Jason C. Anthony's Blog, page 2
November 30, 2012
A new book about Antarctic cuisine satisfies foodies and historians alike (Review)
A new book about Antarctic cuisine satisfies foodies and historians alike (Jeff Inglis/Portland Phoenix) 
As you nurse your post-Thanksgiving food coma back to normality, spare a thought for the men and women in Antarctica this holiday season. They’re warm, well-fed, and happy (if really far from family) — but it wasn’t always this way.
Maine author Jason Anthony explains in Hoosh (named for a half-fat, half-meat staple of Heroic Age expeditions) that “Antarctic culinary history is a mere century of stories of isolated, insulated people eating either prepackaged expedition food or butchered sealife.” He describes “Antarctica’s sad state of culinary affairs” as a set of circumstances where “Cold, isolation, and a lack of worldly alternatives have conspired to make Antarctica’s captive inhabitants desperate for generally lousy food.”
That wry sense of humor pervades the book, based in part on his eight summers in Antarctica. It begins with the mystical appearance of several loaves of fresh sourdough bread (a delicacy, I can attest from my own time on the Ice, that is of incalculable value) as Anthony prepares for a deep field expedition, with him and one other person (as it happened, a direct descendant of an early Antarctic expeditioner) slated to spend 90 to 100 days alone on a glacier, clearing and maintaining an emergency landing strip in case of bad weather at the main US base, McMurdo Station.
November 17, 2012
Exploring the cuisine of the deep South (Interview)
“Soup to Nuts: Exploring the cuisine of the deep South” (Portland Press Herald/Meredith Goad)
BRISTOL – Jason Anthony does not consider himself a foodie — you know, the kind of person who by definition loves good food, can identify every last ingredient in a dish and where it came from, and would try just about anything in the name of gastronomic braggadocio.
And yet, there is one thing he knows for sure.
“I would eat a penguin,” Anthony answered, without missing a beat, when I asked him if he would ever like to try some of the food the early Antarctic explorers had to eat to survive.
Hoosh Blurbs and Reviews
“Historical writing, well presented, is supposed to be delicious, but in this brilliant, insightful book you will find many essential nutrients that tend to be missing from standard treatments of Antarctic exploration. This is a delightfully balanced reflection on human involvement in the Last Place on Earth, from earliest times to the modern day, presented with much gusto and the added sauce of first-hand experience.”
- Ross MacPhee (curator, American Museum of Natural History, and author of Race to The End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole
“Some years ago a friend who worked on a nature programme told me a tale of desperate penguin-killing (concluding with an ice pick) that left me with a fascination of how to feed yourself in the Antarctic. Jason Anthony’s book has rekindled my appetite for Antarctic gastronomic thoughts.”
- Fergus Henderson, Chef and Co-Owner of St. JOHN, London, and author of The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
“I went to sleep thinking of Antarctica, and eagerly anticipated returning to the ice over my morning coffee. Anthony is an exemplary translator, imparting a collection of otherworldly experiences to the rest of us in precise and deft, but no less astonishing, language and narrative technique. The concluding recipes, like so much of the book, carefully fuse the hilarious and the harrowing. In Hoosh, Anthony makes legends human and humans legendary, and stresses that the mundane, if airlifted to the ends of the world, is nothing short of heroic.”
- Matthew Frank, author of Barolo
“Anthony enlivens historical facts with a knack for choice anecdotes… A singular, engrossing take on a region that until now has been mostly documented from a scientific angle or romanticized by adventurers.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“A complete culinary collection… will need this book on its shelves, but don’t expect a lot of call for its recipes.”
- Booklist
