Hello, this is Sam Arnold for Frying Pans West.

The black on your screen was a beaver hat of the 1850 period.

The time when Abraham Lincoln was in Springfield, Illinois.

And beaver hats of this type were in vogue.

The beaver had actually had dropped in its popularity from about 1830 onward, when the silk hat came into into play, but this particular one is made in a very interesting way.

The the method of doing this is to take a cardboard inside, and then you make a felt.

The felt is a made of hair that is put together and into a type of cloth, and then it is covered with glue.

And then they take the fine guard hairs out of the beaver's skin, and they, they flock that onto the hat and brush it while it's still wet on the glue.

Then the the hats.

It's dropping pieces all over me.

Here is a very old hat, and you might like to see the the condition of it.

It's falling to bits now, but they're, they're not too many of these left in these days.

The in earlier times they used a beaver of this shape in the 1830s.

And you can see how the hat styles changed from the 30s to the 50s.

They still make beaver hats.

The Stetson Company, for example, as one of many different hat makers that produces fine beaver hats, but they're very expensive ones.

Today's show, we're going to talk about Indian foods, and we're going to hit two different cultures.

One is the Sioux Indian.

The Rosebud Group up in South Dakota.

And then we're going to talk about the new Mexican eating styles of the Pueblo Indians, and also some Mexican Indian overtones to it, too, and of course, basic to the Mexican or New Mexican Indian food is the chili.

And I brought along here a couple of big chili peppers.

These are called chili publano they're a mild, relatively mild, big long chili pod.

When these are left on the vine, then they become red as the season progresses.

And you will see great strings of these over the houses in New Mexico.

And they take a darning needle with a piece of string to it.

And they, they go right through here just behind the stem and string these together on long strings, sometimes 4 or 5ft long.

Then they let them outside, and they hang them from the ease of the house outside, and they let them dry.

And you can take these and put them in a wearing blender or any type of a grinding machine, and grind them up with a little hot water, garlic, oregano, and you get a marvelous puree that you can use over eggs or for breakfast, or with meat at a main course.

The the very hot part of the chili is usually the seeds on the inside.

And the this the shiny skin is sort of waxy.

And the way that you get this skin off is to put this chili on a skewer or a fork and put it over the fire and actually burn it, burn the skin until it blisters.

Then as soon as it's really hot and you keep turning it, toasting it like a marshmallow, then as soon as it blisters, you take a hot towel and wrap up the chili pods and then pour even more boiling water over the top of it and let them steam there.

Then after about ten minutes, while you can pull that that shiny outside skin right off of the chili, you of course take out the seeds from the inside, and you then have nice chili strips that you can use to make one of the dishes that we're going to show you tonight, the Green Chili Bowl.

Now, beware that you don't get little chilies like this because these are called jalapenos.

And these are really green fire.

If if you are a real good hot food eater, you can eat these at your meal.

And I have a friend in El Paso who is a historian.

And when he came up to Denver, he brought a supply of these for all of his meals.

He had two for each of three meals a day or six per day.

And he was up here for four days lecturing at the University of Colorado.

And so he had a great big sack full of these that he carried, because this is part of his daily diet.

And he loves these things in Mexico.

They pickle these as well.

And you can get jalapenos in escabeche, the pickling juice And they are really tasty.

If you if you like something hot with your steak.

Now there are a multitude of different kinds of chilies, everything from the little tiny raisin chili, which is kind of a brown chili all the way up to these big chili Polanco usually sort of a rule of thumb is that the smaller they are, the hotter they are.

Isn't necessarily so And some of the green chili can be pretty fiery.

But what you really look for is a chili that has a lot of flavor of the vegetable, of the of the pepper plant in it, as well as being pepper hot.

The eating of Chile leaves you with a marvelous sense of well-being after you've eaten.

It's a hard thing to describe.

It may be the vitamin C that's in it.

It may be just the very nature of Chile, but it really does make you feel just great after you've finished a good bowl of hot chili.

And of course, the true test for a chilly lover.

If it makes you perspire on your forehead and in the back of your neck, then you know that the chili is just right.

As far as temperature.

Not all Indian people's ate spicy foods, though.

In fact, the the Plains Indians in the central part of the country rarely used any type of herb or spice in their foods at all.

They liked the taste of meat and corn and beans, but they just didn't really have use for much salt in their diet, or certainly no pepper at all.

And even today, if you have a Sioux Indian, for example, come down to a pow wow where they're serving chili, the New Mexican Indians are, they won't touch it.

They just can't stand that hot stuff.

But I was reading a lot about old methods of cooking on the plains before the white man came out, and I ran into a reference in a journal about how the Sioux Indians used to take the paunch or the stomach out of a buffalo, and they would suspend this on four sticks in the ground and use it as a kettle, putting hot water in it and rocks, and then bits of meat inside the stomach.

