Wild Rice

The first time I tasted wild rice, it was hand-harvested and came from the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota. I was surprised by how different it is from cultivated black paddy rice. It cooks in 20 minutes and tastes slightly nutty, toasty, with hints of smoke and forest and the flintiness of those clear, cold lakes. Wild rice isn’t “rice” at all, but the seed of an aquatic grass. In Ojibwe, it is manoomin, meaning “good berry” or “good seed,” and the term may reflect a deeper meaning, suggesting “good, right, well.”