MVSKOKE RESERVATION- From her home in Okemah, Eugenia “Carol” Tiger (Mvskoke) runs Hompvks Ci! Mvskoke Cooking & Catering, which offers traditional and home-style food and instruction. Since her retirement after 34 years from the glass plant in Henryetta, Tiger embraced the kitchen.
With tutorials on her YouTube channel that feature the Mvskoke Meal Series, Tiger walks viewers through recipes like ‘safke and taklik-kvmokse. Her calm demeanor instructs students step by step and offers advice and encouragement.
Before her mother passed, Tiger watched her in the kitchen. After her passing, she went to her community and learned to cook different foods from elderly ladies.
“I had to learn that way. I went and talked to a lot of elderly women when my mother passed away because there was nobody left to show me, and I just remembered how she cooked,” Tiger said.
She enjoys cooking older dishes that nobody cooks anymore. The dishes she’s usually asked to cook are sofke, chicken and dumplings, or blue bread, if she has the ingredients.
One of the Mvskoke traditional foods she first tried was hominy with meat; she used pork. Now, she mostly makes sofke, and hominy with meat.
One ingredient that she always needs on hand is flour and oil. Tiger mentions that people would always ask her to make fry bread, too.
What sparked interest in the videos was that, wherever she went, her daughter, Cassandra Thompson (Mvskoke), would ask her, “Can we do this?” or “Can we set up somewhere?”
“One person that approached me was the Tulsa library, that’s how the videos got put out there, they were asking me if I would show them how,” Tiger said. The recipe videos were made for the Tulsa City-County Library American Indian Resource Center.
She sees the younger cooks wanting to take the time to learn how to cook these traditional foods. Tiger spoke about how she shows them and tells them what ingredients to get to prepare these meals.
“It’s stuff that they normally don’t cook, but would like to learn. Some of them are grape dumplings, sour cornbread, hominy and meat, chicken and dumplings, fry bread,” Tiger said.
Tiger does enjoy cooking, but that’s just one of the things she enjoys about doing this. Recently, she taught a class on making fry bread, and Tiger noticed how much the participants enjoyed it.
Some recipes take time, some take practice, and some take both.
For Tiger, it doesn’t take long to make certain dishes, but she needs to know ahead of time what to cook, because some dishes can take all night, like sofke. Tiger stressed to the students that making those dishes takes time and a ton of practice.
“I told them, I said, ‘Fry bread takes a lot of practice.’ You have to take your time, and if you want to learn, you just have to keep practicing, whether it turns out good or bad, you still practice how to make your bread. Any of the dishes that I have shown, you have to practice on how to make it, when to make, and how long it takes,” Tiger said.
To watch her videos, she can be found on YouTube at her account Hompvks Ci! and on Facebook at HompvksCe.
Carol Tiger shared her Taklik-Kvmokse recipe, available here.
