In a world of cookbooks that emphasize convenience—30-minute weeknight dinners, one-pot meals, and sheet-pan everything—food writer Sara Calvosa Olson admits that her Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen doesn’t follow current publishing trends.
With recipes for such dishes as acorn manzanita waffles, wild boar pozole, and stinging nettle risotto, this is not a cookbook that lets you simply download a list and race off to Costco or Trader Joe’s to stock up on all of the necessary ingredients. That’s by design. “It’s not a great model for a cookbook,” she laughs. “I mean acorn flour is not commercially available at all. You have to know somebody.” Or, as the book will show you, make it yourself.
Of Karuk descent on her mother’s side and New York Italian and German on her father’s side, the Marin County–based author says her book is less of a traditional cookbook and “more of relationship guide” to food.
While Chími Nu’am translates as “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, the book is about much more than what’s for dinner tonight. Calvosa Olson hopes to connect readers to the lands where they live and better appreciate the ancestral ingredients used by California’s Indigenous peoples.
“The point is not necessarily that you go and make these recipes. It’s about how to be in a relationship with your food,” says Calvosa Olson. “If you’re reading through the book and getting what I’m putting down, then it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, what I need to do is go outside. And I need to see what’s nearby.’
“Maybe you don’t have acorns near you. Because if you don’t have acorns, then you’re not going to make acorn flour. But what you might have are peppernuts or blackberries. Or Monterey pine tips. So you find the thing that you do have. You go toward that. And you learn everything you can about that one ingredient. I mean everything: How was it used traditionally? What are the words for it? What is its story? Are there still people who are subsistence gathering this food?”
A Connection to the Land
Calvosa Olson primarily grew up in communities on Hoopa (also spelled Hupa) lands along Northern California’s Trinity River. “The river was like the main character for me,” she says. “I’m always drawn back to it.”
Hers was a rural upbringing, sometimes without running water or electricity. Calvosa Olson’s father hunted and fished and her mother maintained what she describes as “a bountiful garden.” The family spent time canning and preserving to maintain their food security throughout the year. Even so, she says that her father recently described a time when the family had to subsist on corn meal mush for a few days until he took down a deer that appeared in the front yard.
While the challenges were real, Calvosa Olson says that her upbringing taught her “there was a lot of community in that type of living. And a lot of connection to everything around me and how to basically orient myself to the natural environment. To weather changes and to understand what’s around me. The wildlife and the gathering seasons. The quiet allowed us to cultivate that connection.”
With few modern-day distractions, reading was also a big part of her childhood: “Our town was very rural,” she says, “so the library did a lot of heavy lifting as far as entertainment. I was always a reader.” But she never planned to work as a writer. Instead, after graduating from high school on the Hoopa Reservation, Calvosa Olson attended UC Santa Cruz, where she majored in biology and hoped to become a doctor.
Then she suffered a painful neck injury in a car accident. The injury limited her physical activity and she couldn’t continue in her job with the Girl Scouts in Humboldt County.
While recovering, Calvosa Olson followed her interest in foodways and transitioned to writing. During what she describes as “a pivotal night,” she attended a rooftop dinner in Berkeley that showcased traditional Native foods prepared by such leading Indigenous chefs as Crystal Wahpepah (of Oakland’s Wahpepah’s Kitchen), Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino from Berkeley’s Cafe Ohlone, and Brian Yazzie, a member of the Diné tribe. She had the opportunity to chat with the chefs and recalls, “I thought, ‘You know what. This is definitely the direction I want to go. I would rather be writing though my own truth and through my own lens.”
Calvosa Olson began a column for News from Native California about people working with Indigenous foods and that featured her own recipes. Readers wanted to learn more about Indigenous cuisine and she conducted workshops at the California Indian Museum & Cultural Center in Santa Rosa. Calvosa Olson also sent out traditional-food meal kits she assembled that included such items as acorn bread or acorn miso, then conducted demonstrations via Zoom.
“It was really fun and created a sense of community right during the pandemic when people couldn’t go out and see each other,” she recalls. “People could have that tactile experience of touching these foods, which is really important to find out their properties. That’s what’s really intimidating. You don’t understand the properties of these foods but you know you want to use them. You just don’t know how. It was an opportunity to share what I had learned in my own kitchen.”
A Different Kind of Cookbook
Both sides of her family influenced Calvosa Olson’s approach to food. “My dad’s family is definitely that Italian-style family that you think of—very enthusiastic and boisterous and they love to get together and eat. Where I feel the creativity comes in is the intersection of this immigrant food combined with having to be creative with our foods because we didn’t have a lot of money. The food climate that I grew up in was kind of this homesteading style. It’s like part traditional but part just survival.”
Calvosa Olson originally planned a book of essays about other people’s food work rather than focusing on family recipes. “I'm not a chef so I was feeling a little self-conscious about writing a book of recipes from my perspective because I don't really feel like an authority. I haven't had any formal training. I just know what I've been doing and what has worked in my family.”
The book is divided by seasons, beginning with autumn, which coincides with the start of the new year for the Karuk. Calvosa Olson opens each section with evocative descriptions of the seasons, from the challenges and fireside storytelling of winter to the bounty of summer.
The seasonal structure reflects the book’s emphasis on gathering, processing, and preserving ingredients, not simply cooking. She also draws a clear distinction between gathering and foraging.
“The difference with gathering is that we know, firstly, we are in service,” she says. “We spend a lot of time out there not gathering. Just being in community and observing and making sure that our gathering spaces are healthy. Gathering is very intentional and requires a relationship. Foraging has more of an extractive foundation.”
There are more than 70 recipes, all of which Calvosa Olson developed and cooks at home for her own family. “I know for a fact that these are foods my kids and my family will eat,” she says. “We want our kids to eat the right foods but we’re also competing with Takis and fruit snacks and all of these other things. I totally acknowledge that. I’m a mom too and I understand the struggle. That’s why I developed these recipes, so my kids will eat them and enjoy them.”
While she says the primary audience for Chími Nu’am is other tribal communities, she also hopes to reach anyone committed to protecting the Earth, as well as willing to view things from an Indigenous perspective and ally with Native peoples in their causes.
“The book is for everybody, it absolutely is. For anyone who is interested in looking at our food systems in a different way and figuring out how they can be in a better relationship with our community. For anyone who is just wanting to develop a better relationship with their surroundings. With the Earth. And with their food.”