Welcome to Eating the Past for another episode from our spicy season. I'm your host Evelyn Funda, and I start today with one of the key lessons that I've learned over these months. That is, spices have taken us around the world. It's been fascinating to discover new spices and to find out how versatile they can be as they move from culture to culture.
Take, for instance, the sumac spice, which comes from the deep burgundy red berries that grow in clusters on the deciduous shrub of the common staghorn sumac. I, for one, didn't even know that sumac berries were edible, but dried and ground, sumac offers a taste that is bright, tart, and almost lemony, with fruity and floral under notes.
Let me give you a glimpse of how it flavors two very different world cuisines. First, a number of American indigenous cuisines use sumac, including Lakota, Cherokee, and Navajo, and one of their most iconic recipes is for sumacade, a mock pink lemonade drink that can be made without lemons.
Some food historians even believe that pink lemonade was actually inspired by sumacade.
In the desert southwest, the ground berries of the three-leaved sumac is a common flavoring in Navajo cuisine. Chiilchin, as they call it, is used in traditional Dine recipes like those that you can find in Phoenix-based Alana Yazzie's recent and stunning cookbook, “The Modern Navajo Kitchen.”
There, Yazzie uses it in very traditional recipes like an indigenous hot tea and a cornmeal breakfast pudding, but she also puts a modern spin on the sumac spice by using it to flavor fruit salads, jams and jellies, cookies, a summer spritzer, as well as a blueberry and shaved ice dessert that's topped with diced pickles and ground sumac.
Yazzie is inspiring other Navajo cooks as well. For instance, for a fusion cuisine twist, one TikTok creator uses Yazzie’s cookbook to create blue corn pop tarts with a chiilchin filling.
But now let's head more than 7000 miles east, where Middle Eastern and Arabic cuisines also use sumac to flavor all kinds of savory dishes.It's used as a meat tenderizer in marinated kebabs and beef shawarma. You can find it in a pickled red onion dish, or in the eggplant dip baba ghanoush. I'm dying to try a recipe for the Palestinian roast chicken dish called musakhan, that's flavored with sumac alongside cardamom, cumin, allspice, saffron, fried pine nuts, and lots of caramelized onions.
I think it would pair perfectly with a Lebanese fattoushe salad that I recently served at a party. That salad dresses romaine, tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, and parsley with a yummy sumac-based vinaigrette.
Sumac also plays a starring role in the Middle Eastern spice blend called zaatar, which mixes sumac and salt with thyme, oregano, and marjoram. The customary way to eat it is to dip torn flatbread into a good olive oil and then a zaatar blend. A common idiom from this region is, "We had nothing to eat but zaatar and olive oil.” It's an expression of endurance and survival, even during the hardest times.
Zaatar is also believed to make you smarter. So during school exams, mothers in the Middle East lovingly make their children zaatar sandwiches. The sumac-based blends vary considerably across the Levant region.
The Syrian blend mixes sumac with coriander and ground fennel seeds and hot Aleppo pepper flakes, while the Palestinian versions tend to favor toasted sesame seeds and a small amount of caraway for more earthy flavor, and Jordanian-style zaatar mixes add mint and anise.
The owner of a Lebanese restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, of all places, admits that zaatar can be a very personal and private thing. Some people have their own stash of wine, she says, but I have my own private stash of zaatar.
For more on the versatile cross-cultural uses of sumac, including links to several recipes I mentioned here, check out our show notes on upr.org, where you can also find past episodes from our spicy season.
Join Eating the Past next time for more stories about food, history, and culture. That's Sundays at noon on your UPR station.
NOTE: While the red clusters of sumac berries are used in a number of different ethnic cuisines, do not eat the poisonous white-berried sumac found in swamps and woodlands of the American Midwest.
Alana Yazzie can be found online at her food and lifestyle blog The Fancy Navajo https://thefancynavajo.com/category/food/, and this author-affliate link from Amazon is where you can buy The Modern Navajo Kitchen: Homestyle Recipes that Celebrate the Flavors and Traditions of the Diné:. For authentic Navajo flavor, Yazzie recommends buying sumac berries (Chiiłchin) from Navajo suppliers like navajopride.com, rather than from Mediterranean sources where the ground sumac may include salt.
For a fun spin on Yazzie’s modern Navajo kitchen, you can find Navajo cook and content creator kristmas07 on TikTok where she uses Yazzie’s jam recipe to make Blue Corn Pop Tarts with Chiiłchin filling:
https://www.tiktok.com/@kristmas07/video/7459940646099373342?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7643965593037243934\
The Chicken Musakhan recipe that I want to try is from the blog Palastine in a Dish. See https://palestineinadish.com/recipes/chicken-musakhan/
The Lebanese Fattoush Salad recipe that was a big hit a dinner with friends at my house came from the YouTube channel Middle Eats, hosted by Egyptian home cooks Obi & Salma. I couldn’t find pomegranate molasses, so I substituted 1 ½ teaspoon of pomegranate juice and 1 ½ teaspoon of agave syrup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO7A3Wr98IU&t=62s
For more about the South Dakota Lebanese restaurant, see Alia Yunis’s blog “Thyme Travels” at https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/201203/thyme.travels.htm
Palastinian food blogger, Nadia Gilbert tells the touching story of Za’atar sandwiches and gives us the recipe at https://www.apartamentomagazine.com/stories/nadia-gilberts-zaatar-sandwich/.
As we see with the Yazzie-inspired Pop Tart, sumac is a great fusion cuisine ingredient. For instance, the Bon Appétit blog features a Za’atar Fish and Chips recipe by Chris Morocco feature on the Bon Appétit website at https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/zaatar-fish-and-chips.
For More about Sumac and its uses, see the Serious Eats blog’s post https://www.seriouseats.com/what-is-sumac-7104742.
