The Food of a Younger Land (44 page)

When pumpkins are gathered in the fall, they are peeled and cut into narrow strips and dried for winter use.

O
ne of the most ancient customs of the Choctaw Indians and one that is to some extent followed to this day, is the funeral cry. When a member of the family dies, he is quietly buried with some or all of his personal belongings, at which time the stoicism of the Indian is apparent for it is not often that any tears are shed at the burial service.

On the day of the burial the head of the family cuts and trims nicely twenty-eight little sticks, which he lays up in the cracks of the log cabin as representing the twenty-eight days of the moon month. Every morning he takes down one of these sticks until there are seven remaining, then he hands out invitations to his kinsmen and friends to come to the funeral cry, which is to be on the day the last stick is taken down. The kinsmen and guests are required to bring with them a specific amount of foods or provisions. One is allotted so much meal, another so much flour, and another so much beef, etc. This request is strictly complied with.

The congregation of relatives, friends, and even the strangers meet at the grave or near the grave of the late deceased, where a circular place has been cleaned of all shrubs and grass, in the midst of which a table is spread for the immediate family. At intervals around this center table are tables arranged for all other kinsmen and still outside of these are tables for friends and visitors.

Before the feast is spread, some relative of the deceased rises and begins an oration, telling of the good qualities of the deceased, of his courage and prowess, and as he proceeds he grows more and more eloquent and impassioned. When the cry starts then begins a copious flow of tears, something of which the Indian is very sparing, accompanied by low wailing and moaning that forces the onlooker to join in the cry.

When the cry has gone on for some time the feast is spread, and certain ones of the deceased’s relatives are appointed to wait upon the inner table and others are selected to wait on the other tables.

The alternate ceremony of feasting, crying and wailing is kept up for two or three days. The intrusion and curiosity of the white people has tended to lessen the frequency and publicity of the funeral cry as well as many other ancient customs and ceremonies of the Choctaw Indians. Many people regard the funeral cry of the Indian as a relic of barbarism, but really it is like a ceremony of some of the Christian denominations except that the latter confine themselves to fasting and prayers for the dead, leaving off the feasting and wailing.

If it is not convenient, or if weather conditions are not such that the cry can be held at the grave of the deceased, the relatives and friends go to the church, where the feast is spread and candles are lighted around, which they assemble in prayer and weeping; dividing their time between the candles and the festive board and local oratory.

Ref:
Indians & Pioneers
, Vol. 78, pp. 131-133 [a collection of interviews obtained by the Okla. WPA].

EDWARD PARRISH WARE

T
he old-timers and the Indians of the Southwest usually had good luck with out-of-doors cooking. They knew that it required skillful fingers and good judgment to construct a satisfactory cooking-fire. They knew that the spot selected should be cleared of all grass, leaves, twigs, and should be of considerable circumference. They knew better than to and should be of considerable circumference. They knew better than to build a cooking-fire against a down log or the trunk of a tree, and the soil selected would be of gravel or clay if such could be had.

They knew, too, that evergreen wood—cedar, piñon, spruce—is a soft wood and good for kindling, but unfit for a lasting fire. Evergreen wood burns too quickly. Wood from leaf-bearing trees—oak, ironwood, mesquite, ash—burns slowly and provides good hot coals. Many cooking-fires in the Southwest have been laid far from mountainous or hilly country where hardwood is to be had, and quick-burning woods—the pines, cottonwoods, poplar and willow—just naturally had to be used. Corncobs, dried cow-dung, sagebrush and even cactus stalks have provided fuel in the Southwest for more fires than a man could count in a hundred years. But, since good coals are always best for a cooking-fire, hard or leaf-wood is naturally favored. Steaks, game, fowl, stews, corn-on-the-cob, eggs, for instance, can be cooked perfectly only when good red coals are beneath them.

