Life in Alaska sure has changed. In remote areas where gold-rush stampeders once chewed moldy hardtack under dripping canvas tents, affluent tourists now dine on gourmet fare at deluxe backcountry resorts.
"The Winterlake Lodge Cookbook" is a case in point. At Rainy Pass along the Iditarod Trail, 100 miles from the nearest road, the lodge is rustic Alaska at its most idyllic. Glamorous lodges stud the state's scenic wilderness, but author Kirsten Dixon has made hers stand out with her extraordinary cuisine.
Alaska's Bush is home to many fine cooks, but how many of them can boast a degree from Cordon Bleu in Paris, internships with the world's top chefs and write-ups in magazines such as "Bon Appetit" and "The Quarterly Review of Wines"? And not one, but two, fine cookbooks to their name?
"The Winterlake Lodge Cookbook" follows Dixon's successful "The Riversong Lodge Cookbook," issued in 1993. The format is the same: essays about life at a remote lodge and a wide array of recipes organized by season. The new book updates the format with all-new text and recipes and improves upon it with the addition of postcard-perfect illustrations by photographer Fred Hirschmann.
In both cookbooks, Dixon combines her classical chef training, eclectic tastes and regional specialties to create a mouth-watering Alaska haute cuisine.
"The food I serve at Winterlake Lodge is country food designed to make our guests feel content in our wilderness setting," she writes. "The simple, hearty fare goes with our lifestyle in backcountry Alaska."
Dixon offers inventive ways to serve Alaska's bounty, including salmon, halibut, reindeer sausage, sourdough, morel mushrooms, many types of berries and even fiddlehead ferns. She makes cookery easier for rural residents by emphasizing seasonal crops and produce that keeps well, such as root vegetables, apples and cabbage.
Many ingredients may be familiar, but she often gives her recipes an exotic touch. Ingredients such as goat cheese, duck breasts and Thai red curry may not be available at every village store. The book offers plenty of options when those are not available, plus an excuse to try new things from the city markets.
She jazzes up Alaska standards such as salmon burgers and suggests new variants on all-American favorites such as her "cherry double chocolate chip cookies" and "apple cider barbecue sauce." These are served alongside more unusual fare such as "savory mushroom pudding" and "duck sausage."
Dixon makes a point of offering a motivated cook ways to add a special touch to common menu components by creating homemade versions emphasizing quality ingredients and freshness. She explains how the lodge makes its own mayonnaise daily, usually with eggs fresh from the henhouse. She adds recipes for ketchup, salad dressing, chutneys, puff pastry and even special but easy-to-make salt and pepper blends.
The recipes span all three regular meals, plus hors d'oeuvres, snacks and beverages. Dixon even includes recipes for dog biscuits and bird seed. Arranging them by season rather than type is a bit unusual, but a thorough index makes finding specific dishes easy.
Sampling a random selection of these recipes filled our kitchen with great smells and elicited the comment "yummy!" from eager test subjects.
The recipes are great, but be aware that they are not diet fare. If your New Year's resolution was to cut calories, Dixon will undermine your resolve. This is hearty fare, lush with butter, cream, chocolate and meat. Only one recipe highlights tofu, and caloric or cholesterol counts are nowhere to be found.
The essays are secondary to the recipes, but contribute a sense of intimacy and personality to the book. Although their descriptions of the appealing aspects of modern Alaska's country living are not unique, they include charming anecdotes about lodge life and events, such as finding a black bear atop the refrigerator after a midnight raid. Particularly interesting are Dixon's descriptions of the hard work and personal rewards of keeping a remote, year-round inn.
"All sorts of people appear at our door in the wintertime," she writes. "We have met a man walking around the world, a man skiing across Alaska, a man walking around the world with his dog. We have met Asian mountain guides, Arctic explorers, mountain bikers, buffalo hunters, famous photographers, pilots and a Russian renaissance man. At my kitchen table, I've had people from Britain, Italy, Australia, Russia, Japan, Denmark and Sweden slide into a seat, look around, exhausted, and ask if we were serving food."
Such wilderness wanderers, serendipitously coming upon Winterlake, probably feel as if they have died and gone to heaven when Dixon answers that question with her legendary repasts.
"The Winterlake Lodge Cook-book" is a fine recipe collection. But it is something more. It flaunts the good life in Alaska at the dawn of the 21st century. Imagine enjoying the Alaska Range scenery, fishing wild rivers, viewing bears and swans, and then settling in for a dinner of goat cheese and herb mushroom tarts, tenderloin beef Stroganoff and chocolate cranberry pound cake. How sweet it is!
Thanks to Dixon and this attractive cookbook, Alaska cooks don't have to pay the cost of a week at an exclusive lodge to regale out-of-state visitors with Alaska's most delectable natural resources.
Shana Loshbaugh is a writer and former Peninsula Clarion reporter who now lives near Fairbanks.
