4 meals in this book
“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.”
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.
Recipe from The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896.
“As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have, and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard, food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.”
First boil the potatoes, and then put a little butter, a chopped onion, half a pint of milk, or water, pepper and salt to season; boil this for ten minutes, then add the potatoes, previously cooked; boil all together for ten minutes, and dish them up.
Recipe from A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes of 1852.
“The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two of the party wash dishes and clean up, the third feeds the dogs. Their pot of food has been cooling for an hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold and a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the coldest weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished out with a paddle into the individual pans and the dogs make short work of it. There are some who feed straight fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality, the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run it is decidedly economical to cook for the dogs--not so much from the standpoint of direct cost as from that of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred pounds of fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred and fifty pounds of fish alone. There is little doubt, too, that in the long run the dogs do better on cooked food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food. The Japs took Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow answers a demand of the climate and is increased as the weather grows colder. Man and dog alike require quantities of fat food in this climate; it is astonishing how much bacon and butter one can eat. When the dogs have eaten, and each one has made the rounds of all the other pans to be sure nothing is left, they retire to their respective nests of spruce bough and curl themselves up with many turnings round and much rearranging of the litter. Feet and nose are neatly tucked in, the tail is adjusted carefully over all, the hair on the body stands straight up, and the dogs have gone to bed and do not like to be disturbed again.”
Pick the rice and sift it, and when the liquor boils, put it in and scum it, boil it not too much, then drain it, butter it, and serve it on fine carved sippets, and scraping sugar only, or sugar and cinamon. Butter wheat, and French barley, as you do rice, but hull your wheat and barley, wet the wheat and beat it in a sack with a wash-beetle, fan it, and being clean hulled, boil it all night on a soft fire very tender.
Recipe from The accomplisht cook of 1660.
“There had not been so much snowfall in this section, but the weather began to be very severe. The thermometer fell to -45 deg. and -50 deg. and -55 deg. on three successive nights, and all day long rose not above -20 deg., with a keen wind. The cost of transporting supplies to the road-houses on this trail justified the high prices charged--one dollar and a half for a poor meal of rabbits and beans and bacon, or ptarmigan and beans and bacon, and one dollar for a lunch of coffee, bread and butter, and dried fruit. But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at most of these places--'twas mere shiftlessness. There is not often much middle ground in Alaskan road-houses; they are either very good in their way or very bad; either kept by professional victuallers who take pride in them or by idle incompetents who make an easy living out of the necessities of travellers. One wishes that some of the old-time travellers who used to wax so eloquently indignant over the inns in the Pyrenees could make a winter journey in the interior of Alaska.”
fresh homemade bread; butter the cut end of the loaf thinly, then hold it against the side with the left hand and arm, and with a sharp, thin knife, cut an even slice not more than an eighth of an inch thick; a little practice, and a steady grasp of bread and knife, will enable any one to produce regular whole slices; fold each one double, with the butter inside; and cut as many as you require; serve them on a clean napkin, and send them to the table with any other of the above relishes. 32.
Recipe from The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economica of 1877.
Sources: Every passage above is quoted verbatim from Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipes come from cookbooks of the period, also free in full. All are in the public domain in the United States. The binding is ours — forest cloth, boar stamp.