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Native Artist - Nokomis
Making Flour
Bet you didn't know that you could make flour from a bulrush by drying the roots and grinding them into a powder! That's me in the blue dress watching my mother grind the dried bulrush root into a kind of flour. She started by putting the dried root in a shallow hollow in the rock. Then she pounded it until the pieces were small enough for grinding. For that she used a round rock that was rolled over and over the bulrush until it became flour.
Ground bulrush isn't the type of flour that makes good bread - but it can be used as a thickener in soups and stews or its good to dip fish in before frying over an open fire.
But wait... there's more! Anything you can do with a leek or an onion you can do with the white stalk of the bulrush. You can even eat the cattail if you harvest it when it's very young... like the baby corn cobs served in Chinese restaurants. Slice the hard brown cattail very thin and saute gently in butter. They have a mild, almost nutty flavour... mmmmm.
The real bit of news is that a bulrush has twelve times more Vitamin C than an orange.
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