"You need to read this..."

I can remember where and when I was when someone, somewhere, said to me, “you should read this.” It happens often enough, thankfully, but it also sticks in my mind, because someone is about to tell me about something that may change my life.

The ones I remember the most are the ones that were suggested to me not for the usefulness of the title, but for the openness of the act: the open heart of the person doing the suggestion, and the suggested title itself.

I buy books not out of an obsessive need to hoard or collect (though some may jokingly disagree), but because I love the idea of ideas. The ideas contained therein, rendered immediately or slowly through dissection, discussion, or digestion. The method doesn’t matter to me, but what does matter is that people find an opening that befits them, their needs. And there are few needs as strong as the need to be nourished. 

The conversations I have had with booksellers, especially in cookbook stores, have been some of the conversations I have cherished the most. These are people who understand that love of ideas, and how love begets love. I still remember my first trip to Kitchen Arts and Letters in NYC, where I told Nach what I had read, and I asked for suggestions of  what I should read next. Titles started getting pulled from shelves. 

“This one and this one, if you don’t own it,” he said. At first I wondered why I needed to read The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark, but Nach didn’t want to give too much away. “You will see this title come up again and and again. You know the idea of a musician’s musician? This is that, but for lovers of food writing.” It went on the pile, and into the suitcase. I’ve been fortunate enough to have many a conversation that lead to many a pile, and I have rarely been disappointed by either of them. 

This year, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Portia Clark at CBC’s Information Morning about holiday shopping for cookbooks and books about food (have a listen here). But like all things, a lot was left on the floor of the editing room, much of it my own doing.* There is only so much one can say/write/glean in a few minutes of radio.  So I wanted to do what many had done for me, and say, “you should read this, and here is why.” I do not own a bookstore, and so I can’t pull a book off the shelf, show you a cover and tell you the why’s and when’s. I am also not limited by “best of”s, or calendar years in publishing. In other words, not everything here came out in 2021, though some did. But as someone who buys, reads, shares, and enjoys books a lot, I did want to give a touch more information than what I was able to in my interview.  

(A note: Many of the new titles are available at local independent bookshops, or can easily be ordered through them. I got all of the 2021 titles at Bookmark here in Halifax, just on Spring Garden Road.)

***

For the baker: Mother Grains,  by Roxana Julapat. Julapat’s love letter to whole grain flours, non-wheat flours, and the flavours found therein is easily one of the best baking books I have ever read. Getting a person to bake in a manner they may have not done before is never easy. People talk about bringing confidence to the page, but oftentimes that confidence only lives on that page, and is never transmitted to the reader. With Mother Grains, Julapat is an expert in the act of translation and transmission. Her recipes, ideas, and confidence are there to function so that you, the reader, are as confident as she is, even if you’re walking into possibly new or unknown territory. 

For the (culinary)history lover and/or the cultural studies fan: Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women who Revolutionized Food in America, by Mayukh Sen. If you’ve made a stir fry at home, cooked regional Italian food, or sung the praises of Persian rice dishes, Sen’s book is here to tell you why. The author looks at the culinary and cultural impact of women such as Buwei Yang Cho (the first to use the the terms stir fry and pot sticker), Marcella Hazan (who brought regional Italian food to North American audiences), and Najmieh Batmangliej (who published one of the first major books of Persian cooking in the English language).

For the essayist: The Book of Difficult Fruit, Kate Lebo. An A to Z of fruit, filled with factoids you may not have considered (cherry pits may be poisonous) or fruits you may not never had heard of (such as medlars, also known as monkey’s arse.) Lebo uses each fruit as a launching point to tackle personal topics and essays, while still making you wonder about how many cherry pits you swallowed as a kid.

For the chef who thinks they have everything: Anything by Jane Grigson, especially Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book or Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book. Patience Grey’s Honey from a Weed, tells the story of a British cookery writer who finds herself living in remote parts of the Mediteranean, living off the land, and finding sustenance both culinary and personal. 

