A CHRISTMAS SEAL

Americans are urged to prepare for their Christmas dinner well ahead of time by ordering a ham or turkey a couple of weeks prior to the holiday. In Greenland, the preparation of the traditional Christmas meal, kiviak, requires even more advanced planning.

Although the process of making kiviak is time consuming, the ingredients are simple.  Here is the recipe.

INGREDIENTS:
1.  1 dead seal
2.  300 to 500 dead auks (a flightless bird kinda like a penguin)

PREPARATION:

1.  Skin the seal.  Eat the skinned seal if you wish.
2.  Fill the seal skin with dead auks.  Do not cook, clean, defeather, debone, eviscerate, or do anything else to the auks except stuff them into the seal skin.
3.  Sew up the seal skin and seal the seam with blubber.
4.  Scoop a hole in the permafrost, throw into it the seal/auk "turducken," and cover with a boulder.
5.  Allow to ferment for three to eighteen months.
6.  Dig up the seal skin, slit it open, and invite your guests to pull out the dead auks and eat them raw and whole, bones and all, after plucking off the feathers. Many kiviat aficionados affirmatively enjoy biting the heads off and sucking out the liquefied entrails.

Fans of the TV series Frasier will recall Episode 6.08 (The Seal Who Came to Dinner) where a putrescent pinniped proved to be a particularly pungent party-pooper. Specifically, snobby Niles Crane suffered major social opprobrium when the presence of a malodorous dead seal proved to be a distraction while Niles was hosting a fancy dinner at a beachfront cottage. The writers of the show were correct in representing that the smell of dead seal is not a mild one.  Add to this scent the odor of several hundred fermented birds, and you will understand why kiviak is traditionally consumed outdoors.

Kiviak was developed by the Inuits thousands of years ago in response to the fact that their land was not honeycombed with Piggly Wiggly supermarkets or verdant pastures filled with herds of Black Angus cattle. On those months each year in the frigid north where there was virtually no other source of protein or fat, kiviak was literally a lifesaver.

Finally, kiviak preparation is not a task for amateurs. In 2013, some Greenlanders made kiviak but substituted ducks for the auks and lined the interior of the seal skin with plastic.  The result was death by botulism.

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