Recipes

Celebrate Your Summer Garden With Pyet DeSpain’s Three Sisters Salad

The recipe from Rooted In Fire: A Celebrations of Native American and Mexican Cooking draws on Native American agricultural traditions.

The Three Sisters Salad combines corn, beans, and squash in homage to Native American agricultural traditions.
(Courtesy HarperCollins Publishers)

There are few agricultural traditions as old as the Native American practice known as the “three sisters.” The method of planting corn, beans, and squash closely together dates back thousands of years in Central Mexico and spread through storytelling in the Americas.

As Pyet DeSpain explains in her upcoming cookbook, Rooted In Fire: A Celebrations of Native American and Mexican Cooking, this tradition is based on patient and clever observation of how crops may benefit one another.

“The big sister, corn, goes into the soil first because its stalk provides vertical structure that is the perfect support for bean vines. The roots of the middle sister, beans, replenish the soil … while freeing space down below for the little sister, squash, which grows close to the ground,” DeSpain writes.

As summer gardeners know, this practice of intercropping plants is still useful today. In backyards, where growing space and sunlight can be limited, growing three mutually beneficial crops together is a reliable technique for making the most from a bed.

Thankfully, DeSpain’s recipe for a “Three Sister’s Salad” is a delicious use of those crops, which should be hitting their seasonal summer peak soon. While the recipe can work with frozen corn or canned beans, it turns out even better with those ingredients fresh from the garden.