We just received a splendid copy of the
third edition of the classic community cookbook Pow Wow Chow. Amazon brought it to the Galley. The political baggage arrived under its own power.

First published in 1984 by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the book presents recipes from families associated with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations. That distinction matters:, since recipes from families can cover considerably more territory than recipes handed down from ancestral kitchens.

With Indigenous Peoples’ Day and our Italian celebrants now resting, we thought we would take a look at how a warm community undertaking became a partisan football. Elizabeth Warren’s contributions, printed with a Cherokee identification, became part of the controversy over her ancestry during her 2012 Senate campaign.

Family history met campaign research, and suddenly everybody was inspecting the mayonnaise.

Deirdre honchoed our effort to sort through the matter without overheating either the discussion or the stove. Those of us producing cookbooks and punditry here at Socotra House have an interest in the proceedings. We collect recipes, too. We borrow, adapt, remember and occasionally discover that something Grandmother made had an earlier career somewhere else.

The obligation is to give credit—and to distinguish what we inherited from what we added. Or lifted to share. Here are just a few of the figures in the current edition:

Here are some of the faces behind the book’s journey to our Galley. There are promising dishes between its covers, and we intend to try them as the air turns chill. But first comes the baggage: family recollections, editorial decisions and the remarkable things that happen when a recipe acquires a political constituency.

We will return to Chef Pierre Franey and the disputed trail connecting his crab recipes to Pow Wow Chow when Vic gets the seafood in hand. The published comparisons make that a story worth examining, preferably with both texts on the table and something good on the plate.

It needn’t turn into the French and Indian War.

Though we may have to negotiate over the last serving.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com