Alaska and the Northern Waters

Alaska lies at the northern and western edge of the American table, a coast of cold, fast water running from the Panhandle through the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutians to the Bering Sea and the Arctic shore. Its cooking was made first by the Native peoples of these coasts and rivers, among them the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of the southeast, the Alutiiq and Yup'ik of the south and west, and the Iñupiat of the north, whose foodways rested on salmon, halibut, sea mammals, berries and the animals of the tundra and forest. James Beard, writing of American cookery as a whole, places the fish of the Pacific north among the great natural larders of the country, and it is on that footing that the region belongs in this chapter.

The first fact of Alaskan cooking is salmon. Five Pacific species run its rivers: king or Chinook Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, sockeye O. nerka, coho O. kisutch, pink O. gorbuscha and chum O. keta. They differ in fat, flesh and season, and the cook who treats them alike wastes the differences. The king, rich and heavy, suits the plain methods Beard favours for fine fish: poaching gently in salted water or in court-bouillon, or baking whole, served with little beyond butter or a light sauce. The leaner sockeye and coho take the grill, the plank and the smoke without loss. Preservation made the fish a food for the whole year, and the Native nations of the coast and interior developed the methods that Alaskan kitchens still follow: drying split fish on racks in wind and air, and smoking it over alder or other local wood. Salting and smoking are techniques of necessity in a land of short summers, and they produced fish of concentrated flavour that kept through winter. The cook should understand them as a body of knowledge belonging to the peoples who devised it, not as a rustic afterthought. The cold waters offer more than salmon. Pacific halibut Hippoglossus stenolepis, a flatfish of great size and firm white flesh, answers to the simplest treatment: a brief poach, a quick sauté, or a bake with butter and crumbs, with care taken because its leanness forgives little overcooking. The king crab Paralithodes camtschaticus and the Dungeness crab Metacarcinus magister bring sweet, dense meat that wants only steaming and melted butter. Sablefish Anoplopoma fimbria, rich and soft, takes smoke particularly well. On land the table draws on game, among it moose Alces alces and caribou Rangifer tarandus, and on wild fruit: blueberries, cranberries and salmonberries gathered in the short season and cooked into preserves, puddings and sauces that set sharpness against the richness of fish and game. Gardens in the long light of summer yield vegetables of unusual size, though the growing season is brief. The lesson of the region is restraint before good material. Where the fish is fresh from cold water, the cook's task is to cook it correctly and stop; sauce, spice and ornament serve only to hide what the north gives plainly.

The flavour of Alaskan fish is that of cold water: clean, firm and sweet, with salmon fat carrying a deep, almost mineral richness that varies by species. Smoke, alder in particular, adds a resinous sweetness that sits well with the fat of king and sockeye. Berries and sharp preserves, and plain boiled potatoes, give the acid and starch against which the richness is read.