I’m sitting outside Biscuitclub in downtown Anchorage. It’s a colorful repurposed hallway in the Alaska Marketplace on 4th Avenue. I’m waiting for my biscuits and gravy. Owner Haleena Hanson has run this downtown shop for six years, establishing a reputation for her “mic drop” biscuits that will turn your head skyward in eyerolls of joy. I’ve asked her for the recipe. No dice. But she did admit that buttermilk and a dark roux play key roles.

My order arrives, unassuming in a simple paper tray. The eye rolling commences. Hanson’s Pacific Rim heritage jazzes up her version with Hawaiian notes. Her gravy is brown like a loco moco’s. The garlic pops. Hanson’s biscuits are both Southern and Pacific. But my journey is bigger than just Biscuitclub, or even downtown. I’m hunting biscuits and gravy all over the state, the way some residents stalk moose.

After moving here in 2017 from the Southeast, I quickly noticed one of my favorite Southern dishes was not only readily available in Alaska, it was ubiquitous. Even just a passing glance at Google Maps reveals a landscape blanketed with restaurants in the Far North serving this Southern classic. What’s going on? I had to find out. My search took me across the state and back in time.

Since I’m a researcher by trade, I needed data. A closer look at Google Maps revealed 53 restaurants that highlight biscuits and gravy on their menu. I know I didn’t find them all, but this seemed like a good start. I sent all 53 a survey asking about their menus, their recipes, why they chose this particular dish. The responses were consistent: biscuits and gravy are a staple comfort food throughout Alaska. The owners who responded shared their lore, provided history clues, and even granted follow-up interviews. What follows would have been impossible without their generosity.

Natalie Janicka, manager and chef at Snow City Café in Anchorage, illustrated how communities in Alaska network through shared experiences, swapping recipes that use the shelf-stable ingredients that are so important at this far end of the global supply chain. Her biscuit recipe dates back 28 years, a donation from Harvey Mills, who in the ’90s was a cook for a restaurant in Denali National Park.

So, I started looking for other ways Alaskans shared recipes in the ’80s and ’90s. Back then Alaska had emerged from its pioneer days and was basking in the glory of oil wealth. The internet had not yet connected the state 24/7 with the Outside, but the highways had all been built, improving postal service and igniting a trend of sharing recipes through locally published cookbooks. The University of Alaska Anchorage houses an archive of these books, which number in the hundreds. I found literary classics like The Alaska Cabin Cookbook, The Nome Centennial Cookbook, and The Kenai Peninsula’s Favorite Recipes. The themes here center on sourdough, but every book includes a biscuit recipe. These favor cheap, shelfstable, calorie-dense ingredients, like Nome’s 1-2-3 biscuits that just require 1 teaspoon of salt, 2 cups of flour, and 3 teaspoons of baking powder (with a little oil and milk).

One book, What Real Alaskans Eat, by J. Stephen Lay, includes perhaps the strangest recipe of the bunch. Bear Fat Biscuits, made with grizzly bear lard, instructs to avoid killing a “stream bear” as your source of bear fat, since the salmon in these bears’ diets will give the biscuits a fishy taste. What the book doesn’t say is how bear lard biscuits entered Alaska’s culinary landscape. But Janicka provided a name to chase that clue: Fannie Quigley.

Back up another 50 years and head to the mining village of Kantishna, inside Denali National Park. Quigley lived in the parklands from 1906–44, living off the land and prospecting her 26 mining claims. She killed grizzlies, rendered the fat by hand, and used it to make those bear fat biscuits for her family and for many of the numerous guests who increasingly visited the park as its renown grew.

Quigley may hold the claim as being ground-zero for biscuits entering the state for the first time. She came to Alaska in 1897 with the wave of miners during the Klondike Gold Rush. Rushers brought their Southern recipes and their sourdough starters for biscuits. Quigley opened a restaurant in Dawson City that would have sold biscuits by the dozen to hungry miners. She wasn’t the only one. Journalist Tappan Adney, who was on the ground in Dawson City that year documenting every facet of life in the camps, tells of restaurants, all owned by women, selling biscuits for 25 cents.

Those who didn’t have sourdough could still make biscuits with the newfangled baking powder. Miner William Haskell offered this 1898 recipe in his book Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields: “Having put a quart of flour, two tablespoonfuls of baking-powder, and a half teaspoonful of salt together, I would mix it while dry with lard, if I had any, but more commonly with bacon fat. This I stirred in with water, which had to be previously obtained by melting snow or a fragment of a glacier, and rolled out the stiff dough on the smooth side of a slab. The rolling pin I had manufactured from a section of a spruce pole. Then I would cut the dough into circles with the top of a baking-powder tin, and bake about fifteen minutes.”

