| CB 24, 391-392 |
Heaps of wild yams, white starchy breadroots, and potatolike groundnuts boiled gently in skin pots slung over fires. Wild asparagus, lily roots, wild onions, legumes, small squashes, and mushrooms were cooking in various combinations with subtle seasonings. A mountain of wild lettuce, burdock, pigweed, and dandelion leaves, freshly washed, was waiting to be served raw
with a dressing of hot bear grease, seasonings, and salt, added at the last moment.
One clan's specialty was a combination of onions, mushrooms, and // the round green legumes of milk vetch, seasoned with a secret combination of herbs and thickened with dried reindeer moss. Another brought a special variety of pinecones, from a tree that was unique to the area of their
cave, that yielded large tasty nuts released by the heat of a fire.
Norg's clan toasted chestnuts gathered from the lower slopes and made a nut-flavored porridge sauce from cracked beechnuts, parched grains, and slices of small, hard, tart-sweet apples, cooked long and slowly. The area for some distance in the vicinity of the cave was stripped of blueberries,
high-bush cranberries, and from the lower elevations, raspberries and wild mountain blackberries.
The women of Brun's clan had spent days cracking and grinding the dried acorns they brought. The pulverized nuts were put in shallow holes in the sand near the river and quantities of water poured over the pulpy mixture to leach out the bitterness. The resultant dough was baked into flat
cakes, soaked in maple syrup until they were thoroughly saturated, then dried in the sun. The host clan, who also tapped their maple trees in early spring and boiled the watery sap for long days, were interested as soon as they saw the familiar birchbark containers that were used to store maple
sugars and syrup. The sticky, maple-sweet acorn cakes were an unusual treat that the women of Norg's clan decided to try later themselves. |
