[NAEP] [Fwd: Alaska Natives demonstrate tribal traditions in preparing salmon]

[Dawn Wiseman]

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Subject: 	Alaska Natives demonstrate tribal traditions in preparing salmon
Date: 	Fri, 21 Jul 2006 11:09:59 -0800
From: 	M. Pamela Bumsted, Ph.D. <hlthenvt at mochamail.com>
To: 	FYI Teachers:;, FYI Teachers:;
CC: 	FYI Teachers Quick Topic <qtopic+26-7sSUC5pTZDRNV at quicktopic.com>



One nice thing about this news report is the description of the differences 
between fish and how that relates to the differences in preparation. (That 
is, one can learn from this story.)
mpb

"Making the cut

Alaska Natives demonstrate tribal traditions in preparing salmon

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: July 19, 2006
Last Modified: July 19, 2006 at 02:38 AM

Fish camp is one of the centerpieces of subsistence culture in Alaska. 
Whether you live out on the Aleutians, in Southeast, Southcentral, on the 
Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta or in the Interior, when the salmon are running, you 
head for your spot on the coasts or waterways.

While pulling in this annual bounty may be something you do no matter where 
you're from, for Alaska's Natives, there's considerable variation in how 
you treat the fish once they're on the beach, a fact illustrated Saturday 
during a daylong quartet of salmon-cutting demos at the Yup'ik/Cup'ik, 
Unangan, Athabascan and Tlingit village sites behind the Alaska Native 
Heritage Center.

"See, once they get upriver where we catch them, they've burned off most of 
their ocean fat," said Quentin Simeon, the heritage center's cultural 
program coordinator. "The first time I had a salmon from downriver it was 
so oily, it was like needles in my mouth. I could only eat one or two, and 
I was done, where upriver, you'd have to pull me away from the table."

BUGS, FAT AND ROOFED RACKS

The goal at each of the village sites was the same: to prepare a 
medium-size fish or two for the drying rack and/or the smokehouse. The 
differences in the approaches each person and ethnic group used may be a 
matter of tribal and family tradition, but as Simeon implied, these 
differences are most deeply founded in the fish themselves.

At the Yup'ik/Cup'ik site, Agnes Shales and Juanita Johnson had a trio of 
smallish whole and ungutted reds to process. Heritage center staffer Ada 
Shavings -- also Yup'ik, from Quinhagak -- stood nearby, chiming in 
periodically.

"On the Lower Yukon, we always brag we have the biggest, baddest fish," 
Shavings said, forming her arms into a barrel hoop: "Our kings are this big 
around, straight out of the ocean, and our reds haven't burned off any of 
their ocean fat yet."

Shales, whose family has camps near Bethel and Akiak, wiped down their 
first fish with paper towels to cut the slime, while Johnson, who is from 
Emmonak, used a thin file to sharpen their ulu. The knife looked well-used, 
a dull, acid-etched gun color, the kind of metal that takes an edge like 
nobody's business.

"Once you use the uluaq for this," said Shavings, "you're never going to 
use any other knife."

The fish on the table had been caught a week and a half before at Kasilof, 
then frozen to keep them usable. It was a cold, rainy morning as the women 
began cutting, and the half-thawed flesh was mushy and recalcitrant, 
flaking when it ought to have been pliable. Still, Shales used her knife 
confidently on the fish before her, making her first cut behind its gill 
and pectoral fin.

"Way back, these knives used to be made of slate or obsidian," she said, 
quickly decapitating her fish. "My mom had a slate knife she used for 50 
years."

Shales handed the more prosaic steel knife over to Johnson, who made a long 
cut down the fish's back. A watching cruise ship visitor asked whether she 
ever gutted the fish first. She shook her head.

"That makes it a lot more work," she said. It was a point easy to take as 
she worked her knife through the fish's body with long, slow strokes. With 
the support of the internal organs and the other fillet, a fish cutter with 
a sensitive touch can use the curve of the ribs to lift most of the meat 
neatly off the bone.

As Johnson peeled the fillet back, a sack of roe gradually became visible 
beneath the glistening gray mesentery binding the bones and organs 
together. Johnson stopped her cut short of the tail and, with a single 
quick gesture, stripped the guts out and separated the roe, holding the 
pale gold egg mass for the tour group to see.

Johnson said the Yup'ik sometimes eat the roe raw but more often cook it in 
chowders -- a universal practice among Natives.

