The Home Life of the Stone Age Eskimo, Part Three
The Ancient Hebrews knew what they were talking about when they praised “fat things full of marrow” because a skinny beast did not have much. When a marrow-bearing animal gets so thin that the eyes begin to recede, because of the gradual disappearance of the fat behind the eye, practically all fat has disappeared from the marrow; so that, instead of the expected firm stick of white, you find when you crack the raw marrowbone, a liquid of blood color. Boiled or roasted bones develop the consistency and somewhat the taste of the white of a hard boiled egg.
Hunting man was a connoisseur of fats, and has a definite sequence of preferences in the different fats according to their origination in different parts of the body. The marrows range from the hip and shoulder joints down and the further the better. As we move lower on the leg the marrow is softer and full of flavor. One can tell with the tongue even in the dark which bone the marrow came from. The marrow is the greatest delicacy and the hunting man prefers the boiled moose nose or the boiled liver of the loche, a fresh water fish. These are improved by cooking, but the cooking of marrow spoils good food and turns the delicacy into an ordinary food. The caribou fats are better cooked than raw. The best fats in order are behind the eye, the kidney fat, the fat on the brisket, the fat of ribs mixed with the lean and the back fat. Brisket, my personal favorite! The Eskimos, like the Homeric Greeks, prefer the flesh of older animals to that of calves, yearlings and two-year olds. The fattier animals were always preferred. The caribou had a cycle of fattening corresponding to the age and sex. The winter which was kindest to the Eskimo, also produced the best caribou as well.
The fat of the blubber animals varies a little in quality by age and sex. The fat of the younger is preferred which is not the case with the marrow-bearing animals. In seals, there might be a preference for the fat on the flipper. Seals have no fatty marrow on their bones. The blubber animals have fat in only the layer that separates the skin from the red flesh underneath. There is no streak of fat and streak of lean in their rib meat. There is also no fat mixed with the lean to the naked eye or palate. They also do not have kidney or intestinal fat. The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate in the hunting way of life for they never suffer from fat hunger. This trouble is worse for the forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and they develop rabbit starvation. This leads to headache, lassitude, a vague discomfort, and diarrhea. No matter how much they eat they will feel unsatisfied. Deaths from rabbit starvation are rare because everyone knows the situation and preventive steps are naturally taken. It is practically impossible for a hunter of seals and whales to run short on fat. The sealers use six pounds of lean and one pound of fat by ratio. If one secures enough seal to supply the needed lean, then they automatically have three times the amount of fat needed for food. This means that after he has enough for his family and dog team, he has enough to burn in his lamps for light, cooking, and heating his home.
Caribou hunters can kill in August and September all the animals they need and if they can preserve this meat to last through the year, they would have enough fat to eat with their lean but even then not enough left over for fuel. In practice they burn a little tallow for lighting their homes in winter and in summer they have the midnight sun. But with the greatest economy of lighting, they do not have enough fat to go with their lean since they seldom are able to kill enough bulls and fat cows to last more than two-thirds of the winter. Because of this, they go to the sea coast each year to hunt blubber or they purchase bags of blubber from the coast dwellers
Stefansson says that if we compare the whole diet of a strictly carnivorous Eskimo to our diet, we would find that they eat on average a higher percentage of raw or rare meat than we do. However, if we compare our whole diet with theirs, remembering that our milk and cream are sometimes raw, our fruit and vegetables frequently raw, our eggs usually soft-cooked, while Eskimos invariably cook theirs hard, and that our roasts are more rare than theirs (although their boiled meat is more rare than ours) – if we consider the whole picture, we doubtless use a far higher percentage of uncooked food than the pre-white Eskimo.
The Eskimos cooked whenever convenient (which must be hard for the raw-Paleo folks to believe). If they ate a breakfast of raw food it was either because the group did not want to waste time cooking or because they awoke with too keen an appetite because pre-white cooking took two or three hours. The same could be true for lunch. At dinner, in the Eskimo way of life, there was ample leisure and this meal was seldom eaten raw. The fourth meal was just before going to bed and it normally consisted of cold, boiled food left over from dinner.
Some Eskimos ate a good deal of dried food and others never taste it for years or decades. There are many pronounced variations of diet in other ways. Some groups every had any appreciable amount of food except fish while others seldom taste fish, living chiefly off the flesh of animals.
This is why I say you must be wary of so-called “nutrition experts” who want to claim that the Inuit ate (fill in the blank). Because for every group that did, there were many others who did not and had the same great health.
Frying was not practiced before Europeans came although frying is a rare form of cooking among other primitives all over. Roasting was occasional and usually be Eskimos who lived in forested districts. Even in the woods, boiling is the normal method while on the sea coasts or at sea, it is the only form.
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on February 20, 2009 at 12:43 am
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[...] Astrochicks added an interesting post today on The Home Life of the Stone Age Eskimo, Part ThreeHere’s a small readingThe Ancient Hebrews knew what they were talking about when they praised quot;fat things full of marrowquot; because a skinny beast did not have much. [...]
on February 20, 2009 at 12:47 am
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[...] Quick Weight Loss Tips | Fast Weight Loss Diets added an interesting post on The Home Life of the Stone Age Eskimo, Part ThreeHere’s a small excerptThe Ancient Hebrews knew what they were talking about when they praised quot;fat things full of marrowquot; because a skinny beast did not have much. [...]
on February 20, 2009 at 1:11 am
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[...] Hey, y’all! added an interesting post today on The Home Life of the Stone Age Eskimo, Part ThreeHere’s a small readingThe Ancient Hebrews knew what they were talking about when they praised quot;fat things full of marrowquot; because a skinny beast did not have much. [...]
on February 20, 2009 at 1:14 am
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[...] AlexandriaNews put an intriguing blog post on The Home Life of the Stone Age Eskimo, Part ThreeHere’s a quick excerptThe Ancient Hebrews knew what they were talking about when they praised quot;fat things full of marrowquot; because a skinny beast did not have much. [...]
on April 28, 2009 at 2:18 am
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[...] also points out that Steffanson – a hero of my friends in the zero carb world – found that Eskimos would eat a lot of rotten – fermented – fish, and he himself ended up enjoying [...]