The Recipes & Books of the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook

Here is a list of all of the recipes in The Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook in alphabetical order. The recipes range from what seem like pretty standard "Braised Ptarmigan" (a recipe that got Rene Redzepi quite excited when we showed him the cookbook), to larger scaled recipes such as "Nature", "Indo-European Thought", and "Civilization" (yes we unconsciously follow recipes to reproduce these "dishes"); then there are recipes for critical practices: "Foraging", "Fermenting", "Emulsification", "Commoning" etc.; Plus there are short asides on topics: On Grinding, On Gleaning, On Plants... What excites us at SPURSE in seeing this list is the range of practices that we can have in one cookbook:

ABUNDANCE

APPLE COMPOTE WITH BLOSSOMS

APPLE LEATHER

ARCTIC HARE PIE

ASAK-LUK

BEAR & CATTAIL DOLMADES

BEAR LIVER + TAPANADE

BEAR LIVER PATE

BEAR STIR FRY

BRAISED PTARMIGAN

BROTH BONE

BULGARIAN EGGS

CARIBOU STEW

CATTAIL & LEEK POTTAGE

CATTAIL PASTA

CATTAILS & FORAGED FLOURS

CIVILIZATION

CRAB 81 HALIBUT & COD CHOWDER

CURLY DOCK TAPANADE

DANDELION GREENS

DANDELION WINE

DEER & SQUASH

DEER BROTH

DEER JERKY

DEER SAUSAGE

DEER STEAKS

DEER TARTARE

DOCKS QUICKLY FRIED

ELDERFLOWER MARTINI

EMULSIFICATION

ESKIMO ICE CREAM

FERMENTED DEER

FERMENTED WALRUS

FERMENTS

FLUKE WITH ROMESCO & POTATOES

FORAGERS MUSHROOMS

FORAGING

FROZEN SEAL LIVER

GARUM

GOOSE CRUSTED IN POORMAN’S PEPPER

GOOSE WITH MINT RAW & COOKED

GOOSED COFFEE

GRAPE LEAVES

HALIBUT & COD CHOWDER

INDO-EUROPEAN THOUGHT

LEAVING MUNUS

MAKE A (FIELD) SALAD

MEAD

MILKWEED BLOSSOM SALAD

MINT WATER 

MULBERRY & CLOVER COMPOTE 

MUNUS 

NA-ZEK’-MEEK-TAK 

NATURE 

on brines & salts 

on Canadien geese 

on cattails 

on cosmology 

on deer 

on exotic ingredients 

on flours 

on gleaning 

on grinding 

on oils 

on plants 

on preserving 

on serving 

on squirrels 

on vinegar 

on words

OODOOK

pate 

PATE SKIN CHIPS 

PEMMICAN 

PHEASANT TARTARE 

PHRAGMITES CANDY 

PHRAGMITES CORDIAL 

PINE DEER APPLE LEATHER 

pine oil infusion 

PTARMIGAN

PTARMIGAN STOCK

PTARMIGAN THROAT POUCHES

PUBLIC THINGS 

PURSLANE SALAD 

QUAKED DEER FAKED SEAL 

QUICKLY FRIED GOOSE INNARDS 

RAW DEER 

RENDERING FATS

RUM BUTTERED WOODS 

SCARCITY 

seal oil 

SEAL POKE

SEVENFOLD MEAL 

SIDEWALK COCKTAIL

SMOKE & ANIMALS

smoked salt

smoked squirrels 

SOW THISTLE STOCKS BRAISED 

SOWTHISTLE & DANDELION SOUP 

SPICY CRABAPPLE CHUTNEY 

TAPANADE 

THINGS AS THEY ARE 

TRAVEL MAKES A MEAL

TROUT WITH KNOTWEED & CATTAILS 

turnip chips

UNINTENTIONAL TABLEWARE 

URBAN POT-AU-FEU 

WANDERING WITHOUT NATURE 

WEAKNESS

wild onion & cattail sauce 

YEAST COMMONING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

It’s a brief bibliography; we have left off many books in favor of offering an accessible set of recommendations that are great next steps for personal research and exploration of the topics.

