Last week, the Children’s Food Lab celebrated Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving story I learned as a child, which involved kindergartners dressing up as either English Pilgrims or a Native Americans so they could reenact the feast of the shared harvest, is one side of the story — the side of Mayflower descendants. We never heard the Native American-side of the story. We are learning more, though, and it’s unfortunately not as benign as we hoped. There was a first Harvest Feast of the English Pilgrims. They were taught by the Native Americans how to grow certain foods. Whether they dined together is questionable; whether atrocities occurred by the English against the Natives is not.
In our class, we discussed what a Thanksgiving meal could have looked like in 1621 (if it did happen), and together we made a Three Sisters Stew in honor of the Native Americans. (Note: This is a non-traditional version of the stew, adapted for the modern home cook.)
This dish can be whipped up in just 25 minutes. My family ate it over three days in three different ways: as is (a vegetarian stew,) with baked chicken, and with carnitas. The best part of this recipe is that many of the ingredients come from a can or freezer so you can build it on a budget or easily make it while camping in the woods. And best of all, most kids like it. It helps, of course, to serve it with tortilla chips, sour cream, and grated cheese.
Before cooking, we discussed our Thanksgiving holiday. The American version of this legend declared that the new English settlers, called Pilgrims, and the Wampanoags natives, of what is now Massachusetts, peacefully celebrated the English’s first harvest.
The soil of Cape Cod was rocky and sandy, nothing like the easy-to-till, loamy soil of northern England. The story goes that Tisquantum “Squanto” who was originally of the Pawtuxet tribe, and who spoke English since he had been captured by the British years before, showed the Pilgrims how to work the dry soil of the Massachusetts Bay. The Native Americans taught the English how to plant corn, squash, and beans together, and to fertilize the land with fish carcasses. This method was called Three Sisters Companion Growing. The beans give the soil nitrogen, the squash grow along the ground, keeping moisture in and weeds at bay. And the corn acts as a trellis for the beans, allowing them to grow upwards towards the sun. Together this symbiotic relationship between corn, squash and beans also created a nutritionally balanced meal. The three sisters are family - and families give and take to keep themselves up.
So the 1621 legend says that the Pilgrims and Wampanoag’s celebrated the Pilgrim’s first harvest over 3-days with dinners that looked very different from the meal we know and love today. There was no wheat, butter, sugar, potatoes, or sweet potatoes, and therefore no pies, stuffing, sweet cranberry sauce, or mashed potatoes. Instead there was shellfish, venison, wild birds like ducks, geese, turkey, and other fowl. There was hard flint corn that was ground into cornmeal porridge, and cranberries but not as sweet as the sauce we eat.
The legend doesn’t talk about how the English settlers pushed Native Americans off their land. It glorifies the English people’s arrival and ignores the slaughter of the Native American tribes all over the northeast and beyond. Legend also has it that in 1637 William Bradford declared a day of Thanksgiving after the murder of the Pequot Tribe by the colonists in what is now Stamford, CT.
George Washington declared a day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the birth of the nation (at the cost of so many Native Americans), but the holiday didn’t stick. It was Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of a popular women’s magazine who spent 40 years trying to convince every American president to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. It finally worked when in 1863, Abraham Lincoln listened to Hale. In an effort to unify the Civil War-torn country, Lincoln declared the last Thursday of the month Thanksgiving day. Why it became a day to declare the English colonist and the Native Americans peaceful and happy, no one can really explain, except that perhaps Americans didn’t want to admit their wrongdoings.
In honor of the Native Americans we made a non-traditional, but perhaps the most traditional of Thanksgiving dishes seen today, a Three-Sisters Stew.
Three Sisters Stew
Serves 4 to 6.
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (canola, safflower, grapeseed, any veggie oil)
1 large yellow onion, finely diced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
3/4 teaspoon fine salt or Morton’s kosher salt (or 1 1/2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt)
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups cubed frozen or fresh, peeled butternut squash (about 1 pound)
1 (15-ounce) can pinto beans, rinsed and drained (1 1/2 cups)
1 (15-ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained (1 1/2 cups)
1 (14.5-ounce) can chopped tomatoes (1 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 cups fresh, frozen, or canned corn kernels, drained
2 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro, roughly chopped (optional)
Sour cream, for serving (optional)
Tortilla chips (optional, recipe below)
Steps:
1. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat until it shimmers.
2. Add the onion, cumin, salt and pepper and sauté, stirring often and lowering the heat slightly if needed, until the onions are see-through, 5 to 7 minutes.
3. Add the garlic and sauté, stirring constantly, until fragrant, about 1 minute more.
4. Add the squash, beans, tomatoes, corn, and broth, and bring to a boil.
5. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, covered, until the flavors meld and the squash is tender when pierced with a fork, about 20 minutes. Taste and season with salt and pepper, as needed. Serve, topped with some chopped cilantro and a dollop of sour cream, if you choose, and tortilla chips. Recipe by Jill Santopietro.
Homemade Tortilla Chips
Serves 4 to 6.
Ingredients:
2 to 3 tablespoons neutral-tasting oil, like canola, safflower or other vegetable oil
8 to 12 (6-inch) corn tortillas (a mix of corn and flour, or just corn is good - thinner tortillas will cook faster)
Kosher salt
Steps:
1. Heat the oven to 350°F. Place the oil in a cup or small bowl. Dip a pastry brush into the oil, and brush the tortillas on both sides with a thin coating of oil.
2. Stack the tortillas one over the other. Using a large, sharp knife, cut the stack in half, then cut each half again, and each quarter in half again, to make 8 triangular-ish tortilla chip stacks.
3. Spread the chips out in a single layer on 2 large baking sheets and season them generously with salt. Bake until golden brown and crispy, for about 8 to 20 minutes, depending on the thickness of your tortillas (rotate the sheets top to bottom and front to back half way through the cooking). Recipe by Jill Santopietro