My roommate and I have these friends who used to live here, Philip Adams and Yvette Nolan, who still call the Yukon “home,” and who, for the past six years, have come up to spend winter Solstice with us.
Their presence alone is a gift, the first precious gift of the season. But they always bring something else with them. Last year it was a copy of Kent Monkman’s The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1; other years Nolan the theatre artist has brought new plays, sometimes her own published works.They bring exuberant chat, and big laughs, and music we’ve never heard before. (Every year Adams makes a solstice playlist, with all of us shouting our requests at him, and we play it solstice evening.) Adams’s first (self-appointed)chore, the first morning they’re here, is to go out and get a few bottles of nice red wine.
This year, the gift was different. On the evening they arrived, Nolan leaned over the kitchen counter with a bag of big dried yellow things. “Okay. I’m kind of intimidated. We have to figure out how to cook these.” “These” were kernels of home-grown corn from Six Nations of the Grand River territory near Brantford, ON.
“They’re from Falen’s dad,” said Nolan. “He picked the corn and—I don’t know—soaked it in wood ash and water and dried it. It’s really fricking special and we’ve gotta find a recipe.”
We both stared wide-eyed at the bag of corn.
This was the same corn whose seeds Six Nations peoples smuggled with them when they were driven from their home territories into what is now Southern Ontario from what is now Upper New York, in 1779, when their villages were razed and crops burned during the Sullivan raids.
It was really fricking special corn.
Our benefactor, Falen Johnson, playwright, CBC radio host and podcaster, grew up eating corn soup, a Six Nations staple, made slightly differently made slightly differently by different Haudenosaunee communities. Johnson says that in her family, “The way that we make it is just corn, kidney beans and pork, water. That’s it. But if you go to other communities—like Kahnawake—they also add vegetables. Lots of cabbage.”
She grins. “We’re all very snobby about who does it the best.”
For Johnson, corn soup is not only a beloved dish, but also a reminder of family, home, and community. When she was working in Montreal during the pandemic and couldn’t go home, Johnson missed corn soup dreadfully. She tried canned or frozen hominy, but it just wasn’t the same.
“My dad said, ‘You know what? I’m going to dry some and mail it to you.’” So, he did, and she searched the depanneurs for pork hocks to go with it. When she was finally able to go home, he gave her a big bag of dried corn to take back to Montreal with her. Nolan visited her in Montreal during one of her many gigs in that city and Johnson gifted her a couple of scoops in a resealable baggie.
Thus do special foods arrive in the Yukon: gifted from a Haudenosaunee to an Algonquin, carried hundreds of miles to my (settler) home on the Traditional Territories of the Tagish Kwan People, the Kwänlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. Whoa.
Johnson’s dad picked the corn from the community corn fields. After husking and before drying, he lyed it to remove the hulls. Soaking in a lye solution is a painstaking process when done the traditional way. Johnson’s dad combined hardwood ash (mostly white oak) and water, soaked the corn in the mixture, rinsed it and soaked it again in a new mixture. Repeat, several times.
When Johnson was a kid, you could buy bags of wet, lyed corn in the local gas station. “You buy it like that, and then you just take it and you dump it into your pot with whatever you’re doing with your soup.” Before her dad sent her the dried corn, that was the only way she’d ever seen it. (Drying the corn means there’s an extra step before making your soup; you’ve got to soak it overnight.)
In Whitehorse, Nolan and I set out to find the recipe that would do justice to the Johnson family corn and cobbled one together from recipes online for Mohawk or Tuscarora corn soup, and from what we had in the pantry.
Smoked pork chop and leftover ham subbed in for the pork hock that these days, replaces what was traditionally probably deer or bear meat. We added a can of pinto beans—the only beans in the cupboard—and a sweet potato to sub in for squash that in our minds approximated the “three sisters” combination of corn, beans and squash traditional in some Nations. In other words, we winged it, based partly on research, what we had on hand, and what we thought would work.
It worked. Our soup was great—smoky, rich, substantial, comforting. We ate it for lunch on the day of the Longest Night, along with bannock made with Nolans’s grandmother’s recipe, based on the “3, 2, 1, ½, 1/4” formula—3 teaspoons baking powder, 2 cups flour, 1 cup milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 cup diced cold butter. Shape it into a rough circle, bake at 400F until it’s done.The holidays are over, and Nolan and Adams long gone from our home back to their lives, and I haven’t even met Johnson yet, except over Zoom. But I have a container of corn soup in the freezer and a lasting feeling of gratitude.
Haudenosaunee-inspired Corn Soup
Ingredients
- 2 cups Haudenosaunee corn homegrown if possible, or substitute dried hominy, sometimes available in local grocery stores
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 1 Tbsp butter
- 1 large onion diced
- 1 large carrot diced
- 2 stalks celery diced
- 2 cloves garlic minced
- 2 tsp dried oregano or thyme
- 3 medium potatoes peeled and diced
- 1 large sweet potato peeled and diced
- 1 19- oz can pinto kidney or black beans
- 2 1/2 cups ham beef, bison, moose or chicken stock
- 3 to 4 cups chopped smoked ham bacon or pork loin
- Salt and black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Soak corn overnight in water to cover. In the morning, pour off water, rinse the corn, drain and place in a large pot with cold water, to cover by about 2 inches. Bring to the boil over high heat, reduce heat to medium low and simmer while you prepare the vegetables.
- In a large frying pan, melt butter and oil. Add onion, carrot and celery and cook for 7 to 10 minutes, until onions are translucent and carrots are softened. Add garlic and cook for another 2 minutes. Add oregano or thyme, stir, and then stir in potato and sweet potato.
- Check corn. If it has blossomed—see photo—and is soft but still chewy, add vegetables. (If not, cook for another 10 minutes and check again. Keep checking until you’re satisfied with the texture.) Cover and simmer until potatoes are soft. Remove about 1 cup of stock and vegetables, blend until smooth and return to the soup. Add beans and ham, then simmer for about 10 minutes. Taste and add salt and pepper as necessary.
- Serve at once with bannock or sourdough bread and butter. Will keep for several days in the fridge and will taste even better the day after you make it.
- Makes about 15 cups.
