Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Category: Recipes

  • Ash Cakes

    Ash Cakes are unleavened corn bread – usually cooked on an open fire, and managing the fire is the most challenging part of the cooking. The recipe is fairly basic:

    1 cup corn meal
    ½ cup wheat flour
    ½ teaspoon salt
    Water

    The flour improves the taste and makes the cakes hold together – it isn’t absolutely necessary. Combine the ingredients, mix well, and gradually add water, stirring as you go. Quit adding water when the mix is still too thick to pour, but will drop from a spoon. Brush back the coals and ash from the fire (here I like to have a large flat rock in the fire). Drop 2 or 3 big spoons of the cornmeal mixture onto the hot rock or bare soil. Rake coals from the fire to cover the ash cake. Bake for about five minutes – it’s done when you can push a sliver of wood into the cake at its thickest point, and the wood comes out clean with no moist dough. Take the cake from the fire, dust and blow off the ashes, and your cake is ready to eat.

    If you’re trying it in the house, substitute an electric fry pan for the fire, heat it to 350 before starting your ash cake, and use the lid to keep the top of the cake baking.

  • Dried Corn Soup

    Once, when I visited the Lower Brule, I was served soup made from dry field corn.  There was no large explanation, just the opportunity for the wasichu to recognize how tough the times were in the first days of the reservations and the last days of the buffalo.  While it’s not five-star cuisine, the recipe probably has a place with anyone who stashes a couple bushels of dried corn in the emergency rations stash.

    1 lb. lean boned beef, cut in cubes
    1 tbsp. bacon drippings
    4 c. water
    1 c. dried corn
    1/2 tsp. salt

    Brown meat.  Add water; cover and simmer for 1 hour. Add dried corn and salt. Cover and simmer until both meat and corn are tender.

  • Fry Bread

    South Dakota’s official state bread is Fry Bread – Probably the best I ever tasted was with wojapi when I visited the Lower Brule Reservation.  I was fortunate to meet, and get to know, Mike Jandreau, who was Tribal President.  His first question was, “What do you know about tribal sovereignty.”  I could answer competently because I had traveled with Joel Clarenbeau as he studied the topic. 

    The Lower Brule Reservation was settled under the leadership of Chief Solomon Iron Nation (1815-1894), a man who accomplished a great deal for his people. 

    I don’t have the recipe from Lower Brule – but this recipe comes from St. Joseph’s, just a little to the south in Chamberlain.  I’ve visited them, and think highly of the school – they do a good job – more information on the school is available at https://www.stjo.org/  If you want the recipe for wojapi, it’s on the website.

    Lakota Fry Bread
    Ingredients:
    ¼ cup sugar
    3 teaspoons baking powder
    2 cups flour
    1 teaspoon salt
    1 cup water (or just enough to make a soft dough)
    Oil for frying

    Mix all the dry ingredients together. Add water, mixing carefully. Divide the dough into four pieces and pat each into a round, flat shape. Add 1-2 inches of oil to a large skillet and heat to 350. Fry each round until crisp and brown on both sides.  
  • Caramel Corn

    Caramel Corn

    This delicious recipe is a yummy treat and always a favorite at gatherings or for a cozy afternoon at home. It is not quick to make but well worth the time put into it.

    Carmel Corn

    • 1 c. butter
    • 2 c. brown sugar
    • 1 c. light corn syrup
    • 1/2 tsp. salt
    • Bring to a boil over medium heat
    • Simmer 5 minutes. Remove from heat and add:
    • 1 tsp vanilla
    • 1/2 tsp baking soda
    • Pour over six quarts of popped popcorn…using an air popper works best (I fill a large roaster and separate the unpopped kernels first…no sense breaking a tooth)
    • Bake in oven at 250 for one hour…stirring every 15 min.
    • Enjoy!

  • Kuchen- a Russian German Dessert

    About the time of the American Revolution, Germans were offered a bit of freedom if they emigrated to Ukraine and Russia – free land, freedom from taxation, exemption from the draft and freedom of religion.  Of course that sort of a deal couldn’t last – so about a century later, facing taxation and the draft, the descendants of those Russian Germans moved again, mostly to the Great Plains of the US and Canada.  For years, the Census differentiated between Germans and Russian Germans.