For the armchair traveller: Caroline Eden’s books are stunning travelogues onto themselves, even without the recipes found therein. Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes looks at the countries that surround that aforementioned body of water, dipping through the history and people of Bulgaria, Turkey, Ukraine, Romania, Russia, and Georgia.  Her other books, Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia and Samarkand: Recipes and Stories from Central Asia and the Caucus are also worth your time.

Holiday cozy: Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles is an advent calendar of recipes. A personal journal, a methodology around cooking and baking around the holidays, and with straightforward recipes that read like a friend telling you what to over your shoulder.  If you don’t own any of his books, it’s a good start. if you do, it’s a perfect holiday capo.

Bonus inspiration for all food and literary lovers: Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal.  Whether you just started dipping your fingers into a mixing bowl or are well acquainted with your stove, Adler’s book is an honest love letter to the process of cooking: there is joy, there is annoyance, there is a lot of work, and all are valid. There is also knowledge, knowledge that is much easier to access and much more satisfying than you can ever glean in that moment. From the book:

“If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith. We aren't often taught to cook like that, so when we watch people cook naturally, in what looks like an agreement between cook and cooked, we think that they were born with an ability to simply know that an egg is done, that the fish needs flipping, and that the soup needs salt. Instinct, whether on the ground or in the kitchen, is not a destination but a path.”

*Full disclosure: Some of the writing in this piece may appear within the audio of the interview I did which aired on Information Morning on December 6th.

Summer is the season of all things good

If I were to say the word bread to you, what comes to mind? 

Do you hear crusts crackling as you tear into loaves, or do you visualise perfectly sliced loaves wrapped in plastic bags? Do you think of grandmothers and toasty kitchens, or of the first time you baked it yourself? 

Over at CBC Radio here in Atlantic Canada, I was recently asked to write and produce a radio piece about bread, and so I wrote about the knowledge transmitted through bread. I wanted to write about bread as a form of cultural and culinary identity, agricultural foundation and 21st century balm to pandemic anxiety.

The piece is part of an ongoing summer series the CBC is producing in this region all about Atlantic Canadians’ relationship to bread, and I was more than happy to provide a bit of a foreword to it all. You can listen to it here.

Speaking of summer content and radio, I’m also about to start a weekly column over at Le Réveil, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland’s morning show on Radio-Canada. The series, called Plaisirs d’été, will be weekly looks into what is available in our gardens and our local farmers markets. 

I also recently started a new column for Le Courier, Nova Scotia’s french language newspaper. Called Finis ton assiette (clean/finish your plate), it will be a continuation of the information presented on Radio-Canada, but with a bit more context as to the changing shape and nature of how and what Nova Scotians eat, with tips and guides on how to use the season’s bounty to the best of your ability. 

Le Courrier was kind enough to let me start the column with a slightly more personal piece, where I talk about what it was like to talk about Acadian cuisine outside of Acadie, and how doing so led me to understand what it means to be Acadian while describing it to others through food.

Here’s to summer bounties.

Finding all things whole.

If you had told me four years ago that by 2020, I would have devoted my time/brain power/waistline to anything and everything about flour and grains (outside of eating things made with them), I would’ve said you’re nuts.

But now I care. I care a lot. 

Before I go further, I want to make one thing clear: I’m not interested in telling you what you should or should not be eating. We all make our eating choices, choices based on multiple and individual factors (I’ll leave all of that to those who study food policy and food justice, and I shall tip my hat to all of you, b/c that is some intense work). What I am interested in telling you is that you’ve been missing out. And that your parents, and your grandparents have been missing out. And you don’t even know how, where, why, or even what.

Rhubarb coffee cake, made with 100% whole grain flours.

What you’re missing out on is flavour. And just as importantly, you’re missing out on how to best harness that flavour. 

I fell into this rabbit hole four years ago on a trip to Toronto, while visiting my friend Naomi. Naomi had told me of her friend Dawn Woodward’s baked goods on multiple occasions, specifically that everything she baked was made of grains grown in Ontario, and all of them used whole grain flours. 