And so I wanted to see if I could find somebody still alive among the Sioux who knew how to do this.

And so I went up to South Dakota, to the Rosebud Indian Reservation, and I met a delightful man by the name of Carl Ironshell.

And Carl was when he was a young man back in 1926.

Why, he began, well, he watched a group of the old people performing this, and he remembered how it was done.

So he did it for us.

And we took and killed a beef one morning about 9:00 in the morning.

And Carl flensed it out.

And you might notice that he's using a green river knife as he's flensing it.

That's the very famous skinning knife of the early frontier that's still made today.

Now, this is kind of grisly, and I hope that you don't have color television because it is it's kind of an unpleasant look but nonetheless, that's life.

And it didn't bother Carl one bit.

And in fact, Carl took the liver and the kidneys and he trimmed, trimmed off pieces of it and took the gallbladder and squirted a little gall over the top of them and ate them raw at 9:00 in the morning, offering some to me, which I am ashamed to say, I declined.

It was just too early in the morning for raw liver, I've learned to eat it and it isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.

Carl is now taking the grass out of the inside of the stomach.

Now this is not digested.

Grass is just what the beef had been eating before it was killed.

And you see the ridges on the stomach.

It's tough.

It's almost like an inner tube in in quality and texture.

It has those little ridges on the inside that grind up the food and and send it on through for digestion.

Now we're taking the paunch and building a fire.

Carl's washing the paunch out.

I must say that it could have used a good deal more washing than what it did have, but nonetheless, it was an interesting way of cooking.

The Indian at this point was this was before they had kettles, and they used to suspend the paunch over for forked steaks.

You see, they're driving these steaks into the ground, and they have a fork at the top, and you cut a hole in the side of the paunch so as to let the fork of each of those posts stick through it.

It's sort of like a wastebasket suspended with four outside legs.

And it's really tough.

And this is filled with water.

And they they cut up the meat, some of the meat from the beef and drop that on into it to.

Carl was an interesting man.

He was a member of the Native American Church, which is an offshoot of Christianity.

It believes in the use of peyote, which is a mescaline filled button from the mezcal cactus, and it's used in a very tightly religious ceremony, an all night ceremony.

Carl had also his own Indian sweat bath, which was a lodge built into the ground with reeds over the top, sort of making a little shelter.

And then he would cover this over with cloth old blankets and such, build a fire nearby and heat rocks, and then pour water on the rocks and sweat in there until it was until he was clean and purged.

And see here we're dropping hot rocks into the paunch.

These had been heated in a nearby fire, and you'd have a fork stick to carry them with.

You took about 6 or 7 rocks in there, until suddenly the water began to boil and bubble.

A scum, of course, came up to the surface, which I guess was full of delicious flavor.

For Carl, it was.

Now here we're taking some of the meat out.

You have to remove some of the rocks.

The first thing that Carl did was an old ceremony, and this was not done for us.

This was the way he did things.

This was a religious ceremony, and he was sending a piece of the meat up to the Great Spirit with a prayer.

Then we sat down and we ate the meat, and we ate the paunch and drank the soup.

And there it is.

And that's how you can cook if you if you don't have a kettle.

Now we're going to show you how to make a carne asada and green chili bowl.

And if we have time, we're going to show you the Mohawk corn.

Now, the Mohawk corn is a recipe that Mr.

Herter had in his cookbook, and I don't know the authenticity of it as being actually Mohawk, but it's an awfully good dish.

And I'll show you first how to make a sauce to make can asada you take chili about a quarter of a cup of pure ground New Mexico chili.

And this is a bath that you put your meat into.

And a little bit of oregano that's about a teaspoon of oregano.

Salt.

Good sprinkling.

A little MSG.

Or garlic salt.

And then, take a clove of garlic, a nd that will get some good flavor.

Then take cooking oil and pour in approximately a cup.

So you have chili oregano oil and salt MSG.

And now this is the way it looks.

And.

You then get yourself a piece of meat.

And and I have this over here and I'll show you how you cut this into strips.

Go through it this way first.

This is a fast way of making jerky, but it's the only proper way of of cutting jerky.

To be careful that you don't slice through your finger.

You just unroll it like a jelly roll.

The Indian always liked his meat in strips, made it easier to chew on.

You can also take a strip like this, hang it up to dry and you've got jerky.

You see how he took that block of meat and turned it into one long strip?

Now, for the sake of serving, I'm going to cut this one in half, and this will give us two portions of meat.

Drop it in this bath.

Of the chili.

Then ideally, you should take that and let it soak there for quite a time, 4 to 6 hours.

But if you can't do that way you can keep basting it and I'll take it over.

Let's see if I've got a broiler pan here.

And I'll lay these in a broiler pan.

The Pyrex piece.

