The Whale and the Cupcake

Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska

Julia O'Malley

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295746753
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte culinaria

From fish and fiddleheads to salmonberries and Spam, Alaskan cuisine spans the two extremes of locally abundant wild foods and shelf-stable ingredients produced thousands of miles away. As immigration shapes Anchorage into one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country, Alaska's changing food culture continues to reflect the tension between self-reliance and longing for distant places or faraway homes. Alaska Native communities express their cultural resilience in gathering, processing, and sharing wild food; these seasonal food practices resonate with all Alaskans who come together to fish and stock their refrigerators in preparation for the long winter. In warm home kitchens and remote cafés, Alaskan food brings people together, creating community and excitement in canning salmon, slicing muktuk, and savoring fresh berry pies. This collection features interviews, photographs, and recipes by James Beard Award–winning journalist and third-generation Alaskan Julia O'Malley. Touching on issues of subsistence, climate change, cultural mixing and remixing, innovation, interdependence, and community, The Whale and the Cupcake reveals how Alaskans connect with the land and each other through food.

Chapter 1

In Alaska’s Far-Flung Villages, Happiness Is a Cake Mix

In a modest boardinghouse on an Alaskan island just thirty miles across the sea from Russia, a handwritten order form hangs on the refrigerator. It has promotional photos of cakes a few women in the village have made that they can make for you: rectangles of yellow cake and devil’s food cake enrobed in buttercream, with local nicknames piped out in pink: “Happy Birthday Bop-Bop” one reads. Another says “Happy Birthday Siti-Girl.”

Traveling out here, where huge bones from bowhead whales litter the beach, I took a ninety-minute jet ride north from Anchorage and another hour by small plane over the Bering Sea. In this wild part of America, accessible only by water or air, there may not be plumbing or potable water, the local store may not carry perishables, and people may have to rely on caribou or salmon or bearded seal meat to stay fed. But no matter where you go in remote Alaska, you will always find a cake-mix cake.

Elsewhere, the American appetite for packaged baking mixes is waning, according to the market research firm Mintel, as consumers move away from packaged foods with artificial ingredients and buy more from in-store bakeries and specialty pastry shops. Yet in the small, mostly indigenous communities that dot rural Alaska, the box cake is a stalwart staple, the star of every community dessert table and a potent fund-raising tool.

At her home in Tanana, Cynthia Erickson and some young volunteers decorate a lemon-blueberry cake from a mix that she jazzes up.

“Cake mixes are the center of our little universe,” said Cynthia Erickson, who owns the only grocery store in Tanana, an Athabascan village of three hundred on the Yukon River in central Alaska. “I have four damn shelves full.”

In the wintertime, when Iditarod sled-dog mushers and Iron Dog snow machine racers pass through Tanana, everybody asks for Cynthia Erickson’s rum cake. It’s her mother’s recipe, from the Athabascan village of Ruby, 120 miles downriver, made with yellow cake mix, vanilla instant pudding, and a half-cup of Bacardi.

Eating in rural Alaska is all about managing the expense and scarcity of store-bought food while trying to take advantage of seasonally abundant wild foods. Cash economies are weak, utilities and fuel are expensive, and many families live below the federal poverty line. To offset the cost of living, Alaska Natives here rely on traditional practices of hunting, fishing, and gathering. In a good year, they fill freezers with moose, berries, caribou, and salmon or marine mammals, depending on where they live. In a bad year, they have to buy more from the store.

The offerings in village stores often resemble those in the mini-marts or bodegas of America’s urban food deserts, at two and three times the price. Food journeys in via jet, small plane, and barge. But milk and eggs spoil fast, and produce gets roughed up. Among the Hostess doughnuts, Spam, and soda, the cake mix is one of the few items on shelves everywhere that requires actual cooking. As a result, tricking out mixes has become a cottage industry, and many villages have a “cake lady” with her signature twist. Some bake as a hobby, while others do a brisk business selling cakes in places where getting to a bakery requires a plane ticket.

A sheet cake is decorated with berries to celebrate a teenager’s birthday in the village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island.

In the Far North, cake ladies top cakes with fondant photo prints of Inupiat whaling crews and serve them with mikigaq, barrel-fermented whale meat. On the western coast, mixes may be prepared with seagull eggs. In the Interior, pineapple upside-down cake is eaten with a salad made of lard, sugar, berries, and whitefish.

On a typical midsummer day in Tanana, people were hauling king salmon from their Yukon River fish wheels—a traditional wood device moored to the river shore that turns with the current and captures fish as they make their way upstream to spawn—then cutting and hanging up the salmon to smoke on the beach. Cynthia Erickson, who frequently bakes for Saint Aloysius Roman Catholic Church, was mopping up a load of thawing fresh produce that had come in frozen, a common shipping hiccup for rural grocers. What to do with a load of icy bananas? Use them in a cake mix!

Cynthia Erickson picks up supplies from the plane at the airport in Tanana. Eating in rural Alaska is all about managing the expense and scarcity of store-bought food while trying to take advantage of seasonally abundant wild foods.

“Sometimes you don’t have a lot of the stuff to make a regular cake,” Cynthia Erickson said. “Maybe you don’t have butter or you don’t have milk.” But with one substitution or another, you can always make a mix cake. Mayonnaise can take the place of an egg. Some recipes call for nothing but a mix and a bottle of Sprite. The Whole Foods crowd may judge it, she said, but where she lives it makes sense.

