FRYBREAD ON A STICK

Recently there was a frybread debate on Twitter, though at first the only distinction made about frybread was that some people treated it as a sweet with honey or maple syrup and others treated it as a savory.  Having thought about all this before (an advantage of being old) I pointed out that frybread, rather than being unique to North American indigenous people, was widespread under many names.  There are ethnic names in many languages all over Europe and even in Asia, and in the Americas folk names like squaw bread or elephant ears.  

All frybread is wheat dough made to rise from baking powder or yeast like traditional baked breads, but fried instead.  But bannock is said to be unleavened, a "flat" bread, like Scots scones.  Instead of being fried in deep fat or oil, the dough might be stuck to a frying pan that can be hung next to an open fire to bake.  The most ingenious way to bake "frybread" is wound around a branch and held over an open fire bed of coals, the way skewered meat can be cooked.

Going to continental origin basics, in the beginning North America had neither wheat for flour nor cast iron frying pans for frying dough.  The North American foods were corn (ground into flour or meal), squash and beans -- the Three Sisters of the Mandan group at the head of the Mississippi -- plus tomatoes, potatoes and fruits of various kinds, mostly berries.  There was rice.  Preservation was mostly done by drying.  I could live happily on this diet!  And how could I survive without chocolate and coffee, both American.  (Nicotine is not a food.  Do NOT eat it!)

Wheat was developed from wild grass in Europe.  Making flour was first mechanized by tethered donkeys or oxen walking in a circle to make two big stones grind the grain heads into powder.  Cows produced butter and pigs produced lard, both good for flour products.  Modern "healthy" oils didn't exist.

But the main food impact missing from the Americas was the use of fermentation to be leavening.  Nor even baking powder.  Their breads, even after the importation of wheat, were flat breads like tortillas, so they tended to treat even risen flour dough as though it were a flat bread, merely fried what the yeast puffed up.  I don't know anyone who fries flat bread but there are recipes online.

Europe was very interested in fermentation, not least because it was the means of creating drinking alcohol.  Beer, wine, whiskey, risen bread, cheese, olives, pickles, yogurt, are all foods still popular.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki Fermentation_in_food_processing  

 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cheese-wheat-and-alcohol-shaped-human-evolution-180968455/

Salting food to preserve it was also popular.  It would have been popular among game-eaters, since wild meat is short on saltiness and fat.  The animals themselves love both.  

In the age of long-distance sailing where people had nothing to eat but salted meat and moldy hardtack, long trips were literally deadly, though in later years there was investigation into other foods that could be carried for weeks.  Maybe fermented cabbage: sauerkraut.  Scurvy meant special importance to anything that had Vitamin C.  I don't think anyone ever hit on the Vitamin C in candy for sailing ships, but a study of the Blackfeet found that children had high levels of Vitamin C from candy.  Neither did the sailors know about pemmican: pounded together berries, fat and meat that is a complete food.  It could have saved lives.

Africa is the origin of sweet potato, cooking banana (plantain), cassava, peanut, common bean, peppers, eggplant, and cucumber.  Some basic commodities are so specialized in origin and appeal -- like sago palm pulp -- that they can support small populations but are never exported.  New Guinea is where sago palm was developed.  It is a desperation borderline food in a very inhospitable place where people live in jungle clearings on the ridges between valleys.  By contrast, the prairie herds of bison were a nutritious source of both food and shelter.  The People were big and vigorous.

Food production and consumption is a huge topic full of politics, distribution economics, and war -- since famine is the ultimate weapon.  Since eating is the first thing a newborn does, its very source of life is deep within us.  Attachment to the experience of eating is passionate.  The first foods are never forgotten and become part of religious and social life.  Only after the ability to experiment and travel to new settings do most people willingly eat strange foods.

At the folk level, which is what most people think of, the family's food is considered the best and the community supplies all the variety a child wants.  As adults, food is a matter of patriotic identity.  At a sophisticated level, even an organic chemistry level, food is still vitally interesting, but maybe unfamiliar and order-breaking.  The people indigenous to North America who could not have eaten risen bread fried or baked will claim that frybread is their traditional food and try to keep it privileged over other people's versions of what to eat.  They give frybread pet names and even crave it.

No one offers frybread as Christian Communion nor should they, since it is celebrated as a flat bread.  Those who bake risen bread for Communion are anachronistic, but also European.  Passover and Lent avoid the luxury of fermented dough, however cooked.  Food is rarely logical, but often historic.