After a long day clearing up garbage from the icy Antarctic landscape, Carol Devine says there was nothing better than coming home to chocolate chip cookies.
In 1996, Devine partnered with the Russian Antarctic Expedition to bring a team of volunteers to help pick up garbage on the continent. Wendy Trusler joined the team as the cook, preparing meals—and cookies—in a tiny kitchen on the Russian base.
Now, the two women have written a book about their experience. "The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning" is filled with Antarctic-inspired recipes, photos of the icy landscape, and tales of the 1996 expedition.
Devine said she had dreamed of going to Antarctica long before the trip became reality.
"I wanted to go to the Antarctic, and I wanted to go with a purpose," she said on CTV’s Canada AM on Wednesday.
She searched for an opportunity to travel to the continent and found one with the Russian Antarctic Expedition team. Decades of garbage had accumulated on the continent, and because of the cold temperatures, the litter was freezing, rather than melting and disintegrating into the earth. The Russians invited Devine to bring a crew to help clean up the trash.
They only had one condition, Devine said: she had to bring her own cook.
And so Devine and Trusler set out for a continent few travellers have ever visited, unsure what to expect from the experience.
"It was really a leap of faith on our part," Devine said.
Once they arrived at the Russian research station, the women faced a number of challenges: labour intensive clean-up work, a cramped kitchen, and trying to order shipments of food from Argentina.
"The biggest problem was provisioning," Trusler said. "I ordered all my food by fax from Toronto in Spanish."
Once, a shipment of food didn’t arrive and Trusler had to contact Moscow to sort out the delivery.
But even though finding and preparing meals could get complicated, food acted as a unifier for the volunteers, Trusler said.
"One of the recipes I made is called cazuela, and it’s a Chilean recipe and I served it to the Chileans and the Uruguayans," she said. "We didn’t really share a common language, but everyone wanted to talk about how someone (they knew) made it at home. And so that became the common language."
Trusler said her favourite recipe in the book is for the Uruguayan stuffed chicken while Devine’s favourite is the chocolate chip cookies. And, Devine said, everybody always loved and requested Trusler’s honey oatmeal bread.
"People over their satellite radios would be like 'Wendy’s bread!' and some of the Chilean wives of the station got a bit upset because all these people, especially the men, were talking about Wendy’s bread!" Devine remembers.
Since the 1996 expedition, both women have continued to work, travel, and live by the slogan on their website: "Whenever adventure beckons, an open mind and a full stomach are necessities."
Devine has worked for Medicins Sans Frontieres, run human rights courses, published writing, and given speeches around the world, and Trusler now works as an artist, designer, and food stylist.
