Lukameen, a Thanksgiving dish as American as apple pie
A tip of the hat to Jack George for this seasonal find…
Chinuk Wawa makes an appearance in the name and history of Ellen Saluskin’s 1974 Thanksgiving recipe…
The Yakama Indian < lukameen > is CW lakamín, defined as ‘soup, stew, gravy; any cooked food requiring mixture/stirring’ by the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary.
I’ve shown in a previous post that the CW word appears to come from an obscure Canadian / Métis French word la gamine for coarse flour.
Ellen Saluskin’s version uses salmon; she tells how Indians would also traditionally make it with other kinds of fish or with various wild game.
I think a whole study could be made of what lakamín is like in communities across the Pacific Northwest. Dictionaries of Native languages that have borrowed the word define it in a number of ways including ‘soup’, ‘stew’, ‘dumplings’…