Johnson flipped her fish and repeated the filleting process on the other 
side, leaving the slab fillets joined at the tail to facilitate draping 
over drying or smoking racks. In the final step, she scored the flesh, 
using vertical cuts made on the bias across the grain. When the fillets are 
hung, these cuts allow the flesh to lean away from the skin like the keys 
of a piano, giving the air more access, speeding the drying process.

"We salt them pretty good before we hang them up to keep the bugs away," 
Johnson said. It's important to avoid iodine-infused salt since the iodine 
leaves dark spots on the fish. During the week or two after the fish are 
hung, someone will check them periodically to be sure the sections of flesh 
aren't adhering to each other, which would allow rot to get a foothold. 
Yup'ik/Cup'ik fish racks are generally roofed: the fish are so fat when 
they're taken that the oil runs off the fillets in rivulets, and any rain 
that got to them would only lengthen the drying process. Farther up the 
rivers, the racks generally aren't roofed because the fish are leaner and 
require less drying time.

Johnson stood the fish's removed head on its cut side so the sockeye seemed 
to be staring at the sky. She brought her uluaq down on the tip of its 
snout, pushing the blade through, neatly halving the head in a single 
stroke. This done, she pulled out the gills and pushed them to the side. 
With the small packet of the guts, this was only part of the fish she 
discarded. Heads backbones and tails are usually thrown into a pot for soup 
according to a simple recipe: half a head per person, onions, potatoes or 
rice and greens, salt and pepper to taste.

Shales says her people will also sometimes bury the fish heads and roe to 
allow them to ferment. She makes a wry mouth.

"Stinky heads, we call them," she said. "It's an acquired taste."

Shavings says the Yup'iks of the Lower Yukon will accompany their fish with 
willow leaves -- harvested when they're tender and young -- put up in seal oil.

NO MUDDY TASTE

At the Unangan village site, Sally Swetzof, a short woman with short hair 
and glasses and wearing an "Atka Dancers" fleece vest, talked about the 
differences between the river fish and the ocean fish her people take.

"To someone from our area, those Yukon fish taste muddy," she said. The 
camps where the Unangax mostly process their fish are swept by ocean winds, 
so the catch doesn't need as much protection from the clouds of bugs that 
plague the mainland. The Unangax have a number of approaches to salmon 
eggs: baking the reds' roe along with the fish or putting it into soups or 
frying it along with the milt from male fish, and making caviar from the 
eggs of the dogs and pinks, mixing them with salt, pepper and onion and 
eating them on fresh bread.

Swetzof gutted her fish immediately after they were decapitated but 
otherwise filleted them much as the Yup'ik women had. The Unangax sometimes 
salt their salmon before they hang them to dry but more often rely on brief 
brining to prepare them for this stage in the process. They then hang the 
fillets briefly before moving them to the smokehouse.

"We didn't use salt until after the Russians came," Swetzof said. "In the 
old days, we just dried and smoked."

Like the other Native groups, the Unangax won't eat salmon gills, though, 
Swetzof said, they're fond of halibut gills and cheeks. Swetzof is also 
something of a connoisseur of the salmon head. After she decapitated each 
of her fish -- using a straight fillet knife -- she immediately prepared 
the head, first cutting off the lower jaw, then neatly slicing off the 
upper jaw and the teeth, then halving the heads and stripping out the gills.

"We eat the heads boiled, with seal oil," she said, though she likes them 
best baked. She puts them in at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes, just 
seasoning them with salt and pepper. "We eat the eye and the brains," 
Swetzof said, along with the packet of savory, boneless meat at the back of 
the head. "You can fry the heads or barbecue them too, and we sometimes eat 
them raw. It's just a very nice flavor, all of it." Swetzof's favorite part 
is the cartilage above and between the eyes.

When the heads are put in the soup pot, Swetzof said, "we use wild parsley 
and salmon heads or halibut heads, along with the backbones if they're 
reds," she said. The Unangax broil or bake the kings' backbones, and pick 
the flesh off them, serving them with wild rice and the roots of the 
chocolate or Kamchatka lily, which are stored in seal oil, once they're cooked.

"After a while, if you eat your fish without (lily roots), it doesn't feel 
right," she said.

HINGED HEADS AND FRIED HEARTS

Upriver, the Athabascans add a few of their own variations in processing 
the leaner salmon. At the Athabascan village site, Janet Afcan whetted her 
ulu with quick strokes on a wet stone she'd picked up right beside the 
shelter. Afcan grew up cutting fish during the runs in Grayling, where they 
took advantage of the long light, working until 1, 2 or 3 a.m.

