Mastering the Art of Bush Alaskan Cooking in the 1960s and the Rich History of Community Cookbooks
My grandmother moved to the small town of Nome with her husband and four young children in the summer of 1959 just months after Alaskan statehood. Nome felt like an “end of the world place” according to my dad, who was six at the time. The barren landscape of the tundra supported no trees. The waves crashed along sandy beaches. Daylight shrunk to a mere four hours in the December darkness. In 1960, this one-time “boom town” made famous during the gold rush of 1899 supported just 2,316 residents, with a 70% Alaska Native population.
Located on the western coast of the state, Nome is not connected to a highway system. Visitors arrive by plane or by sea. In winter, residents still get around using snow machines or dog sleds. Nome is the finish line of the Iditarod, a 1,000-mile sled dog race started in 1973 to commemorate the courageous feat of 20 mushers who ran life-saving serum from Anchorage to Nome during a diphtheria epidemic nearly a century ago.
As my grandmother focused on settling the family into their new home, a renovated turn-of-the-century gold rush shack, my grandfather assembled a transmission tower for the future radio station. The station would connect residents in remote villages with news and other programs including one called “Ptarmigan Telegraph” that broadcasted personal messages concerning everything from death announcements to a family member’s arrival at fish camp.
Of the many tales of Alaskan bush life comprising our family’s collection, I am most intrigued by stories of my grandmother’s cooking. In addition to hosting radio programs for young homemakers, she cleaned, cooked, and baked for her four (eventually five) children. The culinary landscape of Nome in 1960 was in stark contrast to her Midwestern cooking style. Butter, milk, eggs, and other staples sold for at least triple the standard price. To economize, other grocery items and commodities required pre-orders in yearly quantities and came to Nome on the barge each summer before the sea iced over. Meals required extreme planning.
My grandmother used her thriftiness and creativity as she parceled out dry goods from the barge closet, a space filled with cases and cases of food. One year she ordered a stalk of bananas that arrived on the barge and hung in a storage room of the house. Canned goods were prevalent in many meals and “best by” dates were largely ignored. According to family legend, my dad found cans of food in old miner shacks that he and his siblings opened and tasted including some discovered in military stashes from the 1940s.
During the 1960s, while Americans in the lower 48 flocked to pizzerias and fell in love with homemade pizza kits, my grandmother kept on trend by serving her version of pizza: Bisquick crust, ketchup sauce, Velveeta cheese, and Spam. Her kids met the production with a mild mockery that lives on today, but it sounds like a triumph to me.
My dad talked about the joy of visiting friends’ houses and eating store-bought white bread, something not found at home because my grandmother baked enough bread for the family each week. She also baked lots of cakes because they lasted longer than cookies and were inexpensive.
Occasionally, my grandmother surprised her family by opening up “Gert’s Kitchenette,” placing a sign on the front door and welcoming her children in to checkered tablecloths and menus, requiring formal attire for a selection of desserts. This was a treat, as the family never ate at restaurants.
Neighbors frequently stopped in for bottomless cups of coffee. My grandmother hosted a smörgåsbord every Christmas Eve for anyone with no place to go, a nod to the Scandinavian roots of her Midwestern heritage. This meal included her famous candlestick salad consisting of, in this exact order: an iceberg lettuce leaf, a pineapple ring, a section of banana, mayonnaise, and a maraschino cherry. It was sculptural gastronomy on par with fine dining.
Salmon catches were frequent and abundant. Local hunters shared caribou and moose with the community. Crab pots littered the yards like bicycles. The tundra provided exquisite cranberry, blueberry, blackberry and salmonberry picking each season, something my grandmother made use of in her famous jams and jellies.
Outside of her home, the food culture of Nome was a mixture of church basement favorites and traditional Native foods, as depicted in the Nome Cook Book [1] published in the 1970s by the United Methodist Women. It contains recipes like Alaskan Cranberry Tea using low-bush cranberries. The meats-poultry-seafood section kicks off with Moose Stew and Crock Pot Moose, mirroring common favorites but using moose in place of beef. We find Ptarmigan Delight followed by three pages of salmon recipes. And in the casserole section, we discover the joy of both puns and Italian food with Moosketti.
illustration by Tamara Burgh
The Native foods section lists last names like Johnson alongside Nagozruk and Willoya. There are reindeer recipes that showcase the benefits of using the whole animal, such as Reindeer Leg Marrow and Reindeer Head Soup. Carrie Asarhuk shares a recipe for traditional Native ice cream, akutaq, made with reindeer fat, seal oil, and berries. Walrus Stew and Boiled Oogruk (seal) recipes are given as well as Pot Roast Ptarmigan. We learn about the process of boiling and fermenting wild beach greens called toogaiyuk. The section ends with a recipe for preserving berries in a barrel that says, instead of a name, “Dictated by an Old Timer.”
