Hooshes to-day have been excellent in spite of a decided tang of penguin guano.
I think that the palate of the human animal can adjust itself to anything.
-Sir Ernest Shackleton, South
A RECIPE FOR SOMETHING
A day before I flew by Twin Otter from Ross Island into the Transantarctic Mountains for a three-month deep field assignment, my friend Robert Taylor led me quietly into the McMurdo Station kitchen and surprised me with a dozen loaves of his exquisite bread. A slender, soft-spoken baker with a penchant for mischief, he knew he was helping me escape to the hinterlands with some of the best food in the U.S. Antarctic Program (usAP). Into my knapsack went bundles of illicitly made olive, sweet potato, and plain sourdough, moist but with a firm crust.
"This is beautiful, Robert;" I said. "How can I repay you?"
"You can't;' he said, and smiled sweetly. "Just have a good time, and when you come back tell me some stories."
Ask anyone for stories of Antarctic cuisine, and they're likely to go as blank as the ice continent itself. Antarctica lies somewhere beyond their imagination, or exists as the strange white mass smeared across the bottom of their cylindrical-projection world map. Often they'll confuse it with the Arctic, where polar bears and Santa Claus roam the sea ice. With a little prompting, they may at least know Antarctica as the media depict it -the frigid home of penguins, icebergs, and undaunted scientists.
For me, it has been both a second home and a dreamlike otherworld of ice. For eight Antarctic summers, I lived and worked in the starkest landscape on Earth. I slept on a mass of ice larger than India and China combined, woke up flying over glaciers that overflow mile-high mountains, and ate meals in a tent shaken so wildly by katabatic winds that I thought its destruction was imminent.
Antarctic ice is three miles deep in places. The growth of sea ice around the continent each winter is the greatest seasonal event on the planet, while the largest year-round terrestrial animal is a centimeter-long wingless midge, and plant life is confined to a few stony pockets within the 0.4 percent of Antarctica not covered in permanent snow or ice. Ninety percent of the planet's ice sits in Antarctic ice caps so hostile to human life that nobody stood on them until the twentieth century. The existence of Antarctica, the only significant realm actually discovered by colonizing Europeans, was not proved until 1820, and the continent's coastline was not fully sketched until the late 195os.
Therefore, you may ask, is there really such a thing as a venerable Antarctic cuisine? In a word, no. Since the dawn of time, as far as we know, no human ate so much as a snack in the Antarctic region until Captain James Cook and his frostbitten sailors nibbled on biscuits as they dodged icebergs below the Antarctic Circle in 1773. Seal hunters made the first brief Antarctic landings by the austral summer of 1819-20, but no one sat down for a regular meal on the continent until 1898. Then, as now, what visitors to the Antarctic - and we are all visitors - sit down to are imported meals. There is no Antarctic terroir. The land does not provide, cannot provide, because there isn't a square foot of arable soil on the entire 5.4-million-square-mile continent in which to plant a garden. There have been, however, two other sources for the Antarctic diet: the flavors people bring with them, and the flavors of the Southern Ocean, meaning the flesh of seals, penguins, and sea birds raising their young on the Antarctic shoreline. Antarctic culinary history is a mere century of stories of isolated, insulated people eating either prepackaged expedition food or butchered sea life. In recent decades, with kinder, more complex menus, each nation's research base enjoys a limited version of its own home cuisine.
If the mother of Antarctic cuisine was necessity, its father was privation. Hunger was the one spice every expedition carried. As Lieut. Kristian Prestrud of the 1911-12 Fram expedition said, "To a man who is really hungry it is a very subordinate matter what he shall eat; the main thing is to have something to satisfy his hunger." Rations for sledging expeditions were minimal and monotonous.
Sustenance ruled over sensitivity. Thus, the heroes and stoics of Antarctic history scribbled in their journals about seal steaks and breast of penguin, about pemmican and biscuit crumbs boiled in tea. About dog flesh and caches of pony meat. About "hoosh," the bleak Antarctic soup of meat and melted snow. About scurvy and dying hungry.
Properly defined, hoosh is a porridge or stew of pemmican and water, often thickened with crushed biscuit. Pemmican was originally a Native American high-energy food made of dried, shredded meat, mixed with fat and flavored with dried berries. Antarctic pemmican differed in substance-commercial beef and beef fat rather than wild meat-and appearance -compacted, uniform, measured blocks.
The word hoosh is a cognate of hooch, itself a corruption of the Tlingit hoochinoo, meaning both a Native American tribe on Admiralty Island, Alaska, and the European-style rotgut liquor that they made. Hooch became common slang throughout North America for bootleg liquor, particularly during Prohibition, while for British polar explorers, hoosh came to mean the meat stew of the ravenous. Etymologies for hoosh have assumed a strictly Antarctic usage, but I've found it used comfortably in British naval documents of the 1875 Nares Arctic Expedition. No doubt it has earlier Arctic usage as well. By the time it reached southern polar waters, it resonated. "Hoosh -what a joyous sound that word had for us;' said Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance. And indeed, the onomatopoeic sound of it-like the whoosh of the Primus stove bringing their stew to a boil-must have been music to their ears.
All of which shows how Antarctica's sad state of culinary affairs has been framed by a truly rich history on this terra incognita. Here, at the bitter end of terrestrial exploration, where year-round occupation preceded the invention of the microwave oven by only a few years, food has rarely had a more attentive, if helpless, audience. Cold, isolation, and a lack of worldly alternatives have conspired to make Antarctica's captive inhabitants desperate for generally lousy food.