Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine by Jason C. Anthony

Author:Jason C. Anthony [Anthony, Jason C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Amazon: B009ND2J2W
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2012-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

HAIR PIE

The Australians had three IGY bases, including the continent's first permanent base, Mawson Station, which was built just a year ahead of McMurdo in 1954. Phillip Law, the head of the Australian program, was the man who grilled seal brains on Charles Swithinbank's 1949 voyage in the Norsel. Law was known for his wild foods and did not tolerate Australians who turned up their noses at "such items as roast penguin breast or fried seal's liver or crumbed brains." Such men, insinuated Law, were sissies.

Law showed more empathy in an article titled "Nutrition in the Antarctic;" where he noted that digestive illnesses in his close-knit year-round crews were often rooted in social discord: "Indigestion, gall bladder trouble, appendicitis, neurotic stomach troubles -these are the principal ills of an antarctic party" at odds with each other. To build harmony, Australian bases adopted the "slushy roster;" a practice mandating egalitarianism among expedition members. Everyone on station took a turn as slushy, assisting the cook for a week with dishes and food prep, and replacing him on Sunday. "It was an equaliser" between the "ordinary fellows" and the "boffins" (scientists), said one cook. That such rules and roles were necessary showed that the era of Antarctic employment had begun.

While taking his turn as slushy, the doctor at Mawson Station in 1956 made a caramel sauce so thick and chewy that it sucked fillings out of teeth. They came out, he said, "like machine-gun bullets-you could hear them popping!" The next morning, the crew all lined up outside his door, suspicious he had cooked up a plan to get some dentistry practice. Dr. Stefan Csordas, the station medical officer at the Australian base on Macquarie Island, had to carve three new teeth for his cook's denture, but had no bone to work with. Until he looked to the Macquarie shoreline for inspiration, that is, where male elephant seals yawped at their harems. Csordas pared down larger seal teeth to human size, but without proper tools, it took him fourteen days. The cook liked the elephant-seal teeth so much that he kept them even after returning to Australia, hoping perhaps for his own harem.

When Jim Morgan, another Macquarie cook in the iGY era, tired of a man obsessed with finding hair in his food, he planned his revenge. According to one of their companions, the complainer poked at each meal and when he found a hair he held it up and said, "Look, here's another short and curly!" Morgan gathered up clippings from someone's haircut and stuffed them into one of the fruit pies he made for dessert one night. Everyone but the whiner was aware of what lay beneath his custard, and had a good laugh when hair fluffed out as he dug his spoon into the pie. There is no record of how the complainer responded, but "he was certainly cured of ever mentioning that he had found a hair in his tucker."

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