespoons butter. Melt. Add cranberries, rice, reserved water, and squash. Stir and simmer until heated through and liquid is absorbed, about 4 minutes. Stir in 1 tablespoon butter, salt and pepper. Serve warm.

BAKED ONIONS

One of my favorite things to discover in a cookbook is a recipe that makes me rethink an ingredient I’ve known all my life. In Survival Food, Weso writes about one of the staples of his childhood: baked onions.

After Grandpa finished his story, we went to bed in our house that had changed completely since the death of our matriarch. My tears had slowed, and I slept deeply. The next day, Grandpa fixed eggs for breakfast. In the storeroom, he pulled out onions and potatoes for our evening meal. I looked forward to one of the family favorites, baked onions, which must date back to a precontact method of slow baking at the edges of a campfire, an original technique for cooking comfort food.

There’s legitimately nothing to this recipe: you bake an onion in the oven until it’s fork-tender and then you dress it with some salt, pepper, and butter. But the result is a dish that is surprisingly complex. When I tried the dish, the texture of the onion varied a bit (from yielding but crunchy to downright tender) and the sweetness and sulphuric kick of the onion played in a surprisingly complex way with the richness of the butter and the bite of the black pepper. Salt tied everything together, and it made a simple baked onion into a fully realized side dish all by itself.

Baked Onions
From Survival Food

1 onion per person
Salt, pepper, and butter to taste

Heat oven to 350 F. Place onions on middle rack of oven with skin on and bake until fork tender, 45-55 minutes. To serve: cut off root ends, and squeeze from the top until onion insides pop out. Discard skins, and serve with salt, pepper, and butter.