Popular Foods You Didn't Know Native Americans Invented

Those who inhabited this continent before the Europeans came over ate — and invented — a number of popular foods that we still eat today.

In the days before refrigeration, fresh meat needed to be preserved by various methods. The best way to accomplish this? Salt it and dry it out! The very word jerky derives from the word ch'arki, in the South American Quechua language. Its meaning? "Dried, salted meat."

Corn (or maize), as we learned in elementary school, was a staple crop of the Native Americans, both in Mexico, where it was probably first domesticated, and to the north and south. There were hundreds of uses for it, and baking it into a kind of hearth bread was one of them.  

Corn meal mush, called safki or sofkee in various indigenous languages, was the foundation for many Native American meals. It is made from nixtamalized corn — corn treated with chemical lime or some other alkali — and becomes hominy before it is dried and ground.

Southern chefs weren't the first to think of deep-frying cornbread batter. Cherokee, Choctaw, and other Southern tribes figured out many ways to transform corn and cornmeal into delicious food.

Nixtamalized corn is the foundation for tortillas as well as for grits. When European colonists brought wheat to the New World, flour tortillas appeared, too.

Corn, beans, and squash were the essential staples of the Eastern Woodlands Native Americans, so much so that they were called the "Three Sisters." Mix them all together in a pot, and you've got succotash (from the Narragansett word sohquttahhash, meaning cracked corn).

Traveling north from its origins in the Andes to Central America, Mexico, and the American Southwest, the tomato became a common vegetable for Native Americans. As sustenance farmers, they couldn't afford to waste food, so late-season tomatoes, green but savory, were seared on griddles long before anybody ever dreamed of the Whistle Stop Café.

Evidence of popcorn from nearly 4,000 years ago has been found in New Mexico. Microwaves were not involved.