Corn
Corn
Hominy
Navajo Fry Bread
To read about the history of
corn:
Story about Big Long Man's Corn Patch
This recipe is from Marilyn Yazzie, Navajo, Tsenjikini (honeycombed rock) mother's clan, Tachiinnii (Red runs into the water) Father's clan. She favors using only fresh chiles, and likes it hot. She uses lean pork and no salt, for health reasons. If you're not so sure about fiery southwestern foods, use only 1 jalapeno, or use only mild green chiles, no jalapenos. This and many others can be found in Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking (see main RECIPES page, cookbooks section).
Simpler Posole, Navajo -- serves 4-6
2 cups blue dried posole (dried whole hominy)
1/2 cup mild fresh green chiles, roasted, peeled
amd chopped or 1 4 oz can
1 - 3 fresh or canned jalapeños, peeled, seeded, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
1 -2 peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes (about 1 cup)
2 - 3 lb boneless pork roast
2 tsp dried oregano
1/4 cup choppeed fresh cilantro
Salt to taste
Rinse posole in cold water until water runs clear. Soak for several hours or overnight in cold water. Place posole with water to cover in large heavy covered pot or Dutch oven. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and summer, covered, till posole pops, about 1 hour. Roasat the peppers (if fresh) in a paper bag in a 400°oven for about 10 minutes , remove, cool, peel (skin slips off easily). If using canned posole (about 8 cups) or frozen (3 lbs), omit the cooking step. Add everything but the herbs and salt. Simmer, covered, 4 hours. (3 if using canned or frozen hominy). Remove meat, shred, return to pot, add herbs. Taste forseasoning, add salt to taste. Simmer, covered, 1 more hour.
Lots of
Corn Recipes and Information about Corn and Tribes
Hominy
Southwestern tribes made hominy by cooking the dried corn kernels in a lye water made from a mix of corn-cob ashes and powdered lime in water, I'm informed. Either way, the net effect on the nutritional value of the corn is that while some nutrients are leached out, those weren't in available forms anyway. The treatment greatly increases the amounts of usable protein, usable vitamin B (especially thiamine, rarest among vegetable sources), and adds a considerable amount of usable calcium and potassium to the resulting food. (This is probably not true of the way factory-canned hominy is made.) If corn is the staple of your diet, it is hominy you will mostly eat. White people were unaware of this, because relatively little scientific attention was given to nutrition, and no scientists were willing to learn from so-called primitive people with their so-called irrational customs. In the 1920's and '30's, there was widespread pellagra among poor whites, especially in the south. Pellagra is a serious, eventually fatal, disease caused entirely by nutritional deficiences that arise from eating diets largely of of milled cornmeal, chemical hominy, and corn-off-the-cob or canned. Corn was bum-rapped by scientific nutritionists because of the pellagra epidemic. They didn't realize that traditional people, whose diet often consisted almost entirely of corn and beans knew how to handle it to get the best food values from it.