In Native American culture, the three sisters were corn, squash, and beans, three crops that when planted together, all supported each other to grow and thrive. Those three ingredients were found throughout many Native American recipes, and although we eat plenty of corn, squash, and beans as a family, and it would be easy to find recipes that included any or all of them, I knew I wanted to make something indigenous to the Americas to truly represent this theme. I requested a bunch of cookbooks from the library, and after skimming through them, I settled on the three sisters salad with shallot vinaigrette from The New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian, by Chef Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli.
The salad included onions, garlic, carrots, celery, thyme, zucchini, corn, white beans, and spinach, with a vinaigrette consisting of lemon juice, shallots, garlic, and olive oil. The vegetables are all cooked, so this was more of a warm/room temperature salad.
We liked this salad, especially the flavors of the vinaigrette. It tasted light and healthy, and was a good match for the heavier components of our dinner (rotisserie chicken and garlic bread). The recipe intro stated that they couldn't match this summer salad (which we ate in early spring) to any particular community, but for us, this will be for the AtWCC for the USA. Since we're doing each state and territory separately, we'll be counting the indigenous recipes that we try there. Now that we've found a bunch of cookbooks, looking forward to trying more!
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