It’s better when you don’t have to sign up. Wild chance and how different we all are anyway brings main dishes and vegetables and noodles and breads and desserts. Someone has brought just moose ribs, cooked for hours, with only the magic of boiling water to separate and suspend the textures and flavors of muscle and sweet fat. In that pot, nearly empty already with half the line of people still eager to dip into it, vegetables would have been an unwelcome distraction. All the cartilage between the bones is cooked to delicious jelly. Don’t leave those ribs in the woods. Don’t waste: ribs are the best part.
How good it is to eat what other people bring: food I could not think of, food I don’t have any left of in the freezer, food from another culture. Agutuk (Ah-goo’-tuk) is usually there on the long table. It is never exactly the same, even from the same house and hands. The berries are different this year, or there is no seal oil, or it is a different white fish. Sometimes it’s made with what people here often call salmonberries. These are not the salmonberries from down around the coast but the quiet ones hard to find and farther inland, just one on each little stem. The Scandinavians call them moltebaer, and in plant books they are cloudberry.
Most often, agutuk is made with blueberries, my favorite, especially when they are mixed with white fish—cooked and pulled apart then smushed to a latticed texture on your tongue—and with seal oil if the cook has it, brought by some cousin nearer the coast.
Sometimes the cook uses Crisco instead of kidney fat or that lace from around a moose or caribou gut. Crisco, fluffy and white and odd, but an old friend in the villages—a canned and stable fat, a familiar, and if you think about it, no weirder than the white stuff on wedding cakes.
Always sugar though, that old treasure.
We call agutuk by its Inupiaq name, even though an Athabaskan grandmother brought it. She knows how to call it in her language, but this is easier and everyone who loves this place loves to say it. “Eskimo ice cream” is for people who might start looking for eskimaux. Ordinary and precious, agutuk is there in the middle of the table with the ribs and meatballs, hardly ever with the cakes and cookies at the end. It is not a dessert but a hope and a surprise so it defies categories. Someone is generous with her berries and her idea of who we all are. There’s a big spoonful in each paper cup, just enough cups to go around.