Wampanoag chef 1st Indigenous woman to win a James Beard Award
CBC
Mashpee Wampanoag Chef Sherry Pocknett has become the first Indigenous woman to win a James Beard Award, being named Best Chef: Northeast at a ceremony in Chicago earlier this month.
"I'm from a family of amazing chefs and cooks and bakers so it's in the blood," said Pocknett.
Since 1990, the James Beard Awards recognize talent and achievement in the culinary arts, hospitality and food media.
Pocknett said she started cooking when she was about eight years old on an Easy-Bake Oven that she got for Christmas.
She opened her restaurant Sly Fox Den Too in Charlestown, R.I., in 2021. Named after her late father, Chief Sly Fox, the restaurant specializes in local Indigenous cuisine, sustainably sourced using traditional hunting, fishing and farming techniques.
"We lived by the seasons," said Pocknett.
"I grew up in the '60s and my dad was a hunter and a fisher so we always had stuff from the wild in the refrigerator."
The same fresh ingredients such as eel, venison, muskrat, quahogs and scallops that she cooked for her brothers as a girl are featured on her menu today.
Pocknett takes local ingredients like smoked bluefish or smoked salmon and creates a hash, served with poached eggs and "a big old corn cake" for breakfast.
Summer menu items use strawberry, an important plant medicine for Indigenous people, and seafoods such as striped bass, bluefish, frog legs and soft shell crab.
Pocknett said she was shocked when they called her name at the awards ceremony.
"I was up against four amazing chefs," she said.
Dawn Padmore, vice-president of awards at the James Beard Foundation, said judges' decisions aren't based solely on culinary excellence.
"It's so much more," she said.
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