This church cookbook isn’t so different from the many community cookbooks filling kitchen cupboards and thrift store shelves across the country. Born as a charity project during the Civil War, the community cookbook has been a portrait of American life for over 150 years. In the late 1800s, not only was it a thrill for a woman to see her name in print, it was a way to support a cause and build a lasting testament to the kitchen’s role in the early American home. “Laid end to end, they would form a history of America on a community level,” says Barbara Haber on the importance of community cookbooks as historical documents. Many of these cookbooks served as fuel for the women’s suffrage movement, a document to help women with their domestic duties but also to get them to vote, and even today community cookbooks are having their own sort of revival.
Church communities especially latched on to this industrious fundraising opportunity. A special focus was placed on heritage recipes like goulash and rømmegrøt, granting a separate section at the front or back. Some cookbooks popularized this idea so successfully they became known in the greater cookbook world. The Complete Book of Greek Cooking by the Recipe Club of Saint Paul’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral is considered by some to be one of the best Greek cookery books available.
pages from the Nome Cookbook
As the years went on and recipes contained fewer real ingredients and more cans of cream of mushroom soup, the heritage section remained sacred. More than one hundred years after their ancestors arrived in the United States, churches held fast to these recipes.
The Nome Cook Book is no exception. A recipe using fresh blackberries also calls for Kool-Aid. And as a strangely fitting last recipe, we find rømmegrøt, a Norwegian sour cream porridge with the consistency of paste often served drizzled with warm butter and cinnamon sugar. Sitting 175 miles east of Siberia and 140 miles from the Arctic Circle, even Nome can’t escape the tendrils of Scandinavian heritage recipes. Just as it haunts the cookbooks of the Midwest, rømmegrøt’s presence extends even to the far reaches of Alaska.
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Alaska Natives have been hunting and fishing throughout Alaska's Bering Strait region for thousands of years. Present-day Nome was home to the Iñupiat people before an influx of European traders, missionaries, and gold miners in the late 1800s. In a place they had lived for thousands of years, Alaska Natives were confronted with an alternative to their traditional medicine and food preparation practices. The introduction of a cash-based economy to a people used to a subsistence lifestyle created difficulty. Without a traditional diet of berries, salmon, caribou, moose, whale, seal, ptarmigan, and native greens like fireweed, which were optimal for their lifestyle, nutrition suffered.
Today, Alaska’s population is about 15% Alaska Native. Their traditional foodways have endured despite the impact of colonization, boosted through efforts of cultural preservation by various gatherings and organizations. Though threatened by warming temperatures, melting ice, and shifting floes, the hunting, fishing, gathering, and growing traditions that span hundreds of generations continue.
John M. Poling writes in the Nome Cook Book introduction, “From December to May the sea becomes a rugged field of ice used as a playground for winter sports, ice-fishing, crabbing, and hunting of sea mammals…The tundra and hills are a natural garden of flowers and berries in the summer months. Wild animals, birds, and reindeer feed across the landscape. The ice free sea from June to November is active with shipping, hunting, and fishing. The waterfowl have returned from the south and the local people move back to their summer fish camps to prepare fish, meat, and berries for winter. Nome is many things to many people.”
To me, Nome is a place that preserves the history of my grandmother’s cooking.
As my grandmother aged, and I started cooking for myself, I became captivated by her fierce provisioning. She was capable and resourceful in an era when food preparation fell exclusively to women. She persevered to provide three meals a day, keeping the kitchen warm, the coffee pot on, and the bread always baking.
My grandmother passed away in February of 2019 after spending her last year in the lower 48. I am lucky to have adult memories of her cooking. I recall with fondness the light green tablecloth that always adorned her table, and the way she routinely set a full table of dishes, even for breakfast. I remember the legendary lemon meringue pies she kept baking well into her mid-80s. On my last visit to see her in Alaska, at age 89 she refused to let me help with the cooking. As she puttered about her retirement apartment’s tiny kitchen, I looked on with a cup of coffee in hand.
Like so many before me, I gave profound thanks for a place at her table.
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[1] Nome Cook Book: Recipes Compiled by United Methodist Women, Nome, Alaska. Copyright 1968-1976 by Circulation Service. P.O. Box 7306 Shawnee Mission, Kansas 66207. Printed in the United States of America.
This essay is a part of Comestible Issue 9, a special online edition devoted to the wisdom, knowledge, and inspiration from the women who came before us.
Papercut illustration by Anna Brones
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