Since receiving sh*t from Louts Cowden and Sutton about the urbane nature of the Salmon recipe, compared to other less-than-fine dining fishing fare I have met in the wilds on various trips, I will indeed opine concerning a whale blubber recipe and one other…
Muktuk is the Inuit term for a whale blubber dish (we might call it a delicacy, they tend to call it “food”). While fishing with daughter Kait for Arctic Char on an inlet of the Arctic Ocean near Hadley Bay, far northern Victoria Island, Northwest Territories, Canada, I was able to sample some muktuk. I tried two muktuk “recipes”: Each was a 1 inch by 2 inch by 1/2 inch thick slab of whale blubber with skin. The first had been air dried. It was surprisingly crunchy (think fried pork rind) and had the taste of …jerky, nuts and maybe dried coconut. The second I consumed raw. It had been stored in oil a few weeks - which I can assure you is much better than the other Inuit custom of burying it to putrify before consuming (like caribou stomachs - don’t go there). This was chewier (think raw pork rind) like fatty sushi. Taste was not unlike cold calamari and butter.
Moose Nose was enjoyed (truly!) by myself and brother Louts Bert Minerley and Fred Lewis (and my cousin Rick, who drinks like a Trout Lout but has no patience for the fly rod). We were guests of a friend, Arthur Beck, at his ancestoral aboriginal campgrounds on the Taltson Bay of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. His mother, “Doris” is the daughter of Chief Snuff of the largest of the Yellowknife Tribes, the Tatsanottine, who signed the landmark 1900 Treaty with the Crown. Unlike many of the the top-shelf all-inclusive fishing resorts, once you’ve instructed the bush pilot how to find Beck’s remote camp, you land to find Doris at water’s edge busy butchering a fresh-killed Moose which, in myriad forms, will comprise most of your meal package for the week. The previous visit, I talked with Doris down at her impromptu smoke shack amidst the moose jerky and noticed the skewered snout smoking away. She informed me she was saving it to eat with her grandson, that she thought it was the “best part”. Two years later on my next trip, I humbly asked if our party might not sample a small taste of the treasured Moose Nose (this time stewing away on the woodburning stove). Getting Doris to relinquish a small taste was akin to getting DeBie to pour you a dram of his best home single malt - painfully begrudged in miniscule portions. The taste was … sublime: a bit like oxtail with the fat, gelatinous, slippery and earthy. When I inquired how Doris prepared Moose Nose, I was rewarded with the best-ever unintended pun in her answer, “It’s really tough, so you have to boil the snot out of it”. Really.
No pics of the food, but here’s one of Kait with her IGFA World Record Arctic Char for Junior Females.
Bob Sutton said:
June 21st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
The problem with the world is that everybody is at least one snot-free moose snout behind. Remind us sometime how the peyote ceremony went.
Seriously, Doc, when I stop laughing coffee through my nose, I’ll relate a bit about Cousin Jack’s fried alligator patties. Good eatin’ when you can get ‘em!