In Unalakleet, 300 miles west of Tanana on Norton Sound, Donna Erickson (no relation to Cynthia) is a noted cake lady. Her most famous creation was created in a rush to get to a community potluck. She made a white cake mix and poured it into a sheet pan because she knew it would bake quickly. After it was baked, she said, “I mixed orange Jell-O with two cups of bright orange salmonberries. I poured it on top of that cake and I threw it in the fridge. People were just like, ‘Wow, can you make that again for me?’ ”

Fund-raisers known as cakewalks—a variation on musical chairs—are held to send whole basketball teams to the Lower 48, support people through chemotherapy, or pay for coffins. Rural Alaska has some of the highest rates of accidental death and suicide in the country. When there is tragedy in Unalakleet, bakers bring cakes to the school multipurpose room, put them on a big table, and each is given a number. Popular flavors include salmonberry, tundra blueberry, and low-bush cranberry.

Then the cakewalk begins: Each person buys a ticket, and then they all circle the table while music plays. When the music stops, a number is drawn out of an old coffee can. The person standing by the corresponding cake wins that one and the money goes to the fund-raising. Then the music starts again, and the cakewalk continues until all the cakes are gone. “It’s a festive environment even though it’s [sometimes] a sad time,” said Donna Erickson. “You should see the cakes; they are so beautiful. Village bakers are brilliant.”

In America’s northernmost town, Utqiagvik (formerly called Barrow), the baker Mary Patkotak is brilliant at gaming cake economics. She uses Betty Crocker Triple Chocolate Fudge Cake Mix for her famous cherry-chocolate cake. In the village store, it costs four dollars and sixty-nine cents a box. On Amazon, where Ms. Patkotak orders it, it’s one dollar and twenty-nine cents. Alaska’s many weather delays mean the mix never shows up on time, but she doesn’t care because the delay qualifies her for partial refunds on her annual Amazon Prime membership.

She bakes when she knows a payday is coming around, then freezes the cakes. Out-of-town customers order cakes or cupcakes from her Facebook page, and she retrieves them from the freezer and tucks them into the cargo hold of a small plane. “We don’t have any bakeries. We have very few restaurants,” she said. “People really crave the fresh cake.”

Last winter, Cynthia Erickson hauled an old propane stove by snowmobile to her summer hunting camp, fifty miles northwest of Tanana on the Tozitna River. It fell apart on the way, but her husband wired it back together. She fired it up and slid in a chocolate cake.

It’s a simple thing, making a cake from a box, she said, but when you’re doing it in remote Alaska, you feel rich. “I was, like, the camp queen!” she said. “Middle of nowhere, eating cake.”

DULCE DE LECHE POPPY SEED CAKE

MAKES 1 BUNDT CAKE

When I was growing up in the 1980s in Alaska, everybody’s mother had a cake-mix cake recipe. Maybe it was the one that subs a 7-Up for all the ingredients, or the classic rum cake, where you put chopped nuts on the bottom and soak it with a glaze made of butter and Bacardi. Or the (giggle) Robert Redford cake, a.k.a. the “Better than Sex” cake, made with chocolate cake-mix cake soaked in condensed milk and topped with Cool Whip and candy bars. You can find these recipes in just about every Alaska community cookbook from mid-twentieth century on.

The one in my family line is simple: a never-fail poppy seed Bundt cake made famous in our immediate circles by my Aunt Alicia, who also grew up in Anchorage. Her recipe card lists yellow cake mix, butterscotch pudding mix, and extra eggs. Over the years, I’ve made it many, many times and it never tasted quite like hers. I came to believe it might have something to do with the fact that I can only find instant, artificially flavored butterscotch pudding mix in the store in Anchorage. So I set about looking for a substitute.

Cake-mix cakes are still relied on by Alaska cooks because, aside from the fact that they are very fast to put together, they call for easy-to-find, low-cost, mostly shelf-stable ingredients. Eggs are the only perishable thing (and, if you use a soda, you can get around that). You could make a pastry cream using brown sugar and it would be butterscotch pudding, but I wanted my re-tooled recipe to be true to the shelf-stable ingredient rule. That’s how I settled on dulce de leche, a Mexican milk caramel. It comes in a small can and is widely available in the canned milk or Hispanic foods section of grocery stores. It tastes just right.

2 tablespoons melted butter or shortening, for the pan

2 tablespoons almond flour or all-purpose flour, for the pan

4 eggs

⅓ cup dulce de leche

1 cup water

½ cup canola oil

1 box yellow cake mix

⅓ cup poppy seeds

2 to 3 tablespoons powdered sugar, for dusting

Some Bundt cake tips: Don’t grease the pan with cooking spray. Use melted shortening or butter and brush it on with a pastry brush, then immediately flour the pan. (If you let the pan sit with the grease on it, it may pool in the bottom.) Almond flour, for flouring the pan, is nice because it is dark and so the baked Bundt cake looks perfect when you remove it from the pan. All-purpose flour tends to collect in white blobs on the surface of the baked cake. A general cake mix tip: Avoid using a standing mixer; it’s almost impossible not to overbeat the mix. Instead, use a hand mixer or wooden spoon. Also, I’ve tried just about all the yellow box cake mixes out there, and it is my opinion that Betty Crocker Super Moist Yellow Cake Mix is by far the best for this recipe. Duncan Hines’s yellow cake mix is a distant second. And, if you are making a gluten-free version of this cake, use King Arthur Yellow Cake Mix, which is great. Generally, canned dulce de leche is gluten free, but check the label.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Brush the Bundt pan with melted butter, and then flour the pan with almond flour.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs and the dulce de leche until smooth, using a hand-held electric mixer or wooden spoon. Add the water, oil, cake mix, and poppy seeds, and mix until the batter is well combined and not lumpy. Don’t overmix.

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