More Than Subsistence

A presentation by Virginia Lacy to the Alaska History Conference, Homer, AK 2007

Good morning: The theme for this year's meeting–Food for Thought–is most intriguing. I feel fortunate to have been raised with a multi-cultural background. My grandmother, Matrona, was half Russian, half Aleut, and was born in Nuchek in Constantine Harbor some 50 miles from Cordova and was one of the daughters of Chief Makari Chimoviski. She married August Tiedeman, a German sailor who came to the United States in 1900 with the German navy. He jumped ship in Baltimore, Md., joined the United States Navy and served in the Spanish American War. Upon discharge he sailed on the Coast & Geodetic Survey ship McArthur which was mapping the Alaska coastline. The ship stopped in Nuchek for supplies and history repeated itself when he again jumped ship after meeting my grandmother. They lived in Nuchek for a few years and then moved to Ellamar where he worked in the copper mine.

When the mine closed they moved to Alice Cove, about 13 miles from Cordova, and raised blue foxes–and four children–two boys and two girls. My grandfather was raised on a farm and one of the first things he did was put in a garden. He grew lettuce, cabbage, carrots, turnips, rhubarb, potatoes, radishes, horseradish roots, and huge raspberries. He had a compost pile and mixed seaweed and fish with it and made his version of fish fertilizer. We all gathered clamshells from the beach and he burned them to make a soil additive. The grandkids loved to sneak into the garden and pull the young carrots and we would bring along sugar to sprinkle on the leaf lettuce. We blamed the rabbits for raiding the garden but I don't think anyone believed us.

My father was a Bulgarian immigrant who came to Alaska in 1916 and was working as a logger in Sheep Bay, very close to Alice Cove. My mother and her sister both married loggers. I was born at Alice Cove with my grandmother and an aunt as midwives and lived there until time for me to go to school in Cordova. My two brothers were born in the local hospital but we still spent holidays and summers at Alice Cove.

At first as babies we were given spoonfuls of cod liver oil but soon my parents switched to Scott's Emulsion, which is a thick, white, syrupy mixture containing cod liver oil. A friend at our elder's sewing circle says she thought it tasted awful but my brothers and I liked it much better than the regular oil. It is still being made as I found it on the internet. Now it is also made in orange and cherry flavors which they say are more palatable than the original flavor.

In addition to the garden, my grandfather raised pigs, goats, rabbits, and pigeons. And of course we had the subsistence meats–Sitka blacktail deer which had been planted in the area by the Forest Service, and goats, as well as ducks and geese. We always hoped that the goat would be a young one as the old ones were tough and strong tasting. Deer meat was preserved by canning with a gravy and made a delicious dinnner served over rice or home-made noodles. I much preferred it to the porcupine stew which my grandmother would make occasionally. Our parents insisted that we try everything so thank goodness the stew did not appear very often and we could get by with a few spoonfuls. The meat was very lean and stringy and kind of sweet tasting. Not as good as the young black bear that we sometimes had. Bear roasts were cooked with onions and caraway seeds and served with a rhubarb relish.

We drank goat's milk when the goats were producing. At other times we had a powdered milk that was called KLIM, which is MILK spelled backwards. We had it just mixed with water but one family had some kind of a machine with paddles and they added a clump of butter which was mixed in and of course made the milk much richer. I also found KLIM on the internet, still being made by Nestle, but produced in Canada. Our goats were not friendly–especially the billy goat. You had to continually watch your back or he would butt you. The goats would eat anything. We called one of them "Tin Can" because he even tried to eat cans.

Our butter was white and a yellow capsule was included with it and we took turns for the fun of being the person who mixed it until it was yellow with no streaks. It was kept in brine in small wooden kegs to preserve it. It was interesting to find that when our family went to Bulgaria to visit my father's relatives many years later that their butter was white. It was white on the farm as well as in one of the hotels where we stayed. My grandson had never seen white butter before and it took a while to convince him that it wasn't shortening and would taste good on his toast.

