Saving Room and Holding Space: Three Indigenous Cookbooks That Will Help You Bring Native American Cuisine to Your Table

With Thanksgiving only a few weeks away, families across the country are already well into planning their gatherings—and their menus. Like many, my crew enjoys celebrating the day with culinary gusto. Lately, however, we have begun to reflect on how we observe this tradition, welcoming broader cultural viewpoints on what we honor, where we gather and how we hold space for the stories that precede ours. Some of this includes a pre-meal land acknowledgement (the Native Governance Center created a comprehensive guide for how to write one) and exploring Native American cuisine, broadening what our family table proffers by learning about and incorporating recipes from Indigenous chefs.

In the past few years, Native American cuisine has seen a surge in popular culture. Sean Sherman’s The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, which won the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook in 2017, had much to do with that. He presented dishes made without “European ingredients” (dairy, sugar, wheat flour and domestic pork and beef) that deliciously highlighted Native foodways. 

That said, “This is not survival fare,” Sherman insisted in a New York Times piece. “These are bright, bold, contemporary flavors… I am not interested in recreating foods from 1491. Rather, I hope to celebrate the diversity that defines our communities now.”

If you’d like to delve into Indigenous foods and bring some of that diverse, expansive cuisine to your own holiday menu, then these three cookbooks will give you a place to start.

The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley

Sean Sherman is an Oglala Lakota Sioux chef and founder of both The Sioux Chef, a company that creates Indigenous foods using Indigenous ingredients, and of NĀTIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), which promotes education about and access to Indigenous foodways. He’s also received numerous accolades in the process: In 2022, his Minneapolis-based Owami was honored as the best new restaurant by the James Beard Foundation. This year, Sherman has been named to the 2023 Time 100 Most Influential People list and recognized for his impact on American cuisine with the Julia Child Award. 

The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen is, in a word, comprehensive. Sherman organizes recipes according to where their primary ingredients can be found: Fields and Gardens, Prairies and Lakes and so on. He devotes an entire chapter to “The Indigenous Pantry,” which is explicitly “decolonized,” as Sherman describes it. (No European ingredients, remember?) He also includes straightforward instructions for finding and preparing the staples needed for the book’s recipes, such as corn stock, acorn meal flour and smoked salt, or how to forage for sage and staghorn sumac. It may take some more effort to cook Sherman’s recipes, but he assures curious cooks that the process—and the results—will be worthwhile.

Sherman concludes the book with a chapter featuring recipes from other Native chefs and a chapter of pop-up dinner menus developed to celebrate the full moon. He encourages his readers to make use of these menus in planning their own feasts. The Dinner of the Great Spirit Moon, a late fall observance, features White Bean and Winter Squash Soup, Smoked Duck, Sweet Potato, Wild Rice Pilaf, Cedar-Braised Bison and Hominy and Griddled Maple Squash—all of which sound just about perfect for a Thanksgiving meal.

Recipes to try: Salad of Griddled Squash, Apples, Wild Greens, and Toasted Walnuts; Roast Turkey, Wild Onions, Maple Squash, and Cranberry Sauce (note: Sherman advises that heritage turkeys will have the best flavor); Sweet Corn Sorbet

New Native Kitchen by Chef Freddie Bitsoie & James O. Fraioli

Freddie Bitsoie is the former executive chef for the Mitsitam Native Foods Café in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In July of this year, he joined NĀTIFS as the inaugural chef-in-residence for the Indigenous Food Lab, a training center for those who want to run a successful Indigenous culinary business.  

Bitsoie, a Navajo (or Diné), begins his gorgeous cookbook with a generous introduction, inviting his readers to learn about North America’s diverse Indigenous cultures through their foodways. His approach, Bitsoie says, is “to honor our past and our diversity… [without being] constrained by tradition.” This shows up in the recipes, which call for pantry staples familiar to most Americans: coconut milk, oil, chicken stock, white wine and unsalted butter.

Next follows a list of Native American pantry ingredients, which range from Aztec beans to manoomin (a wild rice) to saguaro seeds, with Bitsoie’s suggestions on where to source them. Like the other two chefs featured here, he encourages cooks to seek out Indigenous purveyors if able. He also provides practical information throughout, such as instructions on safely removing spines from cactus paddles (nopales) and a nutritional comparison of beef and bison. Of all the book’s chapters, Bitsoie writes that he was most excited about “Puddings and Sweets,” because it dismantles “the common misconception that in pre-Columbian times, Indigenous diets didn’t include desserts.” 

Because Bitsoie doesn’t completely eschew European ingredients in his recipes, New Native Kitchen may feel a bit more approachable for investigatory forays into Indigenous foods.

Recipes to try: Onion, Celery Root and Parsnip Soup; Glazed Root Vegetables; Grilled Duck with Apple and Sage; Steamed Indian Corn Pudding

Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine by Loretta Barrett Oden with Beth Dooley

Raised in Shawnee, Oklahoma, as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Loretta Barrett Oden serves as chef consultant for the restaurant Thirty-Nine at Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum, which features culinary dishes from Oklahoma’s 39 Indigenous Nations. In 1993, Oden opened Santa Fe’s Corn Dance Café with her oldest son. The restaurant showcased Native cuisine from across the North American continent while using “pre-European contact ingredients” (Oden’s term)—hailed as the first of its kind in the U.S. Oden won an Emmy for her five-part PBS series Seasoned with Spirit: A Native Cook’s Journey.

Corn Dance, Oden notes in her introduction, contains recipes inspired by the flavorful foods served at the eponymous café. She uses a mix of Native and European-derived ingredients in the dishes, with a focus on “flavor, our sense of place and how the meals… come together.” The book’s chapters include “Big Little Plates” (starters), “Wide Oceans, Deep Lakes, Fast Rivers” (fish and shellfish), “Fresh Baked” (Cornbread, Biscuits and Little Big Pies)” and “The Earth’s Sweetest Gifts” (desserts). Sprinkled throughout the book are “Notes from Loretta’s Kitchen,” in which she discusses the history, importance and preparation of a particular Indigenous food, such as the Three Sisters (the Native term for corn, beans and squash, which are often planted together).

Of the three cookbooks featured here, Oden’s contains the most robust dessert chapter. But flip to almost any page in Corn Dance, and you’re sure to find a appealing-sounding recipe appropriate for a Thanksgiving meal. 

Recipes to try: Three Sisters and Friends Salad, Butternut Squash Soup with Frizzled Sage and Toasted Squash Seeds; Stuffed Portobellos; Cranberry-Apricot Little Big Pies with Honey-Goat Cheese Cream; Pumpkin Cheesecake with Piñon Crust