Exploring New Uses for Native Ingredients

An interview with Sara Calvosa Olson of Mill Valley and the Hoopa Valley Reservation

Feb 02, 2022

This week, I’m sharing an interview with Sara Calvosa Olson, a Native Californian and food writer who is focused on reintroducing Native ingredients to people’s diets in modern ways. Her cookbook, which is full of these kinds of recipes, will be published by Heyday sometime in the next few months. (I’ll let send a link out when it’s available!)

Sara talked with me about how she became interested in this work, the various ways she’s encouraging people to use Native ingredients, and the line between engaging people in using Native knowledge to combat climate change and encouraging practices that can be unsustainable and culturally appropriative. Here is my interview with Sara, condensed and edited for clarity. Her wonderful recipe for pumpkin fry bread follows.

Sara Calvosa Olson

I grew up in Hoopa, which is a reservation in Northern California, and so did my husband. I am a Karuk tribal member. I live in the Bay Area now, and I’ve been a food writer for ten years.

I was thinking about how my children had not really been connected, in the way that I was connected from growing up in Hoopa. So I was thinking about how I can connect my own children to the Karuk community. And because I’m a writer, my initial thought was let’s do story telling.

I was telling this acorn maiden story, and it kind of led me explain that this is how we identify the acorns—by using this story, we identify the acorns that we like. And then I thought, I guess I have to show them how to deal with acorns. So it all of a sudden became this holistic circle: Now that we have all these acorns, how do we store them? How do we preserve them? Then we turn them into flour—now what do we do? And then we can make acorn soup, which is really kind of the main way that we use acorn traditionally, one of the only ways that we have documented.

A lot of our recipes and traditions have been lost, mainly because we have a missing generation, a boarding school generation. And even post-boarding school there’s not a lot, because of that break. Also, the anthropologists who were documenting our traditions were all men. They found cooking and foodways to be women’s work, and it wasn’t as compelling or interesting to them. The only time that they really cared to document foodways was in a ceremonial setting, because it was dramatic and it had flair.

So we really have a very short list of things that we can point to directly and say, “Yes, this is something that we ate: acorn soup, smoked salmon, acorn breads.” It’s just not very thorough. And I know, as a mom and somebody that cooks, that there had to have been this beauty and nuance in their everyday cooking. It wasn’t just, “Here’s this soup.”

In the Bay Area (and I grew up with these also), we’ve got a lot of bay laurel peppernuts, also manzanita berries, acorn, salmon, surf fish, shellfish, seaweed, mesquite, chia, all sorts of seeds, coastal buckwheat, things like that.

So I’ve been gathering ingredients that are traditional, and then taking these traditional ingredients and using them in a modern setting. Now that we have our acorn flour, I’m like, Ok, let’s make something interesting and fun, just like what we would eat today. Let’s make muffins, or let’s make waffles, something like that. My kids are helping out and getting involved. It’s really gratifying to me that my kids know how to gather and process and work with acorns.

Things like acorns actually need to be gathered in order to cut back on pests like the little moths that can bore holes into the acorns. You get rid of pests and clear the underbrush and get rid of fuel. I feel like there’s been a bit of a revival in the last couple years, now that I’ve been running around telling everyone to gather their acorns so we can do this stuff together. I know people who used to gather but haven’t been gathering for a long time—and that goes back to, “Now we have our acorns, but no one wants to eat just acorn soup over and over.” If I get everyone to go out and do all this gathering, then I need to have some things for them to make that are going to be easy enough and tasty.

Right: Sara Calvosa Olson at the mouth of the Klamath. Left: Her sons cracking and cleaning acorns

It’s fraught when you’re talking about traditional foods and walking that line between what is for us, that we want to preserve, and what is for everybody else. Because there is a line.

We do need to engage everybody when it comes to climate change and reconnecting to natural rhythms and actually giving a rip about the earth. People are so disconnected that it’s difficult. It feels like this sort of existential crisis, but it’s not. We can go outside, and it’s very tangible and very real. And there are things that we can do now. And we need to engage everybody. And I think we should do it by centering traditional ecological knowledges and centering Native people in the way forward.

I’m hoping that I’m drawing people in but that it’s not going to have a negative impact on Native people, like foraging does. Foraging can have a really negative impact on Native people, because foragers are going out and gathering in all these places and turning around and selling it. It’s centering capitalism.

Instead, it should be about the reciprocity between you and the land that you’re tending. That’s the difference between foraging and gathering. With gathering there’s reciprocity: I’m there to help, and in return I receive a gift from my original relatives. The relatives that matter the most to me, the elders that matter the most to me, are those original relatives: the river, the oak tree, salmon, all those things. So if I’m going out with reciprocity in mind and with the good intentions of tending, then I will be rewarded by my original relatives eventually.

And at that point, I can share that. And I should be sharing that. My first instinct, and a forager’s first instinct, should not be, Look at all these mushrooms! I’m going to sell all these morels and make a fortune! It should be, Whose land am I on? And whose elders are here? Maybe those elders are still subsistence gatherers. A forager can be a good relative by going in and saying, “Hey, I can gather and tend these areas. Are there elders that may rely on these foods? Can I share these foods with your elders? Can I teach your youth and help them reclaim that knowledge that they were disconnected from?”

I have a half-Italian, half-Native family. So I grew up cooking with the Italian side of my family. My grandpa was this amazing cook. He just had all of these really old recipes from his mother.

