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FOODS THE INDIANS GAVE US by Wilma Pitchford & R. Vernon Hays

FOODS THE INDIANS GAVE US

By

Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 1972
Publisher: McKay-Washburn

A rundown of foods that originated in the Americas, many of them first brought to Europe by Spanish explorers and later reintroduced here by early settlers. The potato, sweet potato, peanut, beans, tomato, pineapple, chocolate and cocoa, and the all-important corn are reviewed in terms of origin, history, customs and cultivation, with directions for home growing where this is feasible. The Hays' sources are conventional (and there is no recognition, for example, of the recent deterioration of commercial tomatoes) but valid as far as they go. The appended recipes ""adapted from Indian ways of cooking"" are by no means consistently indigenous (""only stone-ground cornmeal"") will do for Indian pudding but Osage bread is made from flour and baking powder) but they'll serve to enliven the classroom study for which the book is evidently and adequately geared.