Hoosh, an Antarctic Recipe

Food from the Deep South

Preparation of hoosh, easy (assuming you already have pemmican).

Food technology, cookery, science

Hoosh has a good claim on being the most traditional recipe from Antarctica. It is one of the simplest of foods made from 3 ingredients, one of which you didn't even have to carry with you - snow or ice. In the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the explorers were powered along on a daily basis by hoosh.

Rather than being an actual recipe as such, hoosh is really just a word for a stew made from the limited ingredients you have at the time, in the early days of Antarctic exploration there weren't many varied ingredients and so everyone's hoosh tended to end up pretty much the same.

Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, Mawson and any other explorer you might have heard of from that time ate mainly hoosh when out travelling whether manhauling or by dogsled.

I spent time in Antarctica and on some occasions travelled away from base camping, at no point did I ever eat hoosh, by that time freeze dried meat had taken over from what we knew of as "meat bar" or pemmican. Rice, pasta or dehydrated potato had replaced the staple carbohydrate of sledging biscuits in cooked food. I was familiar with pemmican and sledging biscuits and had eaten them in "the field", particularly sledging biscuits, but not made into hoosh. Hoosh is something that people just don't eat much any more, even in Antarctica.

Time to make some hoosh