    They brought Kuchen to the prairies, and it is South Dakota’s official state dessert.  (While Norwegians also settled the prairies, nowhere is lutefisk an official state dessert)  So here is a recipe for those who want to make Kuchen, just like the Russian Germans do.

    Bread Base:

    • 1 ½ c. milk, scalded
    • 1 ½ c. shortening
    • ¾ c sugar
    • 1 heaping tsp. Salt
    • 4 eggs
    • ⅓ c. warm water
    • 1 package active dry yeast
    • 1 tsp sugar
    • 5 c. flour

    Blend together the milk, shortening, ¾ c. sugar and salt.  Let cool.  Beat in eggs, one at a time.  Blend the warm water, dry yeast and 1 tsp. sugar.   Add the yeast mixture to the first mixture.  Add the flour.  Beat well with a spoon.  Dough will be very soft.  Let rise.  Stir down and shape, or place in the refrigerator overnight.  Take out in the morning and pinch off small sections, one for each Kuchen (this recipe makes 10 or 11 9” Kuchen

    Roll out dough as you would pie dough, not quite ¼ inch thick.  Put in greased pan without stretching dough.  Pinch down against the inside of pan.  Do not let the dough rise before filling; spread a layer of fruit or cottage cheese immediately on the bread base.  Then top with a custard appropriate to the kind of Kuchen you are making – one custard recipe is 2 c. sugar, 4 Tbsp. flour, 4 eggs, a pinch of salt and 4 c. milk.  Cook until thick, stirring all the time.  Let cool, stir in 2 c. cream.  Pour over fruit.

    Sprinkle Kuchen with a crumb mixture of 2 Tbsp flour, ¼ c. brown sugar, 2 Tbsp. butter and cinnamon to taste.

    Bake at 350 degrees F for 10 minutes, then at 325 degrees for 20 minutes until filling is almost set.  Remove from oven, let set until filling becomes firm.  Slide the Kuchen from the pan onto plates.

    Recipe from Sei Unser Gast – which probably means something in German or Russian. 

  • Prairie Communists and Rhubarb Pie

    The communism you encounter in Montana and the Dakotas is generally based on Acts 2:44 “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common.”  On the prairies of Montana and the Dakotas, communal ownership and living is not Godless communism, it is based on that verse from the New Testament.

    They’re Hutterites – and not all Hutterites are the same.  Historically, they aren’t even all communal – when the Hutterites came to America, the 1880 Census showed 443 Hutterites living on four colonies, while 825 (called the Prairieleut) lived non-communally.  By 1952, all the non-communal Hutterite churches became Mennonite.  It appears that the faith requires communal living to survive.

    In the Ukraine,  communal living was abandoned in 1819, and reinstituted under the leadership of Schmide (blacksmith) Michael Waldner.  Darius Walter led a second group’s return to communal living in 1860.  Janzen summarized the differences between the communal and non-communal Hutterites: “In Ukrainian Russia, communal and non-communal Hutterite groups had been virtually indistinguishable except for the differences in economic arrangements.  In America, a vibrant spirit of assimilation had caused the two groups to become radically different from one another” . . . (1999:177).  One of my colleagues at SDSU confidently stated that his family was never Hutterite – despite a surname (Tschetter) that shows up only among Hutterites.  He might have more accurately said that his family was never communal Hutterite, at least in North America.

    A couple of recipes for rhubarb pie might show the differences:

    Jeeta Kant’s Hutterite Community Cookbook:

                4 cups fresh cut-up rhubarb (½ inch pieces)|
                2 cups sugar
                3 Tbsp cornstarch
                1 double unbaked 9-inch pie crust

    1.  Mix all filling ingredients together and let stand overnight.
    2. Place in an unbaked pie shell and cover with a top crust and seal.
    3. Bake at 425 for 10 minutes, then at 325 for 30 more minutes.

    Opposed to the recipe from Pots of Gold from Hutterian Kitchens:

    About 5 pails cut up rhubarb               72 egg yolks

                1 ½ c. flour                                          72 egg whites

                24 c. sugar                                           5 ½ c. sugar

                12 c. sweet cream                              72 egg whites

    Place 3 cups cut up rhubarb in unbaked pie shells.  Beat egg yolks.  Stir in 24 cups of sugar, flour and cream; mix well.  Pour over cut up rhubarb.  Bake at 350 until done; cool.

    Beat egg whites with a little salt.  Add 5 ½ cups sugar, put on top of pies and brown in oven.