Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner Read Free Book Online Page A

something impure, associated with the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her very cooking a brewing of poison, nay, her very existence a source of sin to man. Thus woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch. The witch trials of the Middle Ages, wherein thousands of women were condemned to the stake, were the very real traces of the contest between man and woman. Christianity putting the religious weapon into man’s hand made his conquest complete. 14
     
    Gage documented the spiritual and practical authority Native women maintained in the field as well as in the kitchen, while acknowledging their influence on white women in both areas. “Let every eater of succotash—a ‘luscious mixture’ of green-corn, beans, and venison correctly called ‘msickquatash’—henceforth remember to whom we are indebted for that toothsome dish.” After replacing venison with pork and changing the name, “we white people speak of it as one of our national dishes,” she said, when in truth, “the gustatory succotash” was given to us by Haudenosaunee women. It is not “our only culinary remembrance of the red-woman’s skill in cookery,” she added, “for more than one of our national dishes are ours not by invention, but by adoption from our Indian predecessors.” 15
    In another article headlined, “Do You Love Corn?” Gage questioned whether the reader might “emulate Sancho Panza, and bless the man who first invented Succotash.” If so, Gage was ready for a fight. “Never, Mr. Editor, you cannot deprive my sex of that glory,” she challenged, for “succotash is the invention of a squaw.” [sic] “White men borrowed tobacco of the Red Indian,” she wrote, while “white women, more to good purpose, borrowed the art of succotash-making, and the golden pumpkin, its fit accompaniment, when in a Yankee pie.” 16
    A further Gage acknowledgment of Haudenosaunee influence on cooking claimed that, “Hasty pudding was an ancient method of preparing corn among the Iroquois.” Her proof? Reference to “A History of the New Netherlands, published in Amsterdam in 1671, [which] speaks of the Indian food, called by them sappaen, and made of crushed corn boiled to a pap.” 17
     

    Western women ... [from] sacred creators of life-giving food to kitchen drudges.

     
    Appropriately, when Hattie Burr published her Woman Suffrage Cook Book in 1886, Gage contributed a recipe for Indian pudding that had been handed down in her family, coming to her from her mother:

Old-Time Baked Indian Pudding
     
    Three pints of sweet milk, two large iron spoonfuls of yellow cornmeal, one small egg, one iron spoonful of molasses, three-fourth cup of sugar, heaped teaspoonful of ginger, level teaspoonful of cinnamon, one-third of a small nutmeg, and one-half a teacupful thick sour cream. Put half the milk over the fire with a sprinkling of salt; as soon as it comes to a boil, scatter the meal quickly and evenly in by hand. Remove immediately from the fire to a dish, stir in the cold milk, the egg well-beaten, the spices, sweetening, and sour cream. Bake three hours, having a hot oven the first hour, a moderate one the remainder of the time. Eat with sweet cream. If rightly made and rightly baked, this pudding is delicious, but four things must be remembered as requisite: First, the pudding must be thin enough to run when put in the oven, second, the egg must be small, or if large, but two- thirds used for a pudding of the above size. Third, the sour cream must not be omitted (but in case one has no cream, the same quantity of sour milk with a piece of butter the size of a small butternut can be substituted). Fourth, the baking must be especially attended to. Many a good recipe is ruined in the cooking, but if the direc tions are carefully followed, this pudding will be quavery when done, and if any is left, a jelly when cold. Use no sauce, but sweet cream or butter.
     

Matilda Joslyn Gage, Fayetteville, N.Y. 18
     
    As they