One book, What Real Alaskans Eat, by J. Stephen Lay, includes perhaps the strangest recipe of the bunch. Bear Fat Biscuits, made with grizzly bear lard, instructs to avoid killing a “stream bear” as your source of bear fat, since the salmon in these bears’ diets will give the biscuits a fishy taste.

In 1865, the Western Union Telegraph Expedition hired a young William Healey Dall as the assistant to biologist Robert Kennicott. The explorers charted both Siberia and the lower Yukon, surveying a route for a transcontinental telegraph line. In his published journals, Dall tells of a snowy night in Unalakleet, huddled around a wood stove, breaking up biscuits and soaking them in the meat gravy from the reindeer their guides harvested earlier that day. This makes Dall almost certainly the first recorded person in Alaska to eat biscuits and gravy, although he called the dish “telegraph stew.”

The biscuits of Dall’s day were not fluffy biscuits made with sourdough or baking powder. They were rock-like pucks that had to be smashed and soaked in liquid before they could be eaten, or else you might chip a tooth. This type of biscuit was called hardtack and had been used by sailing captains and soldiers for millennia, dating all the way back to the Roman Empire, who called them biscotus, the origin of the modern word. Today, we just call it Pilot Bread.

We can now see how the practice of moistening hardtack also helped invent gravy, the second half of our dynamic duo. Biscuit gravy’s ancestor is not as old as hardtack. It emerged in 1651 as a spin on béchamel, also called “white sauce,” one of the five basic “mother sauces” of French cuisine. Gravy uses animal fat, like bear lard or bacon grease, instead of butter or oil.

Gravy was born out of necessity. The same cooks who developed the modern leavened biscuit also retained the habit of moistening them with water, broth, or, eventually, a sauce of some kind. The sausage gravy typically associated with biscuits originated from cooks feeding teams of lumberjacks working in the Appalachian logging industry after the Civil War. In those days, Appalachia was the western frontier, just as Alaska is today, and the cooks were freed slaves who had been trained to make béchamel on Southern plantations. Butter and flour were scarce, but pork fat came easily from abundant pig farms, with their salted hams and bacon, and corn grew natively throughout the region. The gritty texture of cornmeal thickening the gravy led the loggers to complain that the cooks had put sawdust in the gravy, hence the name “sawmill gravy.”

Back in the present day, I took the train to Denali National Park to meet with Becki Klauss, owner of The Black Bear, the self-described “Denali’s living room.” The moniker fits. The restaurant/coffee shop combo occupies a cozy log cabin originally built in the ’90s to house a Denali museum. Klauss, who gained experience in Chicago as a line cook, started working seasonally at The Black Bear in 2002 and eventually bought the business from its original owner.

The Black Bear takes enormous pride in its biscuits and gravy. Both are completely from scratch. The biscuits deserve comparison with Denali. They’re enormous, each one a buttery, flaky masterpiece, topped with sausage gravy the way Denali is draped with glaciers. Klauss instantly credits the location for her inspiration. “You have to find a community that keeps you sparked,” she says. Endlessly quotable and effortlessly enthusiastic about her work and workplace, she served up the best breakfast I’ve had since moving to Alaska. [Insert Image 11 – Becki Klauss with B&G; Image Credit: Shannon Hartley, 2025]

She tells us that biscuits are the “poor man’s croissant” and describes folding each batch eight times, multiple times per day, starting at 6 am and continuing well into the evening. The biscuits are so big because “good biscuits make good sandwiches,” hinting that her biscuits feature on the menu in multiple ways, including quick options that tourists can take with them into the park. Her mission is to take these guests “out of their tour and connect them to something rural.”

As we chat, we realize that the tourism gold rush also has biscuits in common with the Yukon rush. “Fannie Quigley is alive on the boardwalk,” Klauss tells us as she delivers heaping plates. She feels that connection viscerally. Both women came from Outside. Both settled in Denali. Both owned restaurants that featured biscuits. Entrepreneurial cooks like Fannie Quigley helped build this state and continue to make it unique, Klauss says.

I can’t help but realize that commonality across this narrative. From Haleena Hanson and Natalie Janicka in Anchorage to Becki Klauss in Denali, that spirit of Fannie Quigley is keeping biscuits and gravy sticking to the ribs of Alaskans and tourists alike. Or as Becki Klauss tells it, “Strong women make good biscuits.”

Explore Alaska’s Biscuit Trail with our interactive map: ediblealaska.com/things-do/biscuit-trail