Many years ago in a wild hilly part of northwest California near the banks of the Klamath River, two women watched as men of the Yurok people brought in a huge sturgeon. One woman, the older Yurok, laid out leaves as plates, spread roe from the sturgeon on them, and put them near a smoky fire. The other woman, who was also Native American but from Oklahoma’s Potawatomi people, tasted and was amazed.
“It was exquisite,” she recalls. “It could have been a thousand dollar dish in a New York restaurant,” says the woman – Loretta Barrett Oden.
This was just one episode in Oden’s years-long (and, in fact, life-long) journey to reclaim her native roots and discover the foodways of the tapestry of peoples who inhabited America in 1491, before Columbus. She traveled the country, living with the Tlingit in the Northwest, the Blackfeet on the Great Plains, the Pueblo people in the Southwest. She fished for salmon with the Tlingit and helped harvest crops in the Louisiana Bayou.
Her life sounds worthy of a documentary, and indeed it was – it aired on PBS: Seasoned with Spirit.
All that knowledge has now found another worthy home. There’s a glorious glassy gleaming building in Oklahoma City that houses the First Americans Museum. Its mission: to immerse the visitor in the American world before Columbus came or, in Oden’s words, “to further heighten our awareness of who we are.”
Inside the museum, Oden’s restaurant, 39, honors the cuisine of these peoples. You can go to any town in the United States, Oden points out, and find pasta dishes from Italy, even Mongolian barbecue, but Native American restaurants are an exotic rarity, and if you find one, it probably specializes in fry bread.
39 does not serve fry bread. Oden limits the menu to ingredients found in America before the Europeans came. She’s not fanatic about this though.
“We don’t use a lot of dairy because we didn’t have cows back then,” she says, “but if I want whipped cream on a dessert, I’m going to have it.”
But the range of ingredients and cooking techniques she uses is incredibly vast. They are culled from years of research, examining archaeology digs, talking with every elder she could find. The name 39 refers to the 39 tribes who currently reside in Oklahoma (most dumped there against their will by the U.S. government), but Oden pulls recipes from all over the Americas.
She serves ceviche because the Moche people of Peru invented it thousands of years ago, using passionfruit for acidity. There’s a scallop dish, because scallops are loved by the peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
“I pair it with sea beans,” she says, “because I like to pair things that live together. My people were hunter-gatherers from the Great Lakes, so we have a lot of venison, wild rice, foraged plants like spruce and sumac.”
There’s even a hummus dish on the menu. Oden discovered the recipe while living with a Sonoran desert tribe in Arizona.
Native cooking methods too were varied. Stews were made in clay pots. Rocks were heated, smeared with pumpkin oil or grease, used as griddles to cook steaks. Oden also uses European fine dining techniques in her recipes. Many chefs do this nowadays the better to showcase their ancestral cuisines.
And in this Oden is aided by two immensely talented chefs, Ben Hutton and Ben Grossman. Is Oden open to learning from these young chefs?
“Absolutely!” she exclaims. “New techniques, fun innovative things, I’m always willing to learn. After all, cooking is the grand passion of my life. I love what I do.”