The Feast of the Christening is a colorful ceremony of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. On the 20th day of the baby’s life, up to which time the sun is not supposed to have shone upon it, the infant is washed in yucca-root water by its paternal grandmother and rubbed all over with cornmeal and the pollen of flowers. Wrapped firmly on its cradle-board, it is then carried to the edge of a mesa, with the mother in her bridal clothing and carrying an ear of corn in her hand. There, with the sun shining full upon it, the baby is touched with the ear of corn in christening, and the officiating high-priest gives it its chosen names. Then the friends of the parents, and there will always be many, also touch the infant with the ear of corn, each in turn bestowing upon the baby such names as they wish it to bear. Thus it is that a newly christened baby may have fifty or even a hundred names.

The christening over, the entire procession marches to the home of the parents for the Christening Feast. And such a feast is truly a great event. It is, in fact, a feast no Hopi family would even think of passing up.

The principal dish at the feast—and all foods are cooked out-of-doors—is mutton, roasted or stewed with corn and beans. Rich cornmeal pudding, filled with peach-seed kernels and bits of mutton-fat, baked in wrappers of cornhusks, is always a part of the feast. In season, green corn, beans, tomatoes, fruit and melons are served. While the guests eat, they make wishes for the baby and each person gives presents of food.

Piki bread in gay colors surrounds the feasters.

Piki bread was being made by the Hopi Indians as far back as 1540, and time has not materially changed the bread or the methods of its making. Colored corn is dried in the sun and shelled. Then the grain is broken in a rough metate, passed on to a finer stone for thorough pounding, and then into a stone bin where it is thoroughly pulverized. Then it is placed in a big earthen mixing-bowl and thinned to a batter with water.

In the meantime a big stone two feet long by one foot wide has been heating over a wood-fire. The top of this baking-stone, rubbed to a satin smoothness, is greased with mutton-tallow. When it is smoking hot the baker dips her fingers into the batter and with one swift sweep spreads a layer entirely over the hot surface, where it cooks almost instantly. With another swift jerk she removes the thin sheet from the stone and smears another over it. The sheets are rolled into cylinders about the size of an ear of corn.

No Hopi dance or christening is considered complete without a feast to follow, and the serving of piki bread is so usual it might well be called a ritual.

The Navajo Indians have taboos in regard to certain foods.

During the Eagle Chant, a religious ceremonial, the participants must not eat eggs of any kind, turkey, chicken, or the flesh of any fowl whatsoever.

Duck or bear meat is never at any time even tasted by the Navajos. Food being cooked in a skillet or kettle must not be stirred with a knife. If a knife-point is thrust first into a melon or other food, the food must not be eaten, as it carries with it the curse of lightning stroke.

During the month of July, beef cooked with corn may not be eaten, as the two foods are thought to quarrel with each other in digestion.

An Indian boy who has not attained the stature of a full brave may not eat of the entrails of any animal, such choice viands being reserved solely for the men who do the fighting. Considered strong meat, a boy’s stomach would decay should he partake of it before he has reached a certain age.

A bunch of cowboys in camp make no bones about “joshing” the range boss, the wagon boss and each other, but the cook is invariably treated with all the fine courtesy noticeable in the conduct of a bunch of fresh-men toward their professors. The camp-cook doesn’t have to take “sass” from anybody, and he knows it.

Dane Coolidge, in
Texas Cowboys
, tells of one such cook who was widely known to Southwestern cattlemen in general and to cow-camps in Arizona particularly.

Sam Elkins, the cook referred to, was hiding out from the Tucson law when Mr. Coolidge first made his acquaintance. It appears that Sam, according to his own story, had been set upon by a drunken bully wielding a large butcher-knife, greatly hampering Sam in his free use of the streets of Tucson while in pursuit of such happiness as might otherwise have been found. Sam retired to a wagon-yard in the outskirts of town, hoping thereby to throw the aforesaid bully off the trail, but the bully declined to be thrown. He discovered Sam—and met his own waterloo.

