Editor’s note: OPB’s video series “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest. Now we’re taking the same guiding principles to a new platform: Email. We’ve brought on food writer Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian and botanist, to highlight different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem every week. This week she takes a look at Indigenous foods in the Northwest.

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November is Indigenous People’s Month, and this gives us a beautiful chance to reflect on the ways that Indigenous foods continue to define our region’s culinary landscape. The foods that the Northwest is known for — salmon, berries and hazelnuts — are the same foods that sustained people here 10,000 years ago. Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest had so much bounty around them that they never needed to develop agriculture like people in other parts of the country, but there’s new evidence that a sort of farming did take place here. What was it? Read on to find out!

Small bites: Miles of meat rope, doughnuts to dollars, and Oregon’s brewing evolution

Freshly picked morsels from the Pacific Northwest food universe:

This party is a total sausage fest.

We love community food events. Grange hall spaghetti feeds, Elks Lodge taco dinners, the Sons of Norway’s Viking pancake breakfasts — these are the slices of life you can’t find anywhere else. Saturday, November 5 is the 88th annual Verboort Sausage and Kraut Festival in the community of Verboort, just outside Forest Grove. If joining a crowd of 8,000 people to eat 15 tons of smoked sausage (plus sauerkraut, applesauce, and a bevy of other sides) sounds like your idea of a good time, then you’re in for the time of your life. Just wear your comfiest pants — sausage and kraut are all-you-can-eat. Tickets to the dinner are available online, or you can show up early (sales open at 9 a.m.) to purchase sausage on-site.

Bend brewers keep thirsts slaked in a drying climate.

In 1888, brewmaster Henry Weinhard extended an offer to plumb Skidmore Fountain with his beer for the fountain’s dedication ceremonies. (Sadly, Mayor Henry Failing passed on the offer.) Long gone are the days when beer flowed as freely as water; heck, the days of water flowing freely as water seem numbered, too. That’s why breweries in increasingly xeric Central Oregon are taking steps to reduce water waste in a notoriously thirsty industry. Small actions like planting bioswales and installing rainwater catchment systems can have big impacts in the long run. OPB’s Bradley Parks reports on the strides Bend’s Worthy Brewing is taking to conserve water.

Remembering Portland’s Doughnut King.

On National Doughnut Day (Nov. 5), let’s remember Portland’s own “Doughnut King,” A. A. Hoover. Beginning as an errand boy for Dresser & Co. grocery store in the 1890s, after a year he’d saved enough to open a small bakery selling Boston brown bread and cookies, but his “milk and honey” doughnuts were what made him rich. During the wheat rationing of World War I, the King’s doughnuts were a third more gluten-free (probably rice flour or potato, as was typical at the time); by the end of the war, he was wealthy enough to have not only purchased the Poulsen mansion, but he was also on his sixth Studebaker.

The original ‘Superabundant’ foods of the Pacific Northwest

November is Indigenous People’s Month, and what better time to reflect on our region’s first foods? The Pacific Northwest doesn’t seem to have its signature dishes; we lack our own iteration of the New York cheesecake, Maryland crab cakes, Boston baked beans, or a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. The closest we Oregonians come to a culinary identity is inextricably linked to our natural resources. We are hewed to the foods of our first people. The long and short of it is: We are salmon and berries.

During the expedition down the Columbia, near the stretch that now borders Portland International Airport, William Clark noticed “emence numbers of fowls flying in every direction Such as Swan, geese, Brants, Cranes, Stalks [Storks], white guls, comerants & plevers [plovers] &c.” They stopped to camp in a scrub-shrub complex of hardhack, whiplash willow, and black cottonwood, on an island beneath what is now Interstate 205. The Corps of Discovery borrowed a canoe from some Natives also camping on the island, hunted swans and geese in Jewett Lake, and shared some of their meat as payment for the canoe rental. After the fog burned off, they disembarked at 10 a.m., stopping a few miles downstream.

That previous, rainy evening, November 5, 1805, the Corps suffered fitful sleep for the din of southbound fowl all around them. Those brants, geese, sandhill cranes and swans, all making their way to sunnier climes, had been up all night honking and chatting in their aerial caravan. “[T]hey were emensely numerous and their noise horrid,” Clark groused. (He also whined that “we are all wet Cold and disagreeable,” echoing the sentiment of more than one newcomer to Oregon’s rainy season.)

Although they were less enamored of waterfowl’s music than its meat, preeminent travel writers Lewis and Clark called the 10-mile stretch of the Columbia River from The Dalles to Celilo Falls the “Great Mart of all this Country,” an opinion held by numerous other chroniclers of early Oregon. The Pacific Northwest’s lands were that of milk and honey — or more accurately, the lands of salmon, huckleberry, camas, and wapato.

More than Three Sisters

During their first visit to our region on that early November day, the Corps found Cascades people altogether approachable and generous. In his journal, Clark scribbled a few thoughts in his slippery shorthand. “We landed at a village (of) 200 men … we were treated verry kindly by them, they gave us round root near the size of a hens egg roasted which they call Wap-to to eate.”

