Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

1. The meat must be perfectly cleaned of every vestige of blubber or fat, no matter how slight.

2. Cut the flesh then into very thin steaks or slices and soak them from six to twelve hours in salt and water, a tablespoon of fine salt to a quart of fresh water. This whitens the meat and removes the residuum of dark venous blood that will otherwise give a slightly disagreeable taste, hardly definable, though existing.

3. Fry these steaks, or stew them à la mode, with a few thin slices of sweet “breakfast” bacon, seasoning with pepper and salt. A rich brown gravy follows the cooking of the meat. Serve hot, and it is, strictly judged, a very excellent meat for the daintiest feeder, and I hereby recommend it confidently as a safe venture for any newcomer to make.

The flesh of young sea-lions is still better than that of the fur-seal, while the natives say that the meat of the hair-seal (Phoca vitulina) is superior to both, being more juicy. Fur-seal meat is exceedingly dry; hence the necessity of putting bacon into the frying-pan or stew-pot with it. Sea-lion flesh is an improvement in this respect, and also that its fat, strange to say, is wholly clear, white, and inodorous, while the blubber of the “holluschickie” is sickening to the smell, and will, nine times out of ten, cause any civilized stomach to throw it up as quickly as it is swallowed. The natives, however, eat a great deal of it, simply because they are too lazy to clean their fur-seal cuts and not because they really relish it.

In this connection it may be well to add that the liver of both Callorhinus and Eumetopias is sweet and wholesome; or, in other words, it is as good as liver usually is in Fulton Market. The tongues are small, white, and fat. They are regularly cut out to some extent and salted in ordinary water-buckets for exportation to curious friends. They have but slight claim to gastronomic favor. The natives are, however, very partial to the liver; but though they like the tongues, yet they are too lazy to prepare them. A few of them, in obedience to pressing and prayerful appeals from relatives at Oonalashka, do exert themselves enough every season to undergo the extra labor of putting up several barrels of fresh salted seal-meat, which, being carried down to Illoolook by the company’s vessels, affords a delightful variation to the steady and monotonous codfish diet of those Aleutian Islanders.

Interior of Salt House, Village of St. Paul.

[Showing the method of receiving, selecting, kenching and salting “green” fur-seal skins.]

The final acts of curing and shipping pelts of fur-seals from the warehouses of the villages, rapidly follow work upon the killing-grounds. The skins are taken from the field to the salt-house, where they are laid out, after being again carefully examined, one upon another, “hair to fat,” like so many sheets of paper, with salt profusely spread upon the fleshy sides as they are piled up in the “kenches,” or bins. The salt-house is a large barn-like frame structure, so built as to afford one-third of its width in the centre, from end to end, clear and open as a passage-way: while on each side are rows of stanchions, with sliding planks, which are taken down and put up in the form of deep bins or boxes—“kenches,” the sealers call them. As the pile of skins is laid up from the bottom of an empty “kench” and salt thrown in on the outer edges, these planks are also put in place, so that the salt may be kept intact until that bin is filled as high up as a man can toss the skins. After lying two or three weeks in this style they become “pickled,” and they are suited then at any time to be taken up and rolled into bundles of two skins to the package, with the hairy side out, tightly corded, ready for shipment from the islands.

The average weight of a two-year-old skin is five and one-half pounds; of a three-year-old skin, seven pounds, and of a four-year-old skin, twelve pounds, so that, as the major portion of the catch is two or three year olds, these bundles of two skins each have a general weight of from twelve to fifteen pounds. In this form they go into the hold of the company’s steamer at St. Paul, and are counted out from it in San Francisco. Then they are either at once shipped to London by the Isthmus of Panama in the same shape, only packed up in large hogsheads of from twenty to forty bundles to the package, or expressed by railroad, via New York, to a similar destination.