Indigenous cuisine of the Americas

Just a couple general points. There are domesticated (or semi-domesticated) turkeys in the U.S. Southwest. By semi-domesticate, I mean there are not many physiological changes in the turkeys you would expect in truly domesticated species, but they were kept in pens or otherwise herded. That said, while they were certainly eaten, the primary reason for keeping them was to use their feathers for ritual items and clothing (blankets or capes mainly). I'm not a Great Basin specialist, but I do know that sego roots were turned into a flour and used as a major part of the diet. One last general point, but while there were no metal knives, there were stone knives available to butcher animals. Now, these don't have quite the same functionality as a European metal knife, but there are perfectly suitable for dicing up some foods. In more detail I will focus on the Southwest since I do know that well. Besides the staple trinity of maize, beans, and squash (the famous "three sisters"), there are a number of wild plants that supplement the diet. Often, these plants will grow along the banks of irrigation canals and fields as "weeds" (even today), but in the past these would have been tolerated as a way to increase the yields of fields by growing foods in parts of those fields that would otherwise not having anything growing in them. Amaranth is native to most of the North America and grows great in the Southwest, particularly southern Arizona. Another starch available and widely used would be mesquite beans, which were historically ground into a flour. Agave is also an extremely important food stuff in more marginal areas were farming is difficult. Archaeologically, you find "beds" made of stone cobbles that were used to plant and manage agave all over the southwest, particularly on the slopes of mountainsides and other elevations. Generally, agave hearts are roasted in large roasting pits and then consumed as a starchy element of the diet. Prickly pears and saguaro fruit are commonly harvested (the saguaro fruit only in southern Arizona, of course, since it doesn't grow elsewhere). Other flavoring elements are mustard weed (a relative of mustard that shares the taste, sort of like a "mustardy" arugala) and chiltipines, which are the wild ancestor of chiles. As for chiles themselves, they may not have actually been used very extensively. This video, Chiles and Taste in the Ancient Southwest/Northwest is very directly addressing your question and is a good view. It is 50 minutes, but well worth a watch if you are very interested in the subject. Likewise, this video may also be of interest since they discuss the procurement and preparation of meat in the Southwest. These videos are all from the same series and by professional archaeologists, so consider the information of high quality. In terms of meat, turkey would have been available but is generally more important for the feathers than the meat (as I already talked about). Deer and other large game would of course be an important source of animal protein, but is not always reliable. Particularly, large sedentary villages tend to overhunt the deer in their immediate vicinity quite quickly, and so if a village is in place for a long time the residents tend to switch their animal protein towards other kinds of animals later in time as deer become more scarce. Deer probably would have been a good example of a food reserved mostly for feasting and other communal occasions. What we do find archaeologically is a huge number of rabbits. At some Pueblos, the animal biomass is sometimes up to 80% rabbit and hare. This would have been the daily source of protein for these communities. Rabbit is near impossible to over-exploit and will live in close proximity to human habitations, so is easy to acquire without ranging too far from home. You can be working in your farm plot and catch a rabbit or two that is living in your field and bring them home for dinner. Even kids can spend some of the day catching rabbits, making them quite available. You also get huge rabbit nets (many meters long and often woven of human hair) that were probably used in communal rabbit roundups that would have involved a whole village. We even see these huge nets being represented in rock art. As for the preparation, our best guess for what food would have looked like (based on the archaeological evidence and what some Native American groups were eating in the colonial period) is that your daily meal would probably have looked something like a modern posole, but with more beans. Tortillas would have been made from ground maize to accompany the dishes, but since the primary ceramic vessels were bowls and jars, soup or stew-like dishes would have predominated. Indeed, a lot of meals would probably have been conducted "family style" by having a large bowl in the center of the meal area that people could dip their personal bowls into. The same sort of style would have been the norm for community-wide feasts, just on a larger scale. Indeed, many Pueblo communities have specific food prep areas close to the main plazas and religious buildings that were probably used in preparing these communal feasts. These "prep rooms" usually have several hearths in them as well as "mealing bins" which are bins built into the wall of the structure that would have had a metate in them (a grinding stone) and they would have been used to collect large amounts of corn flour. As for utensils, the tortilla was probably the primary way of eating your food (along with just slurping it from the bowl), but there are ceramic ladels that were produced by Pueblo groups. There isn't a great idea about what these were used for, but odds are they might have been used for communal feasting to distribute the food or they may have been for collecting a drink of water. Take a look at this one or this one for example. You do also get some mugs (as in, same shape as a coffee mug), but these are really quite rare. This one for instance. Finally, there is evidence of chocolate in the Southwest. This is entirely limited to Chaco Canyon, where residue analyses of this type of cylinder jar has turned up very strong traces of theobromine, an important chemical in chocolate. We also know that cylindrical jars of a very similar shape to these were used in Mesoamerica to drink chocolate from. This chocolate would have to have been imported from southern Mexico since it doesn't grow in arid environments like New Mexico. Due to the incredible rarity and expense of the chocolate, this was likely a very restricted beverage for people with important religious or social functions in society, and only in Chaco Canyon itself. In Mesoamerica, this drink was made as unsweetened chocolate (though sometimes combined with honey as a sweetener). More on reddit.com

Oh good someone actually answered this thread.

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You can find plenty of Native American restaurants in the southwest. There was one just outside Dallas when I lived there about twelve years ago. I can't recall its name. But in the broader sense, most of what we consider to be American cuisine is Native American cuisine, just assimilated and adapted in various ways. The Timucua people of Florida used to have a special technique of cooking a goat slowly in a pit dug in the ground with a pot under it to catch the juices. They'd use the juices to make a sort of broth that would be poured over the goat meat before eating. They called it barbacoa. Today we call it barbecue. My own people are from the Louisiana bayou, and the Indians around those parts are basically the reason why my ancestors didn't die of starvation after the Derangement. It was the Choctaw who first taught my people how to grind up the leaves of the sassafras plant into the powder we now call filé, which we use to make our filé gumbo. (When we don't make our gumbo with filé we make it with okra, and we learned that trick from the Choctaw too.) We had to learn to adapt our French recipes (which were useless in the new and different climate) with help from the Indians and the Caribs and the West Africans who'd been brought over as slaves. We had to learn fast, too, or go hungry. Course, most of what people think of as "Tex-Mex" cuisine is really Aztec in origin. It was the Aztecs (or maybe the Mayans, I can't remember) who first learned to cook corn with lime (calcium hydroxide, not the citrus fruits) so it could be ground up and made into corn flour and then made into things like tortillas and tamales. If you magic-wanded an Aztec man into a modern Tex-Mex restaurant, he wouldn't recognize everything on the menu, but it would all seem eerily familiar. So anyway, long story short, there are tons of distinctive Native American foods. We just tend not to notice them all that much because we think of them as American foods. More on reddit.com

A lot of Mexican dishes are from native american recipes, like mole and pozole. But like the other comments said, native american is way too broad of a term. It's all very regional.

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