Kinnickinnic is not just the town in Wisconsin or even the river by that name. In Anishinaabe, Ojibway, the language, it means “what is mixed.” It is a mixture of herbs and barks smoked for social, spiritual, and medicinal purposes. I’ll put a couple of recipes at the end of this blog. Speaking of recipes, there are many recipes as tribes and different preferred recipes. Plus the fact that the ingredients used in one recipe might not be available in another area. There are three ingredients almost all recipes have in common. They are Bearberry leaf, Labrador Tea Leaf, and a bark usually either Red Osier Dogwood or one of the Willows. Traditionally they were always smoked in a pipe.
You will find various spellings of Kinnickinnic. I do not know enough of the language of the tribes to know which is correct. Suppose you do a search for just Kinnickinnic. In that case, you will be overwhelmed by ads for various things in Wisconsin, ranging from fishing to real estate. I found the best search terms were “Kinnickinnic recipes for smoking” or “Kinnickinnic for smoking.” Most of the ads that come up will tell you a bit more about Kinnickinnic.
Here are a couple of recipes.
Kinnickinnic
Equal parts:
Bearberry leaf
Labrador Tea leaf (picked in spring when orange underneath)
Red Osier Dogwood inner bark
Wormwood leaf (Artemisia frigida)
Chokecherry inner bark
occasionally inner bark of Alder (Alnus crispa)
A modern recipe from a southern tribe
Mullien leaf, damiana, red raspberry leaf, strawberry leaf, cornsilk, and strawberry and peach natural flavors.
A final note: many recipes used tobacco and can no longer be found for health reasons.