And then stick them in the broiler.

You might like to take a peek at that the way it is.

I'll leave that partly open.

Now I'm going to start and do a green chili bowl.

And you can make this either with beef or with pork.

And for the for the sake of the show here, I bought some pork because the other one was beef.

Let's see.

I think I'll cut these into little smaller bits.

You want them into bite sized bits and you want them to fry a little bit first.

They will then be boiling with some other material.

But you want to you want to have them crispy and little browned on the edges.

You know, pork has such a good flavor that way.

Smell that pork.

You can make this about 4 or 6 pieces are enough for one person.

This this will give us a service.

Enough for two.

Now on the beef, incidentally, for carne asada I bought 12oz of beef and I still have another serving.

You could serve three people with that unless you wanted to give them two strips a person, in which case you could get about, you could get a good real good double portion for two people.

Now, while this is Browning, I'll tell you about the Mohawk corn.

I read this in Mr.

Herders cookbook, and he claimed that this was a recipe that dated back 3 or 400 years to some Mohawk Indian princess, and it sounded like a sort of a wild story, but an awfully good recipe.

And so I tried it.

And it's the simplest thing in the world.

All you do is take some corn, canned corn if you have no fresh, or you can cut fresh off of an ear and drop it on into a pan.

And I've got a little red pepper chopped up in this and turn on some heat.

And then you take a half a cup of black walnuts and they've got to be black walnuts, according to Mr.

Herder, for the flavor.

And add those to it.

The the flavor of the black walnuts just so beautifully complements the corn that it's almost a just just a delight.

Mr.

Herder says that to amplify the black walnut flavor, add a little black walnut flavoring that you can buy in the grocery store.

And I don't think that that that is too authentic for 300 years ago, but it does help to make the dish really good.

About half teaspoon of black walnut flavoring that you can buy in your stores.

Then add just a little bit of sugar.

And some salt.

And then stir that up and have to put a little water in it and let it heat.

And that's all there is to it.

The black walnuts and a little bit of sugar really are great.

Okay.

Now.

There's not much fat on this pork at this point.

So Im going to add some oil.

And then about two tablespoons of flour.

And this will this will make a roux.

We need to get that good and hot.

Let that cook for a second I think I'll look at my Carne s. Yeah.

They're just they're just right.

Let's take this cloth.

Now add water to this.

And that gives you sudden, instant gravy.

And I'll go get the carnes out.

And these are ready to eat now.

And it has a real good chili smell.

It just comes up to me right now.

And that that those beef pieces are really, really tasty.

You can see that they're they're still all kind of medium to medium rare, but they're covered all over with the chili and that's good eating.

Now with the Chili Bowl here we've we've gotten a gravy going from the pork.

And we'll use some salt.

And we'll put in our green chilies.

Now here's the pods.

We'll cut those up into little bite sized pieces.

I know it's not accepted technique to cut that way, but it's the way I like to do it.

And this knife is not very sharp, I hope.

Add some more water because that's getting thick again.

You can add as many chili pods as you like.

These are the canned chilies.

You can take the fresh, but they again have to be made without the the skin on them.

These have all been skinned off.

There in fact is a piece of the green skin.

They never can quite get every bit of it out when they produce it commercially.

And you never can at home either.

Now.

Take just a dash of oregano.

And.

I've got that garlic over here.

Mash it.

And.

Chop.

That will boil and cook.

You let this simmer, for 5 or 10 minutes and this is ready to eat.

You want to be sure that your pork is cooked all the way through.

And the more that you cook it, the more the pork flavor goes on into the stew.

It's essentially just simply a green chili and pork stew.

It has a nice toasted taste to the pork.

And when you're ready to serve it, you can take a bowl, for example.

And just drop it in.

Like that.

And for color, add a few little bits of the red pimento, which is a Spanish word, of course, for pepper.

P imento.

But this is mild.

Now all of these recipes have been put into a cookbook called Frying Pans West.

It's the recipes from It has all of the recipes from the whole show series, and you will find out a little bit later at the end of the show, how you can get one of these cookbooks.

We have recipes for holiday dishes and different types of early western drinks, both food and drink, that I think that you'll enjoy.

And it's easy to get and the station will tell you how to do that at the end.

Now we'll take the meat and put it on to the to a plate.

And dish up some of the corn.

You can see how pretty this looks when it's on a dinner plate.

So this embraces essentially two different cultures and embraces the the Eastern Indians and the Midwestern Indians, the the Sioux Indians and the New Mexican chili cultures.

Now, I hope that you've enjoyed the show tonight.

Try a green Chili Bowl, get some good hot chili because it'll really make keep your hair on.

Thanks very much for being with us tonight.

Next week we're going to have some more Indian and early western foods and little bit of palaver about the mountain men.

Thanks very much.

Good night.