The Most Lovely Freezer within the World

Arrival was a shock. Contained in the station, I unzipped my engorged duffel, retrieving my treasured scale and cookie cutters. I crammed my drawers, tacked up images of my husband, two kids, and canine, and pulled out the recipe e-book I’d assembled—marzipan cake, ginger-prune upside-down cake, walnut tart. My father was a chef, and I grew up in a rarefied meals world. I’m as obsessive about substances as I’m with the subtleties of taste and texture. Style is a type of data that’s almost not possible to unlearn, and, no matter challenges the job would possibly pose, I hadn’t deliberate to strive. I’d witnessed the baked items served at McMurdo, the principle American station in Antarctica, the place I’d needed to wait three weeks earlier than being flown to the Pole correct: dense chocolate-chip scones, confetti cake from a combination, Jell-O. These kinds of undoubtedly fashionable objects aren’t in my repertoire, however neither, truthfully, was the every day bread I used to be now liable for producing, along with a morning pastry, a lunch cookie, and a night dessert.

I had a time without work to regulate to the altitude earlier than my first shift. I felt nice, perhaps as a result of I used to be born at eight thousand toes above sea degree in Aspen, Colorado, the place my father opened his first restaurant, or perhaps as a result of we’d all been supplied the high-altitude treatment Diamox earlier than departure. Both means, I used to be virtually levitating with pleasure. Most rooms on the Pole are singles. They’re just about similar—giant sufficient to carry a mattress, a bureau, and a desk. I’m six toes tall, and the tiny quarters made for a comfortable match. However, after three weeks of sharing a windowless room with 4 different folks at McMurdo, the austere house would possibly as nicely have been the Carlyle. What shocked me most was how strange the station was—grubby lounges with the texture of school dorms, a media room filled with DVDs and a dejected sofa, a craft room with deranged initiatives scattered about, a laundry room, a sauna, and a retailer the place I might purchase stamps, T-shirts with the USA Antarctic Program emblem, toothpaste, and rancid sweet.

The subsequent day, I started the six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour existence that might almost defeat me in the middle of three months. (Room, board, and transport from the U.S. had been included.) Though the preliminary inhabitants on the station was sixty or so, it quickly ballooned to a reasonably regular hundred and fifty, a lopsided mixture of scientists (perhaps fifteen per cent) and assist workers often called “ops,” as in “operations” (everybody else). I labored underneath the blazing midnight solar from 6 P.M. to five A.M., the “mid-rat” shift. “Mid-rat” is brief for “midnight-ration”—Navy language inherited by the united statesA.P. “Ration,” not meal; “galley,” not kitchen; “berth,” not room.

The weary overwinter baker whom I used to be relieving departed on day three, and from then on, for that first austral summer time—November by means of early February—I used to be alone each night time, the butter thumping towards the wall of the bowl within the huge Hobart mixer whereas I stared out on the flags marking every signatory to the Antarctic Treaty as they bucked within the wind. Headphones in, chef’s jacket on a hook as I peeled right down to a tank prime, beanie overlaying my gray-streaked hair, I poked at focaccia, balled cookie dough, frosted muffins, carved up brownies, and reduce lemon squares towards the background rabble of the tipsy, Catan-obsessed scientists who preferred to hang around within the eating room abutting the kitchen.

Generally I took lengthy walks on the plateau with a station pal, a carpenter. One night time, quick on time and exhausted from a twelve-mile stroll within the delicate fifteen-below air, I pawed by means of the pantry for one thing simple to bake, cringing on the packing containers of Duncan Hines Satan’s Meals Cake Combine and generic no-bake cheesecake. Pondering that I would threat dishonest my means right into a cherry pie, I picked up a field of Gold Medal Deluxe Prompt Pie Crust. As I pulled it off the shelf, the lettering on the flap caught my eye: BEST IF USED BY 14APR01. I used to be holding pre-9/11 pie-crust combine?

I realized to joke in regards to the canned cherries from the Carter Administration, however extra usually I instructed folks that my substances had been from the Obama Administration—which was nearer to the reality. I had no selection however to make use of cartons of expired frozen-egg product and petroleum-scented flour (it, just like the ice cream, was saved subsequent to the gasoline drums) and, finally, even the decades-old cherries, however I drew the road at consuming Obama-era rooster. Truly, I didn’t eat a lot of something. Principally, I survived on ramen that I found, together with different snack meals—sleeves of Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Nature Valley granola bars—in a cupboard underneath the steam desk. My monkey swimsuit (black chef’s pants and a white chef’s coat) grew looser by the day.