So that was the first kind of food that I grew up cooking, as far as learning the fundamentals of how to cook and flavors, and also the importance of family and the way it connects to food. So that was really where I connected to food was on that side of the family. And I wanted to bring that kind of warm family connection to coming up with new Indigenous foods recipes.

I put together traditional foods meal kits and send them out to Native community members, and we do a Zoom cooking demonstration with the meal kit. This is through CIMCC, which is the Cal Indian Museum in Santa Rosa. They asked me if I would be willing to do an acorn demonstration, which I do all the time. And I had been circling this idea about meal kits, and connecting people that way—especially our elders who aren’t able to get out and gather and really depend on community visits and classes and things like that in order to socialize. And it was just so much fun that we just started doing more and more and more.

My most recent one was acorn miso and a traditional dashi using traditional seaweeds and mushrooms and ramps. We also used Japanese koji to seed the miso. I showed them how to make miso soup balls: you make the acorn miso balls mixed with mushrooms or ramps or wild garlic—whatever you’ve gathered—and you roll them up into a ball and you just freeze them. It’s a way to have acorn soup when it’s wintertime; you still get those spring flavors.

We did acorn flour waffles with manzanita berry flour as well. Manzanita berries are so sweet; they’re like little apples (the name manzanita means “little apple”). And a manzanita berry syrup. We learned about peppernuts and how to roast them, and how to make a roast coffee with them. And we did pumpkin muffins with peppernuts and chia—and chocolate chips, obviously.

We made acorn crepes with a lesson in how to make your own cajeta with goats milk, because a lot of native people suffer from lactose intolerance. It’s kind of a joke in our community, but it’s true; nobody can handle milk.

A lot of my recipes involve putting just one cup of acorn flour into a recipe that usually has something like three cups of white flour. Instead of making it a full acorn bread, it’s just one cup of acorn flour, because then that’s one less cup of white flour that you’re eating. And in our community that’s really important. We’re still really reliant on commodities like white flour and oil; starchy stuff.

Like fry bread. The thing about fry bread and Indian tacos is that it is one of those things that is really synonymous with Native culture presently. It’s emblematic of both our oppression and our survival at the same time. And it is an embodiment also of all the things we need to change in our diet.

It was one of the places where I started, where I felt it was important to try to change it a little bit from our original iteration of flour and water and lard, or flour, powdered milk, and lard. There’s a lot of different ways of making fry bread throughout Indian country. But it’s basically the same thing; it’s how do we make these commodity foods edible so we can survive. So it enabled our survival.

On the one hand I am grateful for it; on the other hand it has become so pervasive in our community that it’s almost like colonization playing the long game: knowing how unhealthy these foods are for us, that we are now suffering above all other demographics with diet-related disease. And it’s because of our dependency on these foods. And it was intentional. Separation from the land was intentional. They separated us from our land and our resources and gave us these basically poison foods to eat.

It enabled us to survive, but now we have to do the hard work of reconnecting back to our traditional foodways. It can be really overwhelming to do that all at once, and to decolonize your diet all at once can be very overwhelming and difficult. So one of the recipes I have is this pumpkin fry bread, and it’s a way to incorporate pumpkin into the fry bread recipe as a way of just breaking that cycle. We’re inching forward in some way; we’re reclaiming it.

Recipe: Fry Bread with Squash and Chile

This twist on traditional fry bread comes from Sara’s upcoming cookbook. Here, she replaces some of the traditional flour with squash puree. She prefers to use squash with thin skin, so she can puree the entire thing for extra flavor and fiber, but she notes that you can use any squash puree. She serves it with elk chili beans, which is a mix of elk meat and beans cooked with dried chiles, tomatoes, and lots of herbs and spices. That recipe will also be in her book, but any beans or meat will also be great here.

Serves 4-6

1 small red kuri squash
1-2 tablespoons red chile powder
1-2 tablespoons maple sugar or syrup
2 ½ cups flour, plus additional ¼ cup flour for shaping
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons yeast
½ cup milk
½ cup water
2 cups sunflower oil
Beans (or elk chili beans), lettuce, tomato, avocado, cheese, salsa, sour cream, baby kale, pickled jalapeños, seaweed flakes, fermented hot sauce, or other toppings, for serving

1. Set the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. Cut the squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Sprinkle the halves with chile powder and maple sugar and roast until tender, approximately 45 minutes. Remove the squash from the oven, put it in a food processor and puree it, skin and all.

3. In a large mixing bowl mix the flour, baking powder, salt, and yeast, whisking thoroughly.

4. In a heat-proof liquid measuring cup, heat the water and milk together in a microwave until slightly warmer than room temperature.

5. Mix the water-milk combo and 1 cup of squash puree with the flour mix. The dough should be a little bit sticky, but if it’s so wet that you can’t form it into a ball and then pat it and pull it into a flat disk, add more flour, ¼ cup at a time. If it’s too dry and doesn’t stick at all, add a little more warm water, 1 tbsp at a time. Cover bowl with a towel and set aside for an hour.

6. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Test the oil’s readiness by tossing in a little flour to see if it sizzles.

7. Coating your hands in flour, pull off golf-ball-sized pieces of dough and pat it back and forth in your hands until you’ve got about a 6 inch disc (or whatever size you like.) Place it carefully in the hot oil and fry for about two minutes on each side. Your frybread should be fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside. Repeat with the remaining dough.

8. To serve, top with any ingredients you like.

The California Table

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