Grilled Three Sisters Salad: A Fresh Summer Recipe Inspired by Native American Cuisine

I was recently collecting some plants to grow on my balcony from a friend who is an avid gardener. Gardening is something I’ve always wanted to be good at, but sadly, I am a known plant-killer, so I enthusiastically accepted my friend’s offer to tour her garden and learn some helpful techniques. Among the many vegetables and herbs she is cultivating are the three sisters: corn, squash, and beans. These “sisters” are staples in Native American cuisine and are given the familial name because they are beneficially planted on the same mound. 

The recipe below is not a traditional indigenous dish, rather it is my take on how to create a hearty meal inspired by the agricultural wisdom of the First Nations while focusing on fresh, in-season ingredients for the summer. It makes a rather large quantity of salad, but I find a lot of creative uses for the leftovers like using it as a dip, putting it in tacos and scrambled eggs, or adding it to leafy green salads. The possibilities are endless!

If, like me, you want to learn more about the three sisters and Native American cuisine, I highly recommend you check out this blog post by Andi Murphy who is a food writer of the Navajo nation. She also hosts the Toasted Sister Podcast where she dives deeper into the Native food entrepreneurs who are raising the profile of indigenous cuisine. I’ll offer some of my own musings about this dish below, but for now let’s just get to the recipe.

Ingredients for Grilled Three Sisters Salad

For the Salad:

• 2 cups cooked pinto beans: See my recipe for making the perfect pot of beans.
• 2 summer squashes sliced lengthwise: Zucchini or yellow squash.
• 2 ears of corn
• ⅓ cup of olive oil
• A few pinches of salt and pepper
• A bunch of chopped cilantro

For the dressing:

• 1 tomato sliced in half: I like to use an heirloom variety when it’s in season.
• 2 tablespoons of plain yogurt
• Juice from half a lime
• 1 teaspoon of honey
• Salt to taste

Directions

1. Drain your beans, but do NOT rinse them. The broth clinging to your beans will add great flavor to your salad.

2. Prepare and light your grill according to manufacturer instructions. Close the lid and let the grill preheat as you prepare the vegetables. If you don’t have a grill, roasting your vegetables in the oven is perfectly fine. However, the grill adds a subtle smokey flavor that I really enjoy.

3. Wisk the salt and pepper into the olive oil. Use four tablespoons of the oil to coat the squash and tomato slices. Use the remaining oil to make my recipe for grilled corn.

4. As you are grilling the corn, if there is room on your grill, you may also place on it the squash and tomato, being careful not to overcrowd your grate. Otherwise, grill the vegetables in batches, starting with the corn, tomato, and then squash. Grill the tomatoes and squash for a few minutes each, flip, and cook for a few more minutes. Check for grill marks to know when they’re ready to flip. Additionally, the tomato should be mushy and almost falling apart. 

5. Remove vegetables from the grill. Slice the corn kernels off the ears and dice the squash into bite-sized pieces. Combine in a large bowl with the beans and chopped cilantro.

6. For the dressing, mash the grilled tomato in a small bowl. The tomato should easily fall apart, but if there are any large pulpy chunks, remove them. Whisk in the yogurt, honey, and lime juice. Add salt to taste.

7. Drizzle some dressing over the salad and serve. This salad can be served warm, chilled, or at room temperature.

Songs to cook to

• “Child of Fire” by Sihasin
• “American Dream” by Raye Zaragoza
• “Land Back” by a Tribe Called Red

Three Sisters’ Place in Native Cuisine

There are a lot of things I love about this recipe: the umami and heartiness of the homemade beans, the summery sweetness from the fresh corn and squash, the burst of acidity in the tomato dressing, and the smokey flavor imparted by the grill. But the most important factor in developing this recipe was learning about the historical significance of the three sisters.

The three sisters pop up in the mythologies of nearly every Native American nation. In one common version of the legend, the sisters live in a field together and are described with traits that could also be applied to the way each of the crops grow. One sister is an infant who crawls on the ground, similar to the way beans grow on a crawling vine. The sister representing squash wears a bright yellow dress and darts across the field, conjuring an image of a squash plant spreading its broad leaves over the mounds with flashes of bright yellow fruits beneath. The last sister stands up straight and tall with her long yellow hair flowing in the wind, much like a stalk of corn growing in a field.

The story of the three sisters is not just poetic, it’s practical. Growing corn, squash, and beans on the same mound offers a slew of benefits to maximize your crops’ potential. The tall stalks of corn are natural climbing poles for the beans. Meanwhile the young bean plants pump nitrogen into the soil, fertilizing the corn and squash. The squash does its part by shading the soil with its wide leaves, which stabilizes the temperature and allows the soil to retain more moisture. The symbiotic relationship between the plants exemplifies the principles of permaculture long before it was a trendy buzzword among gardeners.

As Native Americans were forced off of their ancestral lands, possessing knowledge of the three sisters was critical to survival. Many members of the Cherokee nation were said to have carried seeds of the three sisters’ crops on the Trail of Tears. Like many tribes, they applied the three sisters planting technique in the arid soils of Indian reservations in the American Southwest. This allowed indigenous communities to continue to feed themselves, instead of relying solely on the non-nutritious processed food provided to them by the colonizers (aka the US government). It continues to serve as a link for many Native Amercans to their homelands and culture.

Creating a dish inspired by this staple of Native American cuisine stirs up a bag of mixed emotions for me. Mostly, I am in awe at the ingenuity of native farming techniques, but I also feel a deep sense of grief for all of the lost possibilities of what could have been were it not for America’s persistent genocide against the indigenous people. How many cooking or farming traditions were forgotten through forced relocations? What kind of dishes disappeared because of America’s oppression of native culture? What would the restaurant scene look like if native cuisine was as common as Mexican or Chinese? There is a tragic dearth of knowledge about native food, but every now and then I’ll see a story of indigenous chefs and entrepreneurs raising the cuisine’s profile in innovative ways. I look forward to their efforts paying off and native food becoming more mainstream. I know learning about and experiencing indigenous cuisine cannot undo the harm from the past, but I hope that it can be a way to appreciate native culture and bring it to the forefront of our national tapestry.