I appreciated the idea behind this kind of baking: to use locally sourced and produced grains and flours, to show them off as it were. But the taste memory part of my brain conjured up images of dense breads, sawdust cookies, and off-tasting flours. 

Dawn Woodward of Evelyn’s Crackers table at Wychwood Barns, October 2018.

When we got to Dawn’s table at the farmers market, it looked like what you would expect:  cookies and squares dominated, bags of handmade crackers, a few cake slices. Interestingly, each baked good had a sign in front of it detailing not only the price, but also the variety of grain used in it.  Some of the names of the grains were even vaguely familiar, having seen them used in breads at farmers markets where I lived. Red Fife was used in an applesauce spice cake, with a maple glaze.  It was also in the butter tarts that were filled with maple syrup instead of the usual brown sugar.  The chocolate cookies were made with rye, and the brownies spiced with cardamom.

It was that last one that made me open my wallet, thinking it would go well with the coffee I would eventually be drinking as soon I could locate some. 

And then I had a bite. 

It was a reverse Proustian moment. There were no memories of things past, no grandmothers with madeleines and tea, let alone any positive memories of whole wheat baked goods. If anything, all I could think about was how delicious this was, how much I wanted more, and what else I needed to buy. 

“What have I been missing out on all this time,” I thought. How many combinations of flavour and texture have I not had access to as an eater, as a baker, as someone who bakes for sustenance and as a form of affection? How many other ways could I have said I love you to someone via baked goods? How many experiences and memories was I robbed of? How many of these experiences had we, as a population, has been given culinary short shrift?  

And that’s when the rabbit hole got deeper. That’s when the eater took a seat, and the journalist started asking questions. Why doesn’t everyone know how to bake like this? Why is white flour the norm, on grocery store shelves, in pastry cases, in bakeries? Where is the knowledge that makes this kind of eating accessible, normal, and as tasty as possible? Has it been lost?

Images of wheats at The Bread Lab, in Washington.

What has followed over the past few years has been more than I ever imagined could come from a brownie bite. Research trips that took me from rural Washington to Montreal to Los Angeles to New York. Home baking efforts and recipe testing of multiple cakes, breads, cookies. Long-distance phone calls discussing everything single topic imaginable related to anything and everything grain. Countless conversations about not just eating and growing grains, but who gets to eat and grow it, who gets to collect, assess, and transmit the necessary information that ensures that everyone, anyone, has access to eating something as basic and fundamental as grains, and in their simplest state: whole. 

Recently, I was asked by the gang at Whetstone to talk about all of this on their podcast, Point of Origin. It was a real gift and a privilege to get to talk about all of this. Because like those whole grain baked goods of old, talking about food outside of recipes and travel, can often be dry and dusty. if not borderline unpalatable. But Point of Origin avoids those pitfalls in its work, and I was glad to be a part of that for their latest episode.  You can listen to the episode here, as well as peruse links to some of the people featured in the podcast.

There is so much more to say, to share, to bake, and to taste. I’m a home baker who wants to eat well, who wants to eat delicious things. I’m a writer and journalist who wants to know the story of how we got here. How we got to ease of access to white flour, and lost access to whole grain flours. What did we gain as a society in having such a thing so easily stocked on shelves, and what did we lose: culinarily, agriculturally, culturally, economically, ecologically. All of it.

How to cook onions.

The hardest thing to do when you feel like you are panicking is to slow down.

It can feel antithetical, heretical, or even downright ludicrous to do so when your neurons are firing at unprecedented levels telling you, “There is something wrong, and you need to do something about it.”

And I am doing something about it: I’m turning off the radio, putting my phone on mute, and I am choosing to pay attention to something else, something that doesn’t require a rapid pace, something where I can control the outcome, or at least understand and learn from it. 

Like how long I need to cook these onions. 

