Diet

The Russian workers usually lived on fish. They ate salted fish for four months of each year and fresh fish for the rest of the year. Cod, halibut, herring, and salmon were the most commonly eaten fish. The Russians largely depended on Native Americans to catch the fish they ate.

The Russian-American Company workers who built the new fort at Sitka in 1806 were fed two or three dried fish daily. Typically, this meant a ration of about two pounds of dried salmon. On Sundays, they might have special meals of soup, salted meat, rice, and perhaps molasses or brandy.

Russian settlements in Alaska also depended on locally available food. On the Pribilof Islands, where the Russians had a work camp, the workers' diet was mostly whale, fur seal, sea lion meat, and seabird eggs. Some Russian efforts to produce food locally were successful. Kodiak became the chief source of "colonial products" such as dried fish, dried yellow lily bulbs, crowberries, sour rye-flour soup, and blubber that could be sent to other Russian settlements. Vegetables were the most successful crops in the coastal settlements, particularly at Sitka, where gardens grew cabbages, cucumbers, potatoes, rutabagas, and turnips. 

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