“Perhaps it would be putting it better to say that a team of seven dogs can haul their own and their driver's food and the camp equipment, all, of course, carefully reduced to a minimum, for a month. Dog food of one sort or another can be bought at any place where anything whatever is sold. Almost any Indian village will furnish dried fish, and it is often possible, with no other weapon than a .22 rifle, to feed dogs largely on the country through which they pass. The writer's team has had many a meal of ptarmigan, rabbits, quail, and spruce hen, while to enumerate other articles, on which at times and in stress for proper food, his dogs have sustained life and strength for travel, would be to enumerate all the common human comestibles. Aside from the usual ration of fish, tallow, and rice boiled together, corn-meal, beans, flour, oatmeal, sago (though that is poor stuff), tapioca, canned meats of all kinds, canned salmon, even canned kippered herring from Scotland, seal oil, seal and whale flesh, ham and bacon, horse flesh, moose and caribou and mountain-sheep flesh, canned "Boston brown bread," canned butter, canned milk, dried apples, sugar, cheese, crackers of all kinds, and a score of other matters have at times entered into their food. Dogs have been "tided over" tight places for days and days on horse oats boiled with tallow candles, working the while. Anything that a man can eat, and much that even a starving man would scarcely eat, will make food for dogs. At the last and worst, dog can be fed to dog and even to man. When a dog team reaches a mining camp where supplies of all sorts are scarce--and that is not an uncommon experience--it is sometimes an exceedingly expensive matter to feed it; but something can always be found that will serve to keep it going until the return to a better-stocked region. In the winter of 1910-11, when there was such scarcity in the Iditarod, it cost the writer thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents to feed seven dogs for a week, and he has more than once been at almost a similar charge in the Koyukuk. But in all his travels he has never yet been unable to procure some sort of food for his dogs. At times they have been fed for days on rabbits straight; at times on ptarmigan straight.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Cover bottom of a shallow baking-dish with apple sauce. Cut stale bread in one-third inch slices, spread with softened butter, remove crusts, and cut in triangular-shaped pieces; then arrange closely together over apple. Sprinkle generously with sugar, to which is added a few drops vanilla. Bake in a moderate oven and serve with cream.
Sources: The passage is from Hudson Stuck, Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled: A Narrative of Winter Travel in In, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Farmer, The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — burgundy cloth, cheese stamp.