Before a dance the women busily prepare food and the girls go about speechless, with mouths full of meal, “chewing yeast” for the corn pudding. This and other ins and outs of the kitchen make the knowing traveler rather shy of the otherwise attractive-looking Hopi food.
Surely corn is the “mother” of the Hopi. All the powers of nature are invoked to grant a good crop by giving rain and fertility, and the desire for corn is the central motive of the numerous ceremonies of the villagers of Tusayan. If the prayers of the Hopi could be formulated like the “Om mane padme hum” of the Hindus, it would be in the smaller compass of these words, “Grant us corn!” Nor are these simple villagers ungrateful for such blessings. Kopeli used to stand looking over his thriving cornfield and say with fervor, “Kwa kwi, Kwa kwi,” “thanks, thanks,” and it was evident that the utterance was made with true thankfulness and a spirit of devotion.
It is difficult to imagine the ancient people without corn; but very long ago, as the legends tell, they did not know this cereal. Certain it is they were not then pueblo dwellers and had not spread far in the Southwest. They lived in the places where there was game, and for the same reason that the important food animals lived in such places,—the presence of vegetation that would sustain life.
Their life was along the foot hills of well-watered and timbered mountains rising from plains, where with the flesh of game and seeds and roots of plants they could supply their semi-savage wants. Long perhaps they roved thus as hunters until they drifted to the land of promise—the semi-desert where agriculture of grain plants was born and there they received “mother corn.” Henceforward all the former sources of food wrested from a niggard Nature became as nothing to this food of foods, but even to this day the Hopi have not forgotten their old-time intimate knowledge of the resources in fields not sown by human hands. With corn, which possesses a high food value and is easily raised, stored, and preserved, the Hopi and their Pueblo brethren spread without fear throughout the semi-arid lands.
It has been pointed out that a constant diet of corn produces disagreeable physiological effects, and this is suggested for the use of chile and other condiments, the mixture of corn food with meat and vegetable substances, and, in fact, for the multifarious ways of preparing and cooking corn. This necessity for variety also gives an explanation of the resourcefulness of the Hopi housewife and has acted as a spur to her invention of palatable dishes.
The vocabulary of corn in the Hopi language is extensive and contains words descriptive even of the parts of the plant that are lacking to most civilized people. The importance of corn is also reflected in the numerous words describing the kinds of meal, the dishes made from corn or in which corn enters, and of the various ways in which it is prepared by fire for the consumption of the ever-hungry Hopi. To give an incomplete census of corn foods, there are fifteen kinds of piki or paper bread, three kinds of mush; five of short-cake; eleven of boiled corn; four kinds baked or roasted in the coals; two cooked by frying; four stewed and eight of cooked shelled corn, making fifty-two varieties.
After the paper bread, perhaps the most popular food is pigame, or sweet corn mush, wrapped in corn-husk and baked in an underground oven. Another standby is shelled corn soaked and boiled till each grain swells to several times the normal size. The Hopi like their food well-cooked and know the art of making each starch grain expand to the limit. A book of Hopi cookery would be bulky, but how interesting to the housewife who would know how to make plain food appetizing without milk or eggs, and who would learn new and strange combinations! There are cakes made from dried fruits, chopped meat, and straw, put on the roof to dry; dumplings formed around old hammerstones, corn dodgers, pats of corn-meal mush wrapped in corn husk and boiled or baked, and many other styles of food that would seem strange to other than a Hopi epicure.
When it is time to dine, a large bowl of stew is placed on the floor as the piece de resistance and beside it a tray of piki. Each member of the family breaks off a piece of piki, and, holding it between thumb and finger, it is dragged through the stew much like a seine to catch as many particles of meat as possible, then deposited far back in the mouth so that the stew adhering to the fingers may be cleared off with a resounding smack of the lips. A traveler to Hopi in 1869 describes a more formal meal which consisted of mutton, dried peaches, blue piki, coffee, and a drink made by steeping the roasted heart of agave in water. This writer says:
You take a small piece, lay a fragment of mutton and some peaches upon it or a little of the sweet liquid and bolt the mass, spoon and all. This dinner, though prepared and cooked by Indians, tasted better than many a meal eaten by us in border settlements cooked by whites.
Hopi women assiduously gather the seeds of grasses and other plants, which they grind up and add to corn-meal to improve the flavor of the bread, or, perhaps, a prized bread is made entirely of the ground seed of some desert plant. Oily seeds, such as those of the piñon, pumpkin, and melons are ground to form shortening in various cakes and to add richness to stews. Often food is colored with harmless vegetable dyes, no doubt with the deep-laid scheme on the part of the mother of the household to cause the familiar fare to be attacked with renewed zest. Our tradition of “spring lamb with mint sauce” is duplicated by stewed rabbit with nanakopshi greens, which, with various other herbs, are put to appropriate uses by the master of the Hopi culinary art.