My weekend column mentions en passant Teepee Party candidate Elizabeth Warren’s contributions to the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families”:
The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain . . . ” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.Shortly after my column was filed yesterday afternoon, our Noah Glyn reported that Mrs Warren’s crab dish passed down from her Cherokee ancestors actually came from an upscale Manhattan eatery on 55th Street across from the St Regis:
Two of the possibly plagiarized recipes, said in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook to have been passed down through generations of Oklahoma Native American members of the Cherokee tribe, are described in a New York Times News Service story as originating at Le Pavilion, a fabulously expensive French restaurant in Manhattan. The dishes were said to be particular favorites of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.The Pundette wonders: “Were they Cherokee, too?“
No. But, as Broadway’s first Native American composer, Cole Porter wrote about his Indian blood in his famous song, “I’ve Got Sioux Under My Skin”.
Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn’t a threat to one’s sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation’s most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first “woman of color” on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor’s favorite crab dish to a tribal cookbook.
Before he ascended to the throne, the Duke inspired a hit song of reflected celebrity: “I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales”. That seems to be how Harvard Law’s identity-group quota-filling works. I’m confident Elizabeth Warren will eventually be able to prove she danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with someone who once changed planes at a municipal airport accidentally built on a Cherokee burial ground.