Armed with the butcher-knife, the bully chased Sam around and around a wagon, threatening to slit the cook’s throat and then perform on his gizzard as a sort of post mortem good measure, so frightening Sam (still according to Sam) that he in desperation seized a wagon-yoke and caved the bully’s skull quite some. Later, an unsympathetic judge had sentenced Sam to two weeks in jail, while giving the bully the same. So Sam, fearing that should he remain in Tucson until the bully’s release he might up and take the bully’s life, high-tailed it to the cactus and sagebrush rather than serve his time.

Be that as may be, Sam Elkins was cooking for a Three C’s roundup crew when Mr. Coolidge first came across him. Sam was a first class camp-cook, but he had many habits which irked punchers to an irritating degree. For instance, Sam would roll into his blankets at night, set his alarm clock for four in the morning, place the clock on a dish-pan turned bottom upward beside him, then go to sleep. When that clock went off in the morning it would, reinforced by the hollow sounding-board which was in daytime an ordinary dish-pan, make racket enough to wake the dead. No amount of argument or protest ever got Sam to discard the dish-pan, although the lesser racket of the clock by itself would have made alarm a-plenty.

Having alarmed himself and everybody else into a state of complete wakefulness, Sam would roll out and proceed with his breakfast preparations.

First he would rake the dead ashes from his banked cooking-fire, then take from the chuck box a chunk of fat pine and from the “possum belly” or “cooney” beneath the chuck-wagon a supply of dry wood, or maybe cow-chips. He would whittle pine shaving from the chunk directly upon the live coals of the fire, then add dry wood and cow-chips to the ensuing blaze. Soon a good fire would be lighting up the circumference of the entire camp.

Coffee-water in a huge boiler would then be set on the fire, the chuck-box lid lowered and the actual business of breakfast would proceed.

Sam’s sourdough biscuits, Dutch-oven baked, were always large, light and plentiful, the beef-steak, chicken-fried, invariably brown, fluffy, tender—and likewise plentiful. Black-strap molasses, commonly called “lick,” served invariably as a breakfast dessert, and the triple extract of coffee, hot and plentiful, served always to wipe out any and all resentment on the part of the hands anent the alarm-clock-dishpan contraption.

With very little variation, the above set-up constituted the breakfast generally favored by cowboys on roundup in the Southwest.

No matter how humble the hut, the Spanish family there residing will have its countless
ristras
(strings or chains) of scarlet chiles hung like red icicles from its roof beams, and somewhere at hand its store of
piñones
.

Early in September every member of a Spanish family goes into the fields to pick the shining green pepper-pods from the long rows of chiles. They are heaped in a dark store-room until the green shows splotches of orange. Then Mamacita and the children leave the fields and sit on the floor all day and into the night to tie the pods, three at a twist, onto a ten-foot cord. The work goes swiftly. Soon the cords are full and tied together at the ends. Then they are hung over the roof or from the roof-poles to dry, always high above the reach of straying
bestias
—for goats, sheep, burros and the like have a keen appetite for the red delicacies, regardless that they are super-hot. After six weeks in the sunshine the pods are thoroughly cured and are then stored for winter use.

There is usually another arresting red line to be seen picked out against the drab walls of a Spanish home. It consists of meat, cut in strips, and hung up to dry in the sun. A cow or a goat has been butchered on the rack back of the house, and why waste the surplus meat when it will be so good to eat in the winter time? It goes well in a jerked beef or goat-meat stew and may even, at a pinch, form the
carne
in chile.

But the Spanish folk will tell you that the
piñon
crop is the true gift of God. It is manna succoring the children in the wilderness. Cabeza de Vaca was saved from starvation by living on
piñones
for three days (Note: Ruth Laughlin Barker in
Caballeros
, D. Appleton & Co. New York—London, 1931), and many a sheepherder depends upon these rich piney nuts to supply the fat in his diet.