In the same vein, I can control what I am going to write about. And save for the following nineteen words, I’m not going to say the words COVID-19, or discuss anything medical or economical. For the next 700 words or so, I’d rather focus on what’s happening in your kitchen, in your head and heart.

In my kitchen, I’ve written down every single item I had in my pantry, freezer and refrigerator: the dried Persian limes I’d forgotten about at the back of the top cupboard, the weighed portions of cooked rhubarb in the freezer, the jar of pickled quinces I made when I was faced with forty pounds of them. 

In my head, I want to weigh my options, figuratively and literally. I’ve combed through the stacks of cookbooks that line the shelves of my kitchen and living room.  Cookbooks with stains on the most popular recipes, as well as cookbooks with barely cracked spines. I want dishes that will ask me to stand in front of said stove, as well as dishes that ask so little of me. I’m looking at you, rice pudding cooked in the oven. (Thank you, Nigella Lawson).

Beans for soup, stew, dips, salads. All beans, all the time.

And in my heart, I want to eat dishes made with quantities and qualities that can be happily consumed on both the day they’re made, as well as the next day as lunch or supper. Especially if that is a day that I can’t find the wherewithal to make any decisions due to being panic-stricken, let alone stand in the front of the stove and make choices about how to feed myself. My heart will need foods that soothe, and rely on very little more than re-heating.

If I can figure out how long I needed to cook the onions, then I can do those things. I can figure out what I need to cook, to please myself, to distract myself, to hone my focus on one task at a time. 

Right now, these onions need a bit more salt to help them sweat. 

I want to make dishes that have been waiting for me, the ones I listed on bookmarks of paper, placed within their respective cookbooks I bought over the years. Last week, it was a Turkish dish, called Pazili Ekmek, a bread dough stuffed with a filling of vegetables. In my case, I made the filling the night before, a soft savoury compote of potatoes cooked with an amorous amount of onions, seasoned with a teaspoon of smoked Turkish pepper flakes and a tablespoon of tomato paste. 

I knew there was a reason I was cooking onions. 

It’s the dishes I’ve never attempted before that are the most satisfying to me right now: not in the eating, but in the process, the gentle focus of my senses. The words gentle, and focus, are words I need to remind myself of.

Congee for a good day, with roasted peanuts, egg, katuo-bsuhi, and black sesame seeds.

That list of ingredients and recipes that I had collated became a game plan. Make a sponge to ferment overnight for tomorrow’s bread. Take the rhubarb out of the freezer for the coffee cake that will satisfy your sweet tooth. The leftover rice in the fridge can be cooked into some sort of ersatz congee, with a light broth made from dried seaweeds and Chinese wood ear mushrooms. It’s perfect for lunch, as all it needs is a light reheat. Maybe an egg or two, poached or hard boiled (if boiled, make extra for tomorrow’s lunch).

Right now, the most sincere, and honest thing I can do for myself is to quietly listen, and semi-intently watch these onions cook down. To feel myself slow down. To listen to the steam condense on the lid and drop back onto the hot skillet. I know (or assume? Maybe I should look at my copy of Harold McGee) that if I do this, they won’t dry out or burn as easily. These onions will become one with the rice and lentils (thank you Melissa Clark) I am cooking. But I also know my own palate, and so I am adding black cardamom to the mix, an extra bay leaf, and a little cumin and coriander to the spice mix in my grinder. Oh, and a touch of feta on top of the whole bowl, because that’s what my belly/brain/body is telling me right now. Tomorrow may be different. No, it will be different, unknown. I don’t know what I will eat, wether I will have the drive to do so, but I do know this: when the meal is ready (made fresh or reheated), a gentle voice will pipe up to remind me, “You got this. You won’t feel like you always do, and you may have a hard time sometimes. But you got this.”

A New Project of Old Words

I sometimes almost forget that I am a francophone.

I wake up every morning hearing words in english coming at me. I spend most of my time speaking it. And although I predominantly write in english, french is my mother tongue. 

But my tongue does not sound out words like most French-Canadians, the vast majority of which live in Quebec and Ontario. In fact, throughout most of my adult life, when I speak with other french-language speakers, I standardise the manner in which I speak, to ensure that I am understood, and to be viewed as a francophone.

Why do I do this?  Well that’s a complicated story.

The crux of it all, is that I grew up in a small french-speaking region of Nova Scotia, Canada. And that small region was surrounded by english-speaking communities, and so a degree of linguistic isolation happened over the past two hundred years.  Add to that a general lack of connectedness towards representations (and access to those things) presented via Canadian mass media and you have the conditions for a community that, in essence, preserved 17th and 18th century phonetics, snytax, grammar, and idiomatic expressions.

Get it? No?  Let me give you an example (with general apologies to any linguists vis-à-vis writing out pronunciation guides):

When Molière would write the word green, he would write it as “vart” not “vert,” which is the current standard.  I, however, say the word as “vart,” with an elongated “ah” sound (similar to the English “far”), rather then “vert,” with a soft “eh” sound. 

It would be pretty easy to say that most people who use any language are aware that the manner in which they speak classes them in some manner: culturally, economically, socially, geographically.  And like most forms of classism, there is a hierarchy. And Acadians, especially those from Nova Scotia, were for a long time classed low on this presumed scale.  Their patois or parler acadien was viewed as archaic at best, quaint in general, and uneducated at its worst.  

An excerpt from Pascal Poirier’s “Le parler franco-acadien et ses origines”, which can be found in its entirety here.

To be clear, I am not a linguist or an etymologist, but I am often moved as to how receptive people are to hearing about the distinct manner in which Acadians of various regions express themselves: from their accents to the particular influences which have forged their manner of speaking. For example, because many Acadians worked in or were adjacent to marine lifestyles, as well as agricultural ones.  In most standard forms of spoken french, one would “lace” their shoes. However, it is common to hear “amarre” for tying one’s laces, let alone anything that needs to be tied together in this manner. At that, the word “amarre” refers to rope, especially ropes one would find on boats. The likelihood of Acadians having access to lace for their shoes, rather than string or rope, is another reason why the word never stuck. What one does on a daily or common basis shapes the role of the language, where and how it is used.

But over the past century, an wave of assertiveness could be found in all sorts of linguistic  communities - not just francophone. The manner in which a person spoke could be seen as a badge of honour, a refusal of linguistic classism. In Acadian popular culture, writers and musicians have been taking the high road with their patois or parler acadien, no matter how one pronounces a word.  People like current parliamentary poet laureate Georgette LeBlanc, musicians like Radio Radio or Lisa LeBlanc have been telling their stories in manners which fits best in their respective mouths.  

And that’s what interests me: what comes out of our mouths as Acadians, and the sheer varieties therein.  

So I started a Twitter feed called @AcadieBaranque, which presents acadian vocabulary words. Baranquer is a verb used by some Acadians which means to chat, talk, speak, in a generally informal manner.  As for where I would source these words, I wanted to give that work - and the words themselves - a bit of credibility, and of accountability. And so I chose three published works detailing the Acadian vernacular: Le Glossaire Acadien by Pascal Poirier, Dictionnaire du français acadien by Yves Cormier and Le Parler de la Baie Sainte-Marie by Félix Thibodeau.  

As I said above, I am not a linguist, but I am interested in words and their usage, and perhaps more so, interested in giving people access to these works where these words are presented.  I am especially interested in presenting the works of Poirier and Thibodeau, both of whom worked tirelessly in preserving Acadian traditions, no matter how they manifested themselves. And for them - and arguably their time frame - the easiest way to identify an Acadian was the manner in which they spoke. So why not give credence to such a thing, but collecting it, and putting it out there for others to read, share, and perhaps find validation of one’s mode of expression. 

Alors, je vous invite d’arrêter de beurdasser votre temps, et baranquons des parlers Acadiens!