Pea Sausage: the Gold Rush era MRE you never knew you were missing

The cookbook collection of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library’s Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives contains hundreds of thousands of recipes, found in diverse volumes that range from mimeographed, spiral-bound recipe collections produced by PTAs or community organizations to the Salmon Sisters’ modern cookbooks, to Gold Rush–era pamphlets designed to help gold-seekers adequately prepare for the Alaskan experience. The recipes within are just as diverse, and one can find a great mix of cultures, ingredients, and recipes we don’t see often these days.

As an APRCA archivist, I’ve saved some of these unique recipes for a rainy day, or maybe for a dinner party. Others, I’ve saved out of curiosity. For instance: pea sausage.

It’s probably not as odd as you might imagine. Pea sausage appears in a number of cookbooks and eating guides of the early 20th century, often produced to accommodate the influx of traveling gold-seekers. From the literature of the time, it sounds like pea sausage was actually a very good option to have in your packsack. In fact, according to the booklet Helpful Hints for Klondike Gold Hunters, produced by the Tillman & Bendel Wholesale Grocers out of San Francisco in 1896, pea sausage is the ideal pack food.

It may help the modern reader to learn that it’s not actual sausage, though it does contain meat. Tillman & Bendel’s Helpful Hints describes their proprietary, pre-made pea sausage as a mixture of pea meal (sometimes known as “pease meal”) with bacon, potatoes, and spices: a sort of just-add-water pea soup. They are delighted to explain that just one sausage, weighing a whole 1.5 pounds, will make more than 20 plates of rich soup, and will last for any length of time, in any climate! (Interestingly, their booklet also suggests that boiled peas have “93%” nutrition. That metric is likely not derived from anything we would recognize today, as vitamins were only just starting to be described in the 1910s. It must have sounded encouraging to miners, though.)

How would one consume such a thing? Their instructions suggest that you would simply cut a slice about ⅜-inch thick and add to boiling water in a bowl to serve. Among their list of “A Year’s Worth of Provisions” is 20 pounds of pea sausage. A bowl of pea soup for everyone.

Most of the pamphlet’s claims are true and verifiable—pea sausage has been produced in various forms for more than a hundred years for the purposes of survival because, true to their claim, it does last nearly indefinitely in most conditions, and it is a very good source of portable, stable calories. In German, it’s called erbswurst and is a long-standing culinary institution. It was in fact sold by the German company Knorr up until 2018.

Historically, erbswurst was one of the world’s first “instant” products, in that one might just add water and achieve a meal. This made it very popular with early explorers and mountaineers, though its actual development started with the military. Erbswurst was originally a ration food. Pea sausage was credited in an 1877 editorial called “Soldier’s Rations” for the contemporary successes of the German military. It’s mentioned then that erbswurst was newly created, that it provided excellent energy, and that it could be eaten either cold in its original state or hot, as soup. Compared to the other armies’ rations of mostly bread, I see why this might have been a successful option.

Now, what the sausage was cased in, exactly, is also an interesting question in itself. Tilman & Bendel didn’t mention it in their Helpful Hints, but in the earlier “Soldier’s Rations,” the author mentions that at that time in Germany, it wasn’t possible to source enough skin or bladder to wrap sausages for the whole army (and noted that paper did not work as a casing). Instead, sausage makers turned to a substance that would have been used mostly for photographic printmaking at the time—a combination of gelatin and bichromate of potash, today known as potassium dichromate.

Photographic prints made with potassium dichromate were known as “carbon prints,” and, it should be noted, you very much should not eat anything with potassium dichromate in it. We now know that it is both toxic and carcinogenic, and though cases of acute poisoning are rare today, when it does occur, it is often fatal. Nevertheless, potassium dichromate was apparently quite effective as a sausage wrapping, since it would hold up until it was boiled away (and apparently was not a strong enough concentration to cause mass casualty in the 19th-century German army).

Though the popularity of pea sausage may have fallen by the wayside in the time since the Gold Rush, the role of pack food, ration food, and preserved goods is still prevalent in Alaskan recipes—if not celebrated (think sourdough and pilot bread!). And the legacy of pea soup itself has prevailed: as Alaskan farming and ecological experiments began, peas were quickly found to be a successful crop, and they have remained a staple ingredient of Alaskan soups and recipes.

There’s almost guaranteed to be a recipe for pea soup in nearly every Sourdough Alaskan Cookbook made before the 1950s, and most of the ones after, too. Sometimes it’s split pea, sometimes creamed, or puréed, sometimes with salmon, duck, or other meats. There may no longer be pea sausage on the shelves, but fear not: in Alaska cookbooks, there will always be pea soup.