Chef
Quamash, technically known as camasia quamash and sometimes called “little beds” or “bed lily,” is a perennial herb native to the western United States and Canada. Native Americans used the bulb of this plant for food. Early explorers also depended on this edible plant for survival. Quamash is still consumed, albeit infrequently, today as part of traditional Native American cooking.
Star-shaped blue flowers, each with six petals, bloom along the stem of the plant in late spring. The plant reaches approximately 18 inches (45.72 cm) in height. In the United States, quamash is native to California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. In Canada, the flower grows naturally in British Columbia and Alberta. The bulbs are harvested in the fall, long after the petals have completely fallen off and the stems have dried.
Several early Native American tribes, including the Nez Perce, Blackfoot, Cree, and Shoshone, valued this culture and had specific methods for cultivating quamash fields. The keepers of the fields cleared rocks and weeds and cultivated the land. They also needed to remove any nearby “deathbeds,” or zigadenus enviosus, a poisonous flower with a similar appearance. Families passed ownership and responsibility for these fields to their children. Lewis and Clark, the famous American explorers, also partially relied on corms as a food source during their expedition.
Native American women turned the bulb into flour to make bread. They also combined the bulbs with various grasses and roasted the mixture in a pit for an entire day or more. Early settlers followed this example and boiled quamash until it softened. Settlers could then eat it whole or mash up the boiled and blackened bulb and use it in place of squash or squash in pies and similar dishes. When slow cooked, the complex inulin sugar found in the bulbs breaks down into fructose, making the end product smooth and sweet.
Today, large fields of quamash rarely grow in the wild. Gardeners tend to grow it more for the beauty of the plant than for its edibility, but an experienced gardener interested in Native American cooking traditions can still consume the flower bulb by slowly roasting it or grinding it into flour. The boiled and sweetened bulbs can also be combined with other ingredients, such as water and butter, to make a traditional sauce. Full sun and moist, acidic soil often produce the strongest harvest of quamash flowers. However, the plant is relatively adaptable and small clusters still grow in the wild in lawns, grassy meadows and wet plains.