Mouse Soup - Alaska

Because I have written many a muse, some might say diatribe, about my adventures in Alaska I am not sure if I have imparted the following on this blog site. However due to a recent posting by a friend of mine on Facebook I thought it worth repeating.

A lady friend of mine lives on a small farm in northern Illinois. When she got up one morning she checked her overly used mouse trap and found to her shock and dismay the head of a mouse. Not the body mind you, only the head. It sort of unnerved her wondering what had taken the body and left the head. She hoped whatever it was had left the house.

For those of you on Facebook you can imagine what happened next. The comment section under her post began to fill-up. There were a couple of "eeks," a few "Noooos," and one "I would move."

Trying to defuse the situation, less panic reign supreme in northern Illinois, I mentioned it reminded me of mouse soup, a dish I became familiar with while living in Alaska. Well this caused another round of comments the best being, "I hate mice, that is disgusting."

I tried to ease my Facebook friend's fear and disgust but realized an explanation about mouse soup was far to complicated and lengthy to serve up during the comment phase of the entry. Thus the reason for this particular blog.

Eskimos spend a lot of their leisure time hunting and gathering and the preparing of food for the winter months. They have become over the years very ingenious as to determining what is and is not editable and palatable.

Mice are ubiquitous to the Tundra. They swarm all over the place searching for their own eatables. They find nuts, berries, roots, and grasses and now and then discarded human food. They spend all summer scavenging around  and what they don't eat they pack back to their nests to store for the winter.

Eons ago Eskimos realized what the mouse was doing so they began to search out mice nests in the late summer and early fall to help themselves get through the Arctic winters.

To the trained Eskimo eye a mouse nest is easy to find. I never mastered the skill and could not pick out a nest over a clump of tundra grass.

After gathering, the ingredients are taken to the gatherer's home, put in a pot, boiled, and then strained several times to remove any non human digestible things. If the gatherer is lucky enough to have some vegetables around they too are thrown in the pot. The soup is seasoned to taste and served up boiling hot.

So my dear friends in northern Illinois and else where if you have ever wondered about mouse soup or how to make it now, if you so desire.  The mice are not eaten, or at least in the soup they are not eaten.

I have tasted mouse soup and it does not appeal to me. It is not the flavor that I dislike it is just that I cannot get past the fact that I am putting in my mouth what a rodent had not so long ago had put in theirs.