Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Anny Scoones: Indigenous cookbook writer discovered his roots while foraging for recipes

Last week, I wrote that cookbooks have become a source of beauty, ideas and inspiration, nutritional knowledge and pleasurable perusal, at the same time as food has turned into art, a graceful display of creativity.
TC_292797_web_tawaw3.jpg
tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine by executive chef Shane M. Chartrand and food writer Jennifer Cockrall-King includes essays on First Nation language, spirituality and Indigenous culture, connected by Shane’s amazing recipes, writes Anny Scoones. HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS

Last week, I wrote that cookbooks have become a source of beauty, ideas and inspiration, nutritional knowledge and pleasurable perusal, at the same time as food has turned into art, a graceful display of creativity.

Some cookbooks have also become a source of rich cultural knowledge. If you love food and cookbooks with an air of elegance and beauty, and are seeking to enhance your knowledge of First Nations people and culture, pick up tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine by executive chef Shane M. Chartrand and food writer Jennifer Cockrall-King (2019, House of Anansi Press Inc.), both Canadians.

This is an incredible story with delicious photographs. Shane is from the Enoch Cree Nation but was adopted in Alberta as a little boy by Dennis and Belinda Chartland. He has tenderly dedicated the book to them, writing “For Mom and Dad. You adopted me when I was six and you got me through so much.”

Shane writes about his life in the first few pages, accompanied by comments from Belinda: “At bedtime he’d scream and kick the walls. He didn’t want to go to bed. And after he was done with the tantrum, he’d call me to say, Mom, I need my goodnight kiss.”

Throughout this lovely book are essays on First Nation language, spirituality and Indigenous culture, but Shane’s amazing recipes are the connecting thread.

Since traditional recipes were passed on orally, with no written lists of instructions and ingredients, he had to learn about traditional Indigenous foods by talking to elders, foraging, gathering and travelling, and listening to stories, which helped him to discover his own heritage and his roots.

He says: “I don’t have the original connection to my family’s history, to my ancestors. Like it is for many in my community, those connections were destroyed, outlawed …”

But with patience and over time, find them he did, and now we have a written record in his fabulous collection of dishes, from salmon pemmican to “oysters on a beach” and “Three Sisters Soup.”

If you are not a gardener, “three sisters” refers to the companion plants of beans, squash and corn — “the corn shoots skyward providing a natural pole for the beans to follow as they climb. As they do, they provide some extra support to keep the corn upright. The squash grows low, controlling weeds and keeping the sun off the soil.”

You will learn about wild rice, which “has the distinction of being Canada’s only Indigenous cereal crop” and is not actually rice as we know it, but a freshwater grass, found mainly in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta.

Shane uses bee pollen as a garnish, calling it a “vitamin-packed natural super food” with a “slight crunchy and nutty texture.” And there are drinks – Winter Berry Sour made from berries and birch syrup. Did you know that birch trees provide a delicious syrup? Spruce tips, meanwhile, have an array of amazing medicinal qualities — Shane uses them in one of his mussel dishes.

Finally, of special note is his original and unique recipe titled “War Paint.” Don’t let the “special equipment” of latex gloves put you off (I always think of Mum wearing those big yellow rubber gloves while scrubbing the floors). Every chef wears thin clear latex gloves these days — in this case, to make a blazing, bright-orange red-pepper-sauce hand print on the plate, as shown on the book cover.

I always knew that chefs were artists, but when I saw Shane’s “War Paint” design, I had a little gasp – it truly is original art. The dish is primarily quail with wheat berries, but the striking hand print makes it Shane’s signature dish.

Although he provides recipes for delicious dishes such as sweet potato salad, this cookbook is not for vegans. His two top staples to have on hand are bison broth and pheasant broth, followed by tomato paste, minced garlic and shallots in oil, sweet mustard seed compote, puffed fried rice and bannock.

Shane’s opinion on bannock (also known as fry bread) is interesting. There is debate within the Indigenous community about whether the bannock recipe should be used, given that it is made with white flour and white sugar and therefore not a traditional food.

The Métis word for bannock is galette, and there is a recipe for both bannock and traditional galette in this extraordinary cookbook, which includes a forward by Shane’s friends Marlene and Laurie Buffalo, who say “tawâw dispels the outdated belief that Indigenous food means fry bread or pow wow Indian tacos.”

They’re not kidding!