(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Q&A: How Do You Make Fry Bread? [1] ['Teresa Collins', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2024-06-14 Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. This conversation is a portion of the first episode of Rural Food Traditions, a podcast on the Rural Remix podcast feed. We’re starting where many meals across diverse food traditions begin: with bread. For this conversation, I spoke with Nico Albert Williams about fry bread. Williams is a chef, caterer, and student of traditional indigenous cuisines based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She began her culinary education growing up in California, Arizona, spending time in her mother’s garden and in the kitchen preparing family meals. After relocating to Northeastern Oklahoma, Williams embraced her return to the post-removal homeland of her mother’s people as a calling and opportunity to reestablish a relationship with her Cherokee community. She did this first and foremost through the language of food. At the end of this article, enjoy Williams’ fry bread recipe. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A Native American fry bread, at the West Valley Powwow in Saratoga, California. (Photo by John Pozniak / Wikimedia Commons) Teresa Collins, The Daily Yonder: Hey, Nico. Thank you so much for joining us on the Rural Remix podcast to talk about rural food traditions around bread making. If you wouldn’t mind just to start out, tell us about where you live, what you do. Nico Albert Williams: I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I am the executive director and founder of Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness. We’re an intertribal community wellness center in Tulsa. Our goal is providing access for the native community in our urban area to traditional ways of healing and traditional foods, and really just providing a space for us to all gather and have activities and things like that. So that’s my day to day, and I’m a chef by trade, so I study and teach and cook traditional native foods. When we’re cooking foods that tie us to culture, there is also an element of emotional and spiritual and mental health, and just the act of being in community and having a relationship with where your foods come from, whether you’re actually getting in the dirt and digging or foraging, going on walks and spending time in nature and understanding the seasons and being a part of the ecosystem. Image provided by Williams. Part of colonization was the removal from our food systems and the removal physically from our lands, but also spiritually from our lands. And so reconnecting in that way is something that heals us on all of those different levels. DY: Tell us about fry bread. Can you walk us through the history of fry bread and why it’s controversial? NAW: Fry bread kind of is a representation of our removal from our traditional food systems. It’s a direct result of that. So, before [European] contact, our ancestors were completely immersed in the natural world. They were a part of the ecosystem, and everything that they had that they subsisted on came from nature and from their relationship with the land. And so it was a very healthy lifestyle. It was an extremely diverse diet. It was a largely plant-based diet, and it was in very good relationship with the world in the way that they were taking care of the land. When colonization happened, they were systematically removed from access to that land, to varying degrees in different communities. But I’ll speak about the Cherokee experience specifically. We were eventually forced to move to reservation land in Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears as a result of the Indian Removal Act. That meant that we no longer had access to the wide range of foods anymore. We were put in a very small area compared to the full range of the southern Appalachians that we had access to. And we were given land that’s not necessarily meant to be farmed for our specific crops, and that didn’t have the biodiversity of species that we had in Appalachia. A lot of our population lost their lives along that removal road, but even with the survivors that did make it to Oklahoma, it was still a larger number of people per square mile than had been existing before. And so all of those things led to this enormous disruption in our food system, and eventually a reliance on the federal government for food subsidies that came in the form of commodity foods and rations. Those rations were things like bleached white flour, refined lard, refined sugar, coffee, tinned meats, preserved canned vegetables, things like that. They were designed to be shelf stable. They were designed to sustain, they were designed to keep us alive, but they weren’t designed to keep us healthy. DY: None of those were part of the natural diet. NAW: No. Every single ingredient that they gave us was things that our bodies had never experienced before, that were not a part of our diet. This was a sweeping change that happened within one or two generations. So it was a drastic change for our people to be reliant on these foods that were completely devoid of nutrition. Fry bread was a subsistence food, a survival food. And so while that comes from a place of hardship over the generations, that food does make its way into our traditions and our families, and it becomes a beloved food. I mean, there’s no denying that deep-fried dough is delicious. Everyone agrees, and every culture has their version of a fried bread and donuts and all these different things, and they’re all delicious. In those other cultures, you think about donuts or beignets or something like that. That fried dough is meant as a treat or a snack, it’s not meant to be the entirety of the meal or half of the meal. But that’s where we ended up. Those foods, even though they’re very delicious, they’re not nutritious and they’re not meant to be the staple of a meal, but that’s what they ended up being because of our situation. And so that being said, while we know that they have caused a lot of health problems in Indian country, we have a lot of health disparities, like higher rates of diabetes, higher rates of heart disease and obesity, all relating to our disruption of food systems and the introduction of those foods and the reliance on those foods like fry bread. We still form an emotional attachment to those foods. Fry bread is a beloved part of the dinner table in Cherokee families and native families all over Indian territory that all had the same experience of creating this dish as something that our ancestors made so that we could survive. And it’s made its way along over the years to where now it’s a part of every ceremony, it’s a part of every gathering. When we get together for our celebrations throughout the year, it’s always got a place at the table because people love it, and because we’ve formed that relationship with that food over the years. DY: Right. So it seemed like more of a sign of defiance and resilience. NAW: That is the way we look at it. Those were the ingredients that were forced on us, and our ancestors had the ingenuity to take those things and make something really comforting out of it. And it does represent hardship, but it also represents resilience. And so one of the reasons that we’re here today, that I’m here today, is that my ancestors were able to survive on the very little that they were given. That’s the context that we try to view fry bread in. Fry Bread Recipe: Ingredients: 4 cups self-rising flour, plus excess for forming breads 1 ½ cups hot water ½ cup cold buttermilk or water Canola oil, vegetable oil, or shortening for frying Instructions: Place the flour in a medium sized bowl and make a well in the center. Add hot water all at once, and use hands to stir until almost all the flour has been absorbed and a dough starts to come together. Add cold buttermilk or water until all remaining flour has been absorbed and a soft, sticky dough/batter comes together. Cover the dough with a clean damp tea towel or paper towels and let it rest AT LEAST 30 minutes. Fill a large heavy cast iron skillet or dutch oven about 3/4 full with your frying oil of choice, place over medium high heat. Heat the oil until it reaches about 350°F. Have a clean platter or bowl ready with 2-3 cups of flour, for portioning the breads. Portion the dough into about 1/3 cup portions, one by one, and place into the pile of loose flour. Dust all sides of each dough ball with flour, and use hands to pat the dough out into a 1″ thick patty, being careful not to overwork the dough. Carefully slide the breads into the hot oil and allow to cook until golden brown on the underside. Use tongs or a fork to flip the bread over and cook until golden brown on the reverse side. Transfer the cooked bread to a tray, bowl or basket lined with paper towels, newspaper, paper bags, or a clean linen to absorb any excess grease. Repeat with the remaining dough. This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. 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