The pigs got all of the table scraps that were not used in the compost. When my grandfather decided it was time to kill one of them I would head up into the meadows to the fox pens and stay there until they were finished. He had a big vat that they filled with boiling water to take the hair off the pigs. He taught my grandmother to make headcheese and they smoked their own ham right along with the smoked fish. Sockeyes and cohos made the best hard smoked fish and it was kept dry by hanging in gunny sacks so it would not mildew. King salmon was canned both plain and kippered. And of course salmon was salted to be made during the winter into pickled fish and freshened out and fried to serve with sourdough hotcakes. One of my grandfather's sources of income was from seining humpback or pink salmon in the bay, hard smoking them, and shipping them to the interior for feed for the dog teams. The sea provided many foods. In addition to salmon, there were rockfish, red snapper, halibut, herring, smelt, butter clams, razor clams, cockles, and crab.

There was a large herring saltery on a dock in the cove and a large tender would come in to haul away the huge wooden kegs. My mother fried herring crisp, put them on a platter, covered with sliced onions, and drizzled them with oil and vinegar. Her version of pickled herring was eaten either warm or cold. We had a Norwegian friend who did a fancy pack that he called "Rollmops". He filleted the herring, removed the skin and all the bones, put thin slices of onion on the fillets and carefully rolled them up, sticking a toothpick in them to hold the shape. He put them in jars with vinegar and lemon slices and they were a special gift at holiday time.

In our area we did not eat whales, sealions, or seaotter. My great grand-parents used the sea otter hides for rugs. The only part of the seal we ate was the liver, fried with bacon and onions, but my grandmother did render out the seal fat and made a very light oil similar to Wesson Oil and it was used in cooking. I don't know if our Prince William Sound seals are like spotted seal but from the internet I note that an ounce of spotted seal oil contains 251 calories and 43% of the daily allowance of fat, which is not too good for our hearts. On the plus side it contains no sodium or cholesterol.

Clams and cockles were steamed, fried, made into clam chowder and fritters. Squid also made great fritters and I recall my uncles pounding on octapus to tenderize it before it was fried or used in a fish stew. My grandmother and I would walk to a small rocky island in front of Alice Cove carrying screwdrivers and we would pry chitons from the rocks. They are also called "bidarkis" but we called them "Gumboots"–probably because that was their texture after they were cooked. Most of them were small, about five inches long, but once in a while we found the large red "monsterosa" variety and they were really prized. We also harvested sea urchins for the roe. Every woman had her own recipe for Russian fish pie and I thought my mother's version, made with salmon, rice, hard-boiled eggs, cabbage and carrots in a very flaky crust was the best. In the spring there would be an expedition to the Egg Islands near Boswell Bay to get seagull eggs. It was the custom never to empty a nest but to leave one or two eggs. They were mostly used for baking and were preserved by putting them down in small wooden kegs in waterglass. It is actually sodium silicate dissolved in water and I understand it is still used in some areas as a preservative. When my grandmother made custard pies from the eggs, I had my own small pie plate and made my pie from pigeon eggs. My grandmother or my mother baked bread every other day and made wonderful cinnamon rolls and fry bread. They also made many loaves of frosted Easter bread for us to enjoy and give to friends.

They saved empty cans, washed them thoroughly, and had assorted sizes–from tall coffee cans to small baking powder cans. There was always a pot of sourdough going and we had hotcakes almost every morning. They were topped with blueberry syrup or home-made maple syrup, made by boiling sugar and water and adding a flavoring called "Mapeline". Visitors always went away with a Mason jar of the sourdough starter. One time after we had planes coming into Cordova a friend hand-carried a jar of the starter on the plane–no TSA rules back then. I don't know if the starter got too warm or the altitude caused it, but the lid blew off the jar and splashed clear out of the bag. You can imagine the aroma and mess in the cabin.

We had many wild berries. Every fall we pickied blueberries, lowbush and highbush cranberries, nagoonberries, currants, salmonberries, and cloudberries. There were lots of seedy crowberries in the meadows too and they were sometimes mixed with blueberries when making a pie. We made jams, jellies and syrups, and preserved blueberries in a waterpack so they could be enjoyed all winter. There were also beach greens, goosetongue, dandelion greens, and fiddlehead ferns that were picked when they first came out, the brown coating washed off, and sauteed in bacon grease. I still have a favorite patch and every year it is a rite of spring to enjoy the first cutting and put some in the freezer all cleaned and ready to cook. I think the variety of foods we ate must have provided adequate vitamins and minerals as we were a healthy family.

