On a cold fall night in Tulsa, I met Bradley Dry over a pot of beans and a hot stove. Dry, a food stylist and freelance chef, was cooking one of his favorite meals: beans and ham, fried corn cakes, cornbread, and tomato salad. For people who know Appalachian food, these dishes are familiar staples. Dry didn’t learn how to cook in the mountains rising from the country’s Eastern Seaboard but rather hundreds of miles away in the soft hills of Oklahoma.
I watched as he plopped down a bag of Shawnee Best yellow cornmeal—the same brand his grandma used—and measured ingredients by the handful, not the cup. While we chatted he diced and added smoked ham to the beans in a cast-iron pot that once belonged to his great-grandmother. Satisfied after the cornbread emerged from the oven a perfect golden brown, he pan-fried dollops of corn cake batter over the stove to the same just-right color. To him this meal is the “epitome of comfort.” But “I don’t want to call it simple,” he told me. “There’s a lot of history in this food.”
Appalachian cooking is often called a melting pot to signal the converging influences of Scotch-Irish immigrants, African Americans, and the Indigenous people of the region. But when you know the full history of how those groups interacted, the metaphor reads more like a crude euphemism. Food traditions from West Africa came to the region through chattel slavery—in which the Cherokee Nation participated. In the 1830s the Indigenous people of Appalachia were forcibly removed through the federal policy of Indian Removal in what became known as the Trail of Tears. An estimated quarter of the Cherokee population died during the roundup in make-shift concentration camps and on the forced exodus.
Dry’s family, who had lived in present-day northern Georgia before the Trail of Tears, reestablished themselves in Twin Oaks—a small Cherokee community nestled around the clear waters of Spring Creek in northeastern Oklahoma. Over the past seven generations, they’ve passed down their recipes and even their cast-iron pans. And that is how Appalachian cooking traditions came to be found in Oklahoma.
Chef Bradley Dry.Courtesy of Bradley Dry.
Mildred Raper, Dry’s grandma, grew up in Twin Oaks on land assigned to their family when the US government divided up Cherokee Nation’s treaty territory to make way for white settlers. Dry grew up with his mom in the next town over—called Little Kansas—but he spent the afternoons and summer days of his youth at his grandma’s house. Her kitchen was a kind of oasis. As a young queer person, Dry didn’t always play outside with the other kids. Instead he stayed in, watching his grandma make everything from salt pork to sweet potato pie. They walked the woods, hills, valleys, and creek beds, foraging wild onions, morels, watercress, and buck brush (for weaving baskets). She even showed Dry how to use birch bark to treat acne. Mildred Raper had learned to cook from her mom, and eventually Dry inherited their traditions.
One day, while showing him how to make corn cakes, Raper instructed Dry to add a little bit of sugar. He accidentally grabbed salt. When he later bit into the corn cake, he couldn’t eat it. “I looked at her and started crying,” he recounted. “She just laughed.” Like many children, Dry idealized his grandmother. What he wanted, more than anything else, was to cook like her. “That was my Mount Everest,” he told me.
Many of the foods central to Appalachia—such as corn and wild edibles like mushrooms and ramps—came directly from Cherokees. Dry’s grandmother would take green beans off the stalk, string them, and hang them around the house (a preservation technique known as shuck beans in Appalachia). She kept a vinegar starter in the family for generations. “I don’t even know how old it is,” Dry told me. She never explicitly described her cooking as Appalachian. “It’s just what she knew,” he said. “Because the food is Cherokee, it is automatically Appalachian. Even though we’re not in our homelands…I feel like it’s in our DNA.”
Today Dry lives about an hour west of Twin Oaks in downtown Tulsa. Where some might not expect to find wild edibles, Dry has harvested hickory nuts (to make kanuchi), lion’s mane, wild carrots, sassafras root, wild onions, wild garlic, and a mushroom Cherokees call wishi.
Over the past 11 years, Dry has worked in a number of popular Tulsa restaurants, sharing his family recipes. Even in places with a lot of Native people like Oklahoma there aren’t a lot of Native restaurants. It’s a food culture that exists mostly in the spaces of community events, church kitchens, and people’s homes. Because of this, a lot of people don’t know what to expect from Native food. Recently, Dry got a personal chef gig for a group going “glamping.” They were excited about having an Indigenous chef, and for them Dry made salad with foraged sorrel, corn cakes, and wild strawberry pie. But the food wasn’t what they expected. One of the diners told Dry: “I thought you were going to make something more Native.”
There’s a growing tension in Native cooking between food traditions that pre-date colonization and foods born from it—like fry bread. Often, pre-colonial food traditions are considered much healthier, devoid of processed ingredients or wheat flour. Dry feels that tension a lot when he cooks, for those within and outside Indigenous communities.
During the pandemic Dry transitioned to working for himself. Now he crisscrosses the country cooking at food festivals and special events. Even if you haven’t tasted Dry’s dishes, you may have seen them on television. He made all the prop food for Reservation Dogs, a Hulu coming-of-age comedy series created by Dry’s longtime friend Sterlin Harjo. For one episode Harjo asked Dry if he could make fry bread “for the aunties”—elder Muscogee women from the community where the series is shot. Intimidated, Dry agreed. At the end of the shoot one Muscogee elder came up to Dry to tell him he’d done a good job. The affirmation made him cry. That was his Mount Everest.
When we sat down to eat our meal, Dry looked satisfied. “Anything I make like this automatically reminds me of my grandmother in the kitchen.” To the diced tomatoes he added thinly sliced onions, oil, salt, and pepper. To make the cornbread fluffy, he mixed in a can of creamed corn and a stick of butter. To add spice Dry brought his own spin on salsa macha, homemade with guajillo and árbol chiles, onions, and peanuts. I crumbled the cornbread over the beans, let it soak up the salty-smoky flavor, and devoured every bite until I felt warm and full.
Though Dry has never visited the part of Appalachia where his family and Cherokees are from, he hopes to one day. He crosses a shorter distance when measuring cornmeal by the handful or foraging wild garlic, the way his grandmother taught him. She passed away a few years ago. But he can still conjure her, not just through recipes, but with the heat of a stove, or in the way a room feels after something has finished baking, anchoring him in the way only food can to the familiar and far away.
