AFTER the GOLD RUSH - Friday May 9th Menu
We begin tonight’s story in the mists of a Seattle morning. It is Saturday, the 17th of July 1897 as the Steamship Portland bumps and squawks as she comes to rest against the pilings of Schwabacher’s Warf. Onboard are 68 grinning, shouting, waving men. And a “Ton of Gold!” — the glinting dust and nuggets panned from an obscure river called the Klondike.
Telegraph keys clack frantically: ——● ——— ●—●● —●● GOLD! The electrifying news sweeps the world. The Alaska Gold Rush -- the largest the world will ever see -- has begun.
On a train heading west from Chicago is my grandfather, John Franklin Zimmerman with his best friend, “Brunkey.” They buy provisions in Seattle and Victoria and hop a steamship to Skagway. They are young men. Lugging their 2,000 pounds of provisions over the notorious Chilkoot Pass merits only a single line in Grandfather’s diary. Grandfather will spend the next 27 years making and losing fortunes. He learns the ways of the North: fishing, hunting, gathering, surviving, making bread from sourdough, and savoring sweet berries each autumn. A World War comes. He survives the Spanish Flu. It takes a friend. He builds a cabin in Fairbanks. He has 2 sons and a daughter. One son becomes my father. The other dies in Naples during another World War.
Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it sometimes rhymes.”
For more than 27 years, I have had a restaurant. Thirteen years ago, Chris Weber became The Herbfarm chef. Many of us here forage for wild foods. We try to remember the ways of the wild, times when people were still connected to nature. We bake almost all of our bread with sourdough. Tonight’s dinner is a salute to the GRAND WILDNESS that is still Alaska: Sourdough Bread, Wild Salmon, Seashore-Gathered Greens, and Saskatoon Berries.
All of tonight’s dinner could have been made during the Gold Rush. Here are the details of the one-hundred-seventy 3-course dinners we delivered today.
Check it out! > https://indd.adobe.com/view/ec58cf4b-10c4-4b52-9e81-b3f9d8f24c65
As of today, we have created over 10,000 3-course dinners since beginning our food outreach 56 days ago. Our ever-changing
hot and comforting dinners are saying, “We can’t hug you, but our community sends 10,000 THANK YOUs to you, you who are truly RISKING IT ALL to protect us.”
By the way. Remember Grandfather’s best friend, “Brunkey?” Twain was right. Astonishingly, Brunkey is a relative of Chef Chris Weber. History does rhyme. Often more than one can know. And, this time, too, it isn’t the Spanish Flu. You know what it is.
