The Hominy Foodway of the Historic Native Eastern Woodlands

Abstract

The Hominy Foodway of the Historic Native Eastern Woodlands Rachel V. Briggs (bio) As long as the Indian can eat and drink osafki, he will not go dead. —Creek saying Made from boiled maize kernels exposed to an alkaline solution, hominy has been regarded as one of a number of maize dishes within the culinary repertoire of the Native cook. However, this article proposes that hominy was not a singular dish but rather the life-sustaining staple foodway for Native groups in the Eastern Woodlands and that it served as the basis for a number of resulting foods. The importance of this foodway, practiced well into the twentieth century by many groups, is not just in its chemical alteration of maize but also in the elements of sociality that envelop it, which helped perpetuate the culinary, nixtamalizing practices involved long after they were no longer biologically essential. This sociality includes those domestic and community-wide practices that established a particular taste for lye and ash, important elements of the foodway, as well as the role of the hominy foodway within a broader social context. Food plays a central role in our lives. It is not simply that we eat every day up to several times a day. Food is much more than nourishment—enveloping it are a number of activities, ones that involve procurement, preparation, serving, and even disposal. As such, food is surrounded by a number of cultural rules and guidelines that facilitate this process, telling us what is good to eat and what is not, when it is good to eat and when it is not, how we should eat, where we should eat, even, at times, why we should eat.1 These rules are constantly reinforced on a daily basis, [End Page 112] cementing them as “the original social glue that forms the bonds of family and society while creating the individual.”2 Thus, food is also shrouded in meaning, and this meaning constructs and interprets our lives and experiences. At this point, though, we are no longer talking about just food. We are talking about foodways, or the activities, rules, and meanings that surround not only food but cuisines (or the manner in which food is prepared).3 Unlike studies of food, foodways studies encompass the social activities that surround a specific food or dish, providing a means to discuss shared, common culinary and social practices related to specific foods and dishes. Thus, the distinct advantage of foodways studies is that they are holistic, broadening the focus from the plant or animal exclusively to also incorporate those practices surrounding their preparation and consumption, as well as the social and cultural contexts enveloping them. An example of the important difference between these two approaches would be the study of maize versus the study of foodways in which maize is the central foodstuff. Studies of the maize plant have long stressed its versatility as a food product and its productivity as a dietary staple. Ubiquitous throughout the New World at the time of European contact, maize is heralded as a plant full of possibilities, serving as the backbone for the rise of complex societies in the Americas, as a dietary staple of European peasants from the seventeenth century on, and now as the third most utilized human food source in the world (first for ruminant fodder). There is no question that maize was a staple among the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands. From the chroniclers of Hernando de Soto’s entrada to the letters of Jesuit missionaries to the journals of the naturalist William Bartram, the prevalence of maize was noted throughout the region. In addition, explorers and colonists commented on the numerous, diverse ways Natives prepared the plant.4 Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny is often cited to the effect that among the Natchez there were at least forty-two different ways of preparing maize, each with a different name.5 From a food studies perspective, this statement is understood to indicate that there were many unique and varied dishes that could be made with maize. However, from a foodways perspective, we begin to understand that this statement may have another meaning. Instead of...