Arrival was a shock. Inside the station, I unzipped my engorged duffel, retrieving my precious scale and cookie cutters. I filled my drawers, tacked up photos of my husband, two children, and dog, and pulled out the recipe 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 food world. I’m as obsessed with ingredients as I am with the subtleties of flavor and texture. Taste is a form of knowledge that’s nearly impossible to unlearn, and, whatever challenges the job might pose, I hadn’t planned to try. I’d witnessed the baked goods served at McMurdo, the main American station in Antarctica, where I’d had to wait three weeks before being flown to the Pole proper: dense chocolate-chip scones, confetti cake from a mix, Jell-O. These sorts of undoubtedly popular items aren’t in my repertoire, but neither, honestly, was the daily bread I was now responsible for producing, in addition to a morning pastry, a lunch cookie, and an evening dessert.
I had a day off to adjust to the altitude before my first shift. I felt fine, maybe because I was born at eight thousand feet above sea level in Aspen, Colorado, where my father opened his first restaurant, or maybe because we’d all been offered the high-altitude medication Diamox before departure. Either way, I was practically levitating with excitement. Most rooms at the Pole are singles. They’re pretty much identical—large enough to hold a bed, a bureau, and a desk. I’m six feet tall, and the tiny quarters made for a snug fit. But, after three weeks of sharing a windowless room with four other people at McMurdo, the austere space might as well have been the Carlyle. What surprised me most was how ordinary the station was—grubby lounges with the feel of college dorms, a media room stuffed with DVDs and a dejected couch, a craft room with deranged projects scattered about, a laundry room, a sauna, and a store where I could buy stamps, T-shirts with the United States Antarctic Program logo, toothpaste, and stale candy.
The next day, I began the six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour existence that would nearly defeat me in the course of three months. (Room, board, and transport from the U.S. were included.) Although the initial population at the station was sixty or so, it soon ballooned to a fairly steady hundred and fifty, a lopsided mix of scientists (maybe fifteen per cent) and support staff known as “ops,” as in “operations” (everyone else). I worked under the blazing midnight sun from 6 P.M. to 5 A.M., the “mid-rat” shift. “Mid-rat” is short for “midnight-ration”—Navy language inherited by the U.S.A.P. “Ration,” not meal; “galley,” not kitchen; “berth,” not room.
The weary overwinter baker whom I was relieving departed on day three, and from then on, for that first austral summer—November through early February—I was alone every night, the butter thumping against the wall of the bowl in the massive Hobart mixer while I stared out at the flags marking each signatory to the Antarctic Treaty as they bucked in the wind. Headphones in, chef’s jacket on a hook as I peeled down to a tank top, beanie covering my gray-streaked hair, I poked at focaccia, balled cookie dough, frosted cakes, carved up brownies, and cut lemon squares against the background rabble of the tipsy, Catan-obsessed scientists who liked to hang out in the dining room abutting the kitchen.
Sometimes I took long walks on the plateau with a station friend, a carpenter. One night, short on time and exhausted from a twelve-mile walk in the mild fifteen-below air, I pawed through the pantry for something easy to bake, cringing at the boxes of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix and generic no-bake cheesecake. Thinking that I might risk cheating my way into a cherry pie, I picked up a box of Gold Medal Deluxe Instant Pie Crust. As I pulled it off the shelf, the lettering on the flap caught my eye: BEST IF USED BY 14APR01. I was holding pre-9/11 pie-crust mix?
I learned to joke about the canned cherries from the Carter Administration, but more often I told people that my ingredients were from the Obama Administration—which was closer to the truth. I had no choice but to use cartons of expired frozen-egg product and petroleum-scented flour (it, like the ice cream, was stored next to the fuel drums) and, eventually, even the decades-old cherries, but I drew the line at eating Obama-era chicken. Actually, I didn’t eat much of anything. Mostly, I survived on ramen that I discovered, along with other snack foods—sleeves of Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Nature Valley granola bars—in a cabinet under the steam table. My monkey suit (black chef’s pants and a white chef’s coat) grew looser by the day.