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From: tenas kumtux
Date: 9/30/2002
Time: 12:19:59 AM
Remote Name: 137.53.105.80
Well, that’s a long order. The Chinook lived in a land of plenty.
Foremost in their diet was fish. On the Columbia they had smelt, sturgeon, salmon, and shad in bounty.
Marine mammals were also quite important. Sea lion, seal and whale made up a substantial portion of their diet. They prized whale oil and used it as a sauce over certain roots and berries.
Camas, a bulb that grows in fields, and wapato, a tuber that grows in marshes, were their two major sources for carbohydrates.
Salal berries were gathered in the fall, sun dried, mixed with salmon oil, and pounded into cakes. These cakes kept well over the winter. When needed the cakes were dissolved in a broth which produced a sweet soup. Meriwether Lewis was treated to a bowl of salal soup while visiting a Clatsop lodge.
The list of what they ate goes on and on. Food is abundant on the lower Columbia. In fact, the Chinook were rather puzzled by the first white settlers’ inability to find food.
Twice yearly migratory birds (ducks, geese, swans) stopped over on the Columbia and provided quite a feast. One ship’s surgeon recorded in his journal that he had observed a small group of Cathlamet sitting on a beach apparently doing nothing. After about a half hour they began digging up the sand near the place that they had been sitting. What the surgeon did not know was that earlier they had heated stones in a fire. When the stones were hot they dug a pit in the sand and put the stones in the bottom of the pit. They then lined the pit with leaves and put in a swan and a number of roots. They applied another layer of leaves poured water over the whole of it and then covered it over with sand. When the surgeon first noticed them they had in fact been waiting for their lunch to finish cooking. And to the surgeon’s amazement he watched as they pulled a fully cooked meal out of the sand.
Elk, deer, bear, porcupine, panther, beaver, otter, and even dog were on the menu, along with mussels, clams, crabs, crayfish and eel.
Fruits from crab apples to salmon berries and vegetables from asparagus to skulk cabbage abounded.
They enjoyed salmon roe and would place evergreen bows in streams where salmon were spawning so that the sticky eggs would collect on them.
They did not like salt. When the first traders reached the Columbia the Chinook complained that they ruined the flavor of their food by salting it.
If you wish to experience something close to what a Chinook may have eaten, slow roast a salmon and a few potatoes (I find they have a taste similar to wapato) over a smoky wood-chip fire. I believe you will find that no seasoning in necessary.