Big Bend Eats
By Carolyn Brown Zniewski
MANOMIN – WILD RICE –
ZIZANIA
Only two grains are indigenous to
North America, corn and wild rice.
Most folks think of wild rice as coming
from the North Country, mostly from
the area of the United States and
Canada around the Great Lakes. It has
figured in the diet of Native American
tribes for over 3,500 years. The
Anishinabe word for wild rice is
manomin or manoomin, meaning
good berry. Mano, meaning berry and
min, meaning good.
In fact wild rice grows over much of
the continental United States,
although much of its natural habitat
has been lost to farming and urbaniza-
tion. Texas has its own species of wild
rice that grew all across the southeast
and still can be found in the waters of
the San Marcos River just north of San
Antonio. It was harvested for centuries
until the Indian Removal Act in the
1830s.
In the 1950s James and Gerald
Godward of Brainerd, MN developed
a way to commercially grow wild rice.
Now most commercially grown wild
rice comes from California. If you
want the real thing, grown wild in the
lakes and streams of the North
Country, it is harvested all along the
Great Lakes basin.
Harvesters go out on the water, two
per canoe. A third person stands at the
back of the canoe and uses a long pole
to guide the boat through the shallow
water. The harvester uses beaters to
hold the stalks over the canoe and
knock the grain onto the canoe floor.
Some grain falls back into the lake to
grow next season. The grain then must
be parched and hulled. It has a variety
of uses in cooking and can even be
popped like popcorn. Try that some-
time for movie night.
Just as The Three Sisters, corn,
squash and beans, were a gift to the
southwest, manomin was a gift from
the Great Spirit to the people of the
north.
To Cook Wild Rice
1 cup rice
3 ½ cups water
1 teaspoon salt
continued on page 12
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Fourth Quarter 2017
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