Even though we moved from the country to the big city of Cordova, my father continued to be a hunter and my mother was a gatherer. No one could pick berries faster than Mother and no one could strip salmon for salting or canning more precisely. My grandmother used an ulu made from a saw blade but Mother had a very sharp knife that no one was allowed to touch. She worked at local salmon, crab and shrimp canneries and was always the one who put up the "special packs" of salmon and crab. There was a time when a worker could either work by the hour or do piece work. Of course Mother chose piece work as she had such fast hands. One cannery thought she was making too much money and wanted to change her pay to hourly rate. She said she would quit first and they kept her on as they didn't want to lose her perfectly packed cans.

My father was one of the first Cordova hunters to take his boat to Shuyak Island near Kodiak and harvest one of the moose that had been planted there. His deckhand, known as "Sunshine", was with him when they went ashore and saw the first huge moose. He almost swallowed his cigarette and as soon as he could talk again said "Pete, that's the biggest darn deer I ever saw". We ate well that winter.

At Christmas time we always had Japanese oranges which were shipped in on Alaska Steamship Company and had to go through Customs before they were sold. My recipe handouts are in one of the original wooden boxes.

My grandfather enjoyed his beer and it was a real production to make home brew. The U.S. Marshal was a friend and a frequent visitor so the beer was kept behind some sliding doors on the second floor of the Alice Cove house. My brother liked rootbeer and was the expert in that department. He did have one small problem though. Someone told him that a few raisins in each bottle would give it a little "kick". I think he over-did it as he had his special pack on his closet floor and several bottles exploded and thoroughly drenched all of his clothes. Needless to say, my mother was less than happy and banned the further use of raisins.

So far as food was concerned, I don't recall that things were any different during the Depression. We still had seafood and wild meat and it didn't matter that we didn't have the money to buy hamburger from the local meat market. We didn't get to go to the movie matinees as often and my father had to let his life insurance go but life went on pretty much the same. It is interesting to see the changes in the past few years and how we now take things for granted. Like turkeys with no pinfeathers. And packages of beans and split peas without all those little round rocks we had to sort out. And sliced bacon. And the wide variety of foods in the frozen food section so a person doesn't even have to know how to cook any more.

Part of the fun of a variety of foods is the traditions that develop with family recipes and special dishes we might have tasted at a friend's home or at a restaurant when we traveled "Outside". There was a restaurant on First Avenue in Seattle called "Mancas" that made a wonderful oven pancake which they called a "Dutch Baby". Sunset magazine printed the recipe when they went out of business and it has been one of our special breakfasts over the years and something my grandson would ask for whenever we were traveling. He would be shocked because so few places knew what he was talking about. He would say "But my grandma knows how to make them. She should teach you." and settle for pancakes. My son's favorite birthday cake was not a cake at all but Nabisco chocolate wafers covered with whipped cream and sliced on the diagonal.

I too have been a hunter and a gatherer. While I do my hunting now with a camera, one of the thrills o f my life was spending a week in a tent in the Chehotna River Valley near Glennallen and actually coming home with a more than 3/4 curl Dall Sheep. We ate ribs cooked over the campfire and brought back every ounce of the delicious meat. We had a duck cabin out at Pete Dahl Slough on the Copper River Flats and every weekend in the fall were down there trying to get our limits of ducks and geese. And in the winter there were ptarmigan and rabbits just 13 miles from town.

We are fortunate in Cordova to have excellent fishing less than a mile from the city center. King salmon and silver salmon fry are released each year and the returns have made Hippy Cove a popular fishing spot. Everyone has a favorite fishing hole whether it be down Eyak River or in one of the many sloughs out the Copper River Highway. We truly live in God's country.

I feel that growing up I had the best of both worlds. We didn't worry about cholesterol or calories but had a varied diet that was healthful and satisfying.

As a result of our diverse experience with foods we enjoy cooking and eating and it is always interesting to try something new. And now I'm hungry. What's for lunch? Thank you–and help yourself to some of my favorite recipes.