Afcan lopped off her first salmon's head and gutted it immediately, then 
used a slab cut and vertical scoring to make her fillets. Her innovation, 
once this was done, was to hold the tail and pull the skin near the top of 
the fillet, stretching the fillet and opening it beautifully for hanging. 
She moved then to the head, which among her people is traditionally hung to 
dry and smoke along with the rest of the fish. To facilitate this, she cut 
from beneath and just behind the point of the jaw, splitting the head but 
leaving a hinge of tissue at the top of the lower jaw and the tip of the 
snout, opening it to allow her strip out the gills. Cut this way, she said, 
the heads -- which are usually boiled later, for stock -- are easy to hang 
over the rack.

Athabascans often cut their kings and silvers in strips, and to demonstrate 
the technique, Afcan quickly filleted a second red, then cut each fillet, 
nose to tail, in inch-wide segments. These she then halved lengthwise, 
leaving a bit of skin and flesh connecting pairs of strips at the top of 
her cuts, making them easy to hang. Alternatively, she said, if the strips 
were going to be canned, she would have cut them to a length that could 
simply be dropped into a jar, then placed in a pressure cooker. The oil in 
the pieces usually makes any other preparation unnecessary, she said.

Since the salmon the Athabascans haul in are comparatively lean, Afcan 
said, they don't usually salt their fish directly, instead opting for brief 
brining and a few days of hanging before the trip to the smokehouse. Partly 
dried or half-dried salmon are generally prepared by boiling or baking, 
with no seal oil involved in any part of the process.

"I wasn't raised eating seal oil," she says. "My mom ate it sometimes, 
because her dad traded with the Eskimos, but I never developed a taste for 
it." Afcan did, however, grow up eating the salmon hearts, which her mother 
fried for her family. "We always really liked those," she said.

THE TASTE OF THE WOOD

Another important variation in the process of preparing a winter's worth of 
fish has always been the formula for smoke. Afcan said the Athabascans 
always began with willow branches to get a hot, smoky fire, then moved to 
wet cottonwood to generate a low, steady heat and a lot of smoke and 
finishing with alder for flavor. Yup'iks and Cup'iks usually rely on 
driftwood for smoking, so there's a bit less science involved. There's a 
lot more variation among the Unangax and Tlingits of Southeast because 
alder can have a vastly different character, depending on where it's 
harvested. Alder from one place can give the fish a bitter taste, while 
wood harvested in another place might not impart any off-notes at all.

At the Tlingit site, Elaine Etukeok, who acquired her Inupiat last name in 
marriage, used a slime knife to open the silver she had on her table. She 
was there to demonstrate the characteristic Tlingit "newspaper" cut.

She began preparing her gutted and headless silver by snipping off its fins 
with a pair of kitchen shears. Etukeok emphasized that when Tlingits get 
their fish from the river, they always clean them with the head pointed 
upstream to make sure the salmon's spirit continues on its journey, headed 
the right way. The snipped-off fins are returned immediately to the water 
as a gesture of respect.

Etukeok reversed the usual process of fillet-cutting, starting at the belly 
and cutting toward the dorsal fin. Once she reached the back she left the 
skin mostly intact, stripping out the backbone, cutting off the tail and 
folding the fish open like two sides of a book.

"We brine it off, then put it straight into the smokehouse," said Etukeok. 
"We hang it low, where there's air movement but not a lot of smoke, and 
after about four days, once the flesh has firmed up a little, we take it 
out and make another filleting cut.

This time, she said, the cut goes from the still-connected dorsal part in 
the middle to the outside, essentially making a fillet of the fillet and 
leaving it linked at the belly, then folding it open like the leaves of a 
newspaper. The fillet returns to the smokehouse for another four days, hung 
on a higher, smokier rack, and after a few more days of drying, and the 
cutting and folding process is repeated, then the fillet is returned to the 
smokehouse again, higher this time, for another four days. Depending on the 
size of the fish, the process can be repeated until two or three leaves 
have been folded out from the original fillets. Once smoking is completed, 
the fish is "refolded," ready for storage.

Etukeok shared a few precious pieces of smoked fillet she brought along to 
serve as a visual aid. It was hard to argue with such succulent success.

Daily News reporter Mark Baechtel can be reached at 257-4323 or 
mbaechtel at adn.com."
http://www.adn.com/life/native_culture/story/7982813p-7876095c.html