LEN'S FAVORITE SALMON RECIPE

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Len’s Favorite Salmon Recipe

I always remember my early years of growing up in St. George’s, Newfoundland. We lived on the outskirts of town ,on Steel Mountain Road, on the top of what we called “The Hill” by the other sections of town called “Dog’s Town” . Up until the 1960’s most people living on “The Hill” kept hunting dogs. At that time we were nearing the end of our traditional hunting and trapping lifestyle because most men were now working away from home with companies that paid wages for work. My family still partook in a token traditional lifestyle because up until I finished high school and left home in 1966, we still had a few cattle.

In summer , for me 1955-1965, we children used to go into Hell’s Gulch which was our traditional summer camping site. Hell's Gulch was a valley located on the banks of Flat Bay Brook River which was situated eight miles southeast of St. Georges.

 We went to cut firewood for the winter months and to make hay for our animals ......sheep, cows, goats, and horses. We also picked berries, hazelnuts; pine cones, fern stocks, and collected lots of other plants and animals. We  caught and salted upwards to ten barrels of salmon for the winter. Hell's Gulch was used by the Muise family as a winterhouse [a winterhouse was a safe place to live during the winter months because of the availability of wood, wild game and easy access to trapping grounds]. We usually camped for upwards of two weeks with the older children taking care of the younger ones. My grandfather had a cabin and several barns but we children usually stayed out into one large tent or on hot nights we just sleep under the stars. In the camp were  young teenagers and younger children , as young as seven or eight, there were always older adults around the area that would check on us from time to time.

Food was always a problem because we were such a large family [my parents had nineteen children] so very often someone would drop into our camp with a fresh salmon, a piece of recently killed moose or caribou, some freshly baked bread or some recently cooked wild apple pie. If you can visualize this camp then you will understand this cooking story which started when our close cousin, Walter Drake and his friend David Jesso, brought into our camp a very large twenty-five pound freshly caught salmon.  

How do you work all day and them cook something as big as the salmon that the boys brought into our camp? Walter and David said that we should bake it because it would be easier to prepare other things with the salmon if it was all baked together. My older sisters Doreen, Odelle and Cecilia helped me with preparing this dish. I was around eleven years old at the time. We decided to bake the salmon wrapped into birch bark. We had no salt or pepper so we used a little fresh butter [which was made very salty back in those times] on the outside of the fish. Into the salmon’s belly we placed a couple of handfuls of juniper berries, some freshly cut dandelions, a few fresh onions, potatoes cut into circular thin slices, and a couple of half-soft turnips cut into cubes. On top of that mixture we put some bread crumbs mixed with half-ripped blueberries. We then tied the salmon with thick cod-line [a white line about 2-3 millimeters thick] and wrapped it into the birch bark.

That night we dug a shallow hole [about fourteen inches deep] just the size of the wrapped salmon, about two feet away from our nightly, very large campfire. When we were ready for bed the fire coals were blood-red. We moved the live coals [by sticks] over the buried salmon. There were at least a foot of hot coals lying over the large salmon. Then we went to sleep with strong visions of a great breakfast just waiting for us in the morning. 

In the early morning we kicked the spent coals away from the buried salmon and dug out the now perfectly cooked fish. The combined smell of birch, juniper, and cooked vegetables was mouth watering. The fish was cooked to perfection. We ate that cooked salmon with its varied stuffing for the next two days. I often cook salmon with stuffing, and sometimes I still bury it, but today I just use foil wrap. The taste is not the same and I always wonder if it’s the foil wrap or the fact that I am getting too modernized ?