CHAPTER ONE:

The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend. John MacDonald. A great help in understanding Inuit being-of-an-association.

Articles on Arctic cooking by Zona S. Sparks. All excellent, and can be found in a range of publications. Please look these up.

Beyond Nature and Culture. Phillippe Descola. An introduction to cosmologies beyond our Nature + Culture model. Important overview of animist cosmologies in particular. Much more needs to be done in this area of inquiry.

Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Interestingly, Rousseau did not use the term “Noble Savage.”

Eskimo Cookbook Prepared by the Students of Shishmaref Day School. The original cookbook, published exclusively by the Alaska Crippled Children’s Foundation.

Eskimo Cookbook, Alexandra. Another historical cookbook that Petia discovered -- also very interesting.

The Eskimos: Their Environment and Folkways. Edward Weyer. A classic overview of all Inuit from Greenland to Siberia.

Iñupiatun Eskimo Dictionary. Wolf A. Seiler. Very helpful for us to piece things together. One can never have too many dictionaries.

Interviewing Inuit Elders: Volume Four: Cosmology and Shamanism. Bernard d’Anglure (ed.). An important series of interviews with elders. Nuanced interviews that get into Inuit cosmology on a granular level.

The Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Kund Rasmussen. Considered one of the best historical documents of Inuit Cosmology during the early modern period.

The Journals of Knut Rasmussen . This is Zacharias Kunuk’s film on the Shaman-guide to Knut Rasmussen. Brilliant, as are the two other movies in this series: The Fast Runner and Before Tomorrow.

The Living Shore. Rowan Jacobsen. This has a great discussion about co-shaping coastal landscapes with humans as another strange animal in the mix.

North Alaska Chronicle: The Simon Paneak Drawings. Ninty-seven annotated drawings by Simon Paneak (1900-1975). Covering all aspects of Nunamiut life.

The Raw and the Cooked. Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss’ meditation on what makes us human. While we have strong disagreements with this work, it is critical to all of this.

Shishmaref Eskimo Cookbook. Melvin and Karen Olanna (eds). The more recent of the two small Shishmaref cookbooks. A wonderful book. And Karen became key to our work.

Upterrlainarluta: Always Getting Ready: Yup’ik Eskimo Subsistence in Southwest Alaska. James H. Barker. An excellent photo essay on subsistence life from the 1970’s onward.

CHAPTER TWO:

This is our list of good books on foraging. It is a starting place, there are many others to discover:

Backyard Foraging. Ellen Zachos. This was a real surprise. Looks like a throw away book. Nothing of the sort. An illuminating guide to what is edible in the world of decorative gardens. Let that sink in and realize how great such a book is.

Foraging for Dinner. Helen Ross Russell. A less well know classic on foraging. Genius.

A Field Guide to Bacteria. Betsey Dexter Dyer. We rarely bring this one with us, but it is a key field guide to most of the life on this planet. Something like this could replace the King James Bible.

Nature’s Garden. Samuel Thayer. His books are a good practical field resource. A wide perspective, deep pragmatic knowledge and sharp humor.

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. Gary Lincoff. Good, weather resistant and portable. Ideal in the field.

Native American Ethnobotany. Daniel E. Moerman. Fantastic resource. Dense and dry. Magisterial in its thoroughness. Key reference guide.

Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Euell Gibbons. One of the great classics of American foraging literature. Along with Helen Russell’s work, Gibbon’s books are masterpieces of this tradition.

Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast. Peter Del Tredici. This is a remarkable book. Both an indispensable field guide to our urban ecosystems and careful reconceptualization of cities as complex ecosystems without the cosmology of The Natural vs The Artificial.

CHAPTER THREE:

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture. Patrick E. McGovern. A place to begin researching the pre-human history of fermentations. Note: you will be journeying to the very beginnings of life on earth -- if not further (sadly he stops with our hominid ancestors).

Oxford English Dictionary. A true work of art.

