Cookbook can fix a hankering for intestines

Through the years, readers have shared with me all kinds of unusual stories and family treasures.

One of the most unusual items came to me a few weeks ago during a neighborhood baby shower, from an old friend who has strong ties to Alaska.

Cheryl handed me a 1952 Eskimo cookbook that she recently had acquired from her mother. It's a small, well-worn compilation of recipes put together by the students of Shishmaref Day School, where she attended school.

I'm guessing the unusual cookbook, put together by students as a fundraiser for the Alaska Crippled Children's Association of Anchorage, was a way to promote and preserve the Eskimo culture. Teacher Isabelle Bingham explains in the cookbook's introduction that she asked the children how their mothers prepared native foods.

"One little lad sputtered, 'Eskimo don't have cookbooks!'" Bingham wrote. "I informed him that long ago white man didn't have cookbook, then told a story of how cookbooks first started, how the old cookbooks written by hand were so very much prized."

What resulted from this teacher's effort is a fascinating collection of recipes that illustrate how the Eskimo people lived off the land quite literally to survive in a harsh climate. It lists the Eskimo names and pronunciations for native plants in the Shishmaref area on Sarichef Island, just north of the Bering Strait. It also contains drawings of some native plants.

I have no idea if the dishes showcased in this little cookbook still exist.

It's hard to say whether Alma Nayokpuk's recipe for Ptarmigan Small Intestine is still a local favorite there, or if Oogruk Flippers are on Shishmaref restaurant menus. Oogruk is a bearded seal, I'm told, and its flippers are prepared by encasing them in fresh blubber for two weeks. Then you take the loose fur off the flipper and cut them into small bite-sized pieces.

Eskimos at that point in time used every part of the seal in their diets. The cookbook tells how to make seal oil, seal head, seal bare feet, fried seal liver and of course, seal intestines.

Student Agnes Kiyutelluk's endearing recipe for Soured Seal Liver is a classic: "Place liver in enamel pot or dish and cover with blubber. Put in warm place for a few days until sour. Most of the boys and girls don't like it, except the grown-ups and old people. I don't like it either."

A recipe for Eskimo ice cream calls for grating reindeer tallow and then adding seal oil.

Perhaps my favorite is Bert Tocktoo's recipe for Baby Birds: "Take feathers off from baby birds, clean and wash. Cook them in plenty water. Add salt as much as you want."

Cheryl moved back and forth to Alaska five times. She said it's hard to explain the allure that draws people to the wilderness there.

"Most people don't understand the pioneer spirit that runs in some people's blood," she said. "We all go West and look for a place that no one's been to tame before."

But that said, she also added that living in a cabin in the Aleutian Islands with no water or septic, pregnant, with three kids and cloth diapers, "doesn't appeal to me anymore.

"Now that it's tamed it doesn't call to me anymore," she said.

I hope that many copies of the vintage Eskimo cookbook survived and are tucked away for posterity. It's an important snapshot of a native culture that survived in one of the world's harshest landscapes.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com