Where People Feast: An Indigenous People's Cookbook

I checked out this book because we wanted to serve more Native American dishes at our Thanksgiving dinner. I enjoyed reading the cookbook quite a bit - the photographs are beautiful, the recipes look delicious, and the authors have an interesting story. But I didn't end up using any of the recipes because they depend heavily on local ingredients that can't be found in the Midwest (or at least not easily in November). For anyone from the Pacific Northwest, this would definitely be a lovely book to read and explore. The authors ran what is described in the book as the only first nations independent restaurant in the world; I'm not sure how provable that claim is, but clearly the recipes in the book are designed to appeal to customers show more interested in both the traditional cooking and more upscale presentation. For this reason, may recipes also include less traditional ingredients (like Feta cheese) that would probably appeal to cooks who want to try "inspired by" rather than straight traditional recipes. Some use the author's culinary training in traditional European techniques, others depend on traditional local methods like specific types of woodsmoke. That restaurant approach makes some of the recipes much less accessible to a general cook, though more adventurous foodies may enjoy testing the fruits of the extra effort. show less

This is a cookbook with recipes using native foods of the Pacific Northwest. There are a few traditional recipes such as mousse made from sopalali berries and recipes using oolichan, salmon roe and wild game but for the most part, the recipes use the traditional food in combination with more common ingredients as well as recipes using non-indigenous foods.

This book came out of the author's experience running a restaurant, Liliget Feast House, in Victoria, B.C. where the recipes were used. According to the author, Liliget means "Where People Feast" in English. The restaurant (sadly for me) closed in 2007. I would have loved to explore the menu.