The Sage Encyclopedia of Alcohol: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Scott C. Martin (Ed.)

CHAPTER FOUR:

Connections. James Burke. Burke is just plain whacky. An artist of the grand meander. A philosopher of assemblages without ever claiming any title beyond someone who sees connections.

Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins’ work is critical in that he offers an insightful turning of the anthropological mirror back on ourselves (the West).

The Genealogy of Morals. Friedrich Nietzsche. Arguably the best guide to speculative research.

The Horse The Wheel and Language. David Anthony. This became our go-to reference book on Proto-Indo European histories.

The Languages of the Gift in the Early Middle Ages. Wendy Davis & Paul Fourace (eds.)

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan, under the spell of the great Alfred North Whitehead, articulates how we are of a way of being in a world which connects tools, concepts, species, ecosystems and much else.

Proto-Indo-European Dictionary. DNGHU.org has an excellent set of resources available.

Stone Age Economics. Marshall Sahlins.

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Stanley Mintz.

The Wealth of the Commons. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. A survey of current commons thinking--limits and all.

CHAPTER FIVE:

An Evolutionary Perspective on Strengths, Fallacies, and Confusions in the Concept of Native Plants. S. J. Gould. A wonderful witty polemic against the logic of Native and Invasive plants. We wish the literature on this was far more robust but good books are starting to appear.

Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the Ecological World Order. Eds.: Hobbs, Higgs and Hall. A paradigmatic alternative to the cosmology of purity at the heart of the place as container model of ecology.

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom’s work is brilliant.

CHAPTER SIX:

Capitalist Sorcery. Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre. A powerful inducement to engage with politics and thinking from an alternative logic. Critical to thinking about how to engage with those who do not share your cosmology.

History of Private Life (volumes 1-5). Phillippe Aries, Georges Duby eds. Reference text for an overview of the history of everyday life in Europe from the Greeks to the twentieth century.

Romans, Roads, and Romantic Creators: Traditions of Public Property in the Information Age. Carol M. Rose. An insightful essay on the history of the idea of public property.

Tools for Conviviality. Ivan Illich. Illich, in general, is one of the great poets of all that is common (convivial). This work in particular gets at the pragmatics of refusing scarcity and welcoming a convivial ethos of abundance.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mycelium Running, Paul Stamets. An introduction to human and fungi entanglements.

A Museum of Early American Tools. Eric Sloan. A great book, not for the nostalgia of a different era, but to get an instantaneous sense of the deep entanglement with a way of being in the world and a set of tools to negotiate associations (especially with forests).

CHAPTER EIGHT

Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Erin Manning. Erin’s work is brilliant and a huge inspiration.

Cliff Ecology: Pattern and Process in Cliff Ecosystems (Cambridge Studies in Ecology) Doug Larson. Larson speculates on the evolutionary connections between early cliff ecologies and urban ecologies.

Creatures of Empire. How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Virginia DeJohn Anderson. An eye opening critical read of the movement of human and nonhuman assemblages.

Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. Mark David Spence. The title is pretty clear. So is the argument.

Hypersea: Life on Land. Mark A. S. McMenamin, Dianna L. McMenamin. Life evolves onto land by folding the ocean inside. Excellent ecological framework for the consequences of entangled life.

Kiumaiut: Talking Back. Peter Keith Kulchyski, Frank James Tester. Eye opening read of how the concept of Nature affected the indigenous peoples of Canada.

Mind in Life, Evan Thompson. Thompson makes a powerful argument for how, we as humans, are embodied, extended, enactive, emergent and affective beings.

1491 New Revelations about North America Before Columbus, Charles Mann. A very important introduction and survey of recent research into the historical human practices of the Americas.

The Story of the Earth. Robert Hazen. A broad overview of the geological and biological co-shaping of the earth’s geomorphology. As good a place as any to start to rethink the aliveness, agency and complexity of supposedly inert matter.

What a Plant Knows. Daniel Chamovitz. A good short primer on nature of plants and plant intelligence. Only the tip of the iceberg.