Within the botany and zoology chapter of the History of the Expedition Under Command of Lewis and Clark, more than 20 edible plants are listed for our region, including a wild carrot known as yampah, noted to have an anise flavor; spotted on a mossy riverbank, the selfsame wild onions that grow in England. Some of these species were eventually given Latin names that echoed the Chinookan names bequeathed by the first peoples who ate them: salal (Gaultheria shallon) is “shallun”; camas (Camassia quamash) is “quamash.” Others are still called by their earliest names, like the wetland tuber wapato, for which Sauvie Island was originally named.

The Three Sisters — winter squash, beans and maize — have been cultivated in North America and Mesoamerica for millennia; proto-pumpkins were domesticated 10,000 years ago, and beans and maize soon followed over a span of 5,000 to 6,500 years. Mesoamericans and Indigenous people of North America grew these crops as far north as present-day New York. Pacific Northwest Native people didn’t utilize the same agricultural techniques; people in our region managed entire ecosystems to support their food.

Pacific Northwest tribes are known to have tended forest gardens of hazelnuts, hawthorn, berries, and crabapples. According to a recent study published in the journal Ecology and Society, “forest gardens have substantially greater plant and functional trait diversity than periphery forests even more than 150 years after management ceased.” Native women tended their huckleberry patches in mountain foothills and deftly employed fire to maintain meadows of camas; they cultivated crops of wapato tubers year after year, supporting wetland ecosystems in the process.

Salmon: the life-giver

Watch the Salmon episode of Superabundant

If our region’s Three Sisters are huckleberry, camas, and wapato, then bison and elk, lamprey, sturgeon, and salmon are our brothers.

It is impossible to overstate salmon’s importance to the Pacific Northwest. For Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Plateau, the return of the spring’s first salmon marked the end of living on dried meats and roots, and in some cases salvation from imminent starvation. First Salmon ceremonies have been observed in our region for thousands of years and are still held to celebrate the salmon’s return each year to begin the fishing season. Other strictures and taboos surrounding salmon are said to have been delivered to the people directly by deities.

Salmon were once so plentiful that the fatty fish were used as fuel to keep fires burning brightly, and as fertilizer to nourish the soil, but now these anadromous fish are imperiled by the impacts of dams and logging. Recovery efforts, to the tune of $2 billion, have focused on promoting hatcheries instead of habitat — and have been an abject failure. Today, 26 ESUs (evolutionarily significant units) are currently federally listed under the Endangered Species Act — that’s why the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission works with state and federal fisheries biologists in taking a “gravel to gravel” approach to managing habitat for salmon, as well as for lamprey and sturgeon.

For decades, Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota founder of the Sioux Chef, has been bringing Indigenous foodways to the collective consciousness with his Minneapolis restaurant and James Beard Award-winning cookbook. We don’t have the Pacific Northwest’s analog to the Sioux Chef yet, but Indigenous knowledge has a lot to teach modern land-use managers and ecologists. It offers us myriad lessons on how to eat more locally, more sustainably, and by dint of where we live, Superabundantly.

Recipe: Cedar-roasted salmon with blackberry chutney

Salmon and berries might be the closest thing we have to a regional signature dish. Although the use of cedar or alder planks was widespread among the tribes of the Eastern United States, West Coast tribes traditionally spit-roast salmon by skewering fish onto sticks and hanging them near the fire to be slow-cooked and kissed with sweet smoke. This roasting method tasks a slightly different approach; to get the flavor of Pacific Northwest forest-bathing, we use sprigs of western redcedar (Thuja plicata; you can use arborvitae instead) and the French technique en papillote, to infuse the fish with the fragrance of cedar in a tidy paper package. Of course, if you have a smoker this would be even better (we suggest using alder wood chips). Serves 4-6

Ingredients

• 4 or 5 western redcedar or arborvitae fronds
• Side of Pacific salmon (~2 lb), skin on, pin bones removed
• 1-2 tsp olive oil
• ½ tsp brown sugar
• salt and pepper

Compote:

• 1 tsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp minced shallot
• 1 clove of garlic, minced
• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
• 2 cups Oregon blackberries (frozen is fine)
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp fine sea salt
• few cracks of pepper

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 400oF. Give the cedar fronds a rinse to remove any dirt or spiders. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper about 2 inches longer than the salmon, then fold it in half lengthwise. Open the folded paper and lay the cedar fronds on the paper on the pan.
2. Pat the salmon dry and rub both sides with olive oil, then rub the brown sugar into the flesh side and sprinkle on the salt and pepper. Place the salmon, skin side down, on the cedar fronds. Fold the paper back on the crease to cover the salmon. Fold the edges in about ½”, then fold again, to make a secure little packet.
3. Roast the salmon for 15-20 minutes, or until an instant-read thermometer reads 135oF. Allow the salmon to rest in the package for 5 minutes.
4. While the salmon is roasting, prepare the compote. Heat the olive oil in a small pot over medium-low heat and cook the shallot and garlic for about 2 minutes, until they begin to get glossy and fragrant. Add the remaining ingredients and simmer over medium heat for 15 minutes, mashing lightly with the back of a spoon until the blackberries get a bit jammy. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
5. To serve, cut a slit in the paper and peel it open, then portion as needed. Pass the blackberry chutney to spoon over the filets.

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