Recipe: Cherokee blueberry honey cake (2024)

I always played the Indian in the children’s game ‘Cowboys and Indians’. In movies, I wanted those underdogs to win. I learnt the evocative names of the tribes: Cherokee, Apache, Comanche, Navajo, Cheyenne, are just a few. They represented romance, rebellion, resistance, dignity, tradition, purity of culture. I used to see a Western every week at Saturday Morning Pictures. Do kids still play Cowboys and Indians?

One summer I backpacked around New Mexico, hitching a ride to visit the Acoma pueblo ‘mesa’, a 365-foot flat-topped mountain arising from the dessert. A few Native Americans live there all year round but thousands of tourists visit each year.

We looked around the traditional buildings, the people and the craft shops. In one shop a large friendly red-faced American tourist naively asked a tiny shrivelled Native American lady how old she was. Her reply was scathing “How dare you ask me how old I am. How dare you come here and insult me like this. You are talking down to me, this is typical of the white man, patronising us”. The hapless tourist gabbled apologies. It was embarrassing and awkward.

Her anger punctured our cheerful curiosity about their mesa village. We suddenly became aware that we were interlopers, that they didn’t like us, that we were there on sufferance, so that they could make money to survive.

I’m still fascinated by Native American life; I’d love to spend some time in a teepee, naff thought that might be nowadays. The architecture of the teepee is particularly feminine; many Native Indian tribes are matrilineal. The teepee field at Glastonbury always inspires and I often go there during the festival to have some chai, listen to guitar, by the fireside as dawn breaks.
For this Secret Garden Club I researched Native American food, starting with the planting trio ‘Three sisters’: corn, beans and squash. Foods they ate were mainly corn-based but also included tomatillos (husk tomatoes), berries (Sumac made ‘Indian lemonade’), acorn flour and oil, game and fish, wild potato, Yucca, Squash and zuccini, watermelon, turkeys, maple syrup and pinon nuts.
To find out more about companion planting such as the Three Sisters go here.

Menu:

Corn whisky (Jim Beam with co*ke)

Cornmeal tacos with marinated salmon, fresh and smoked

Cornbread in a skillet

Tomato and spring onion salsa

Succotash using @zia_mays home-grown borlotti beans

Roast squash with maple syrup and sumac

Cherokee blueberry honey cake

Here is the recipe for the Cherokee Blueberry Honey cake (sounds like the name of a pop stars progeny), it worked very well. The original recipe was with ‘huckleberries’ but those being rather thin on the ground in North-West London, I replaced them with blueberries. I was told by a guest that huckleberries* aren’t actually very nice!

*Don’t make the mistake I oncedidin an American cafe and order a ‘dingleberry’ pie.

The next Secret Garden Club (workshop, supper and bouquet) is on the subject on edible flowers: how to grow them and which ones can you eat. Book here:http://www.wegottickets.com/event/157921£45