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.”

Paying Attention to Time: Old Recipes, New Recipes

Cookbooks and recipes will often tell you to pay attention to what you’re doing. Pay attention so you don’t burn the butter, overwhip the egg whites, overdevelop the gluten. In my case, I should’ve been paying attention to the cookbooks themselves. You never know what they will show you.

When my mother gifted me the family notebooks that would go on to become the basis for Pantry and Palate, she also handed me a series of seemingly random books and small pamphlets along with the handwritten family notes. 

My mother had told me that her father - as well as her grandfather - had run a small general/dry goods store for decades in the village of La Butte where she was raised. In the house where I was raised, all sorts of leftovers from that store could be found. A shelf for motor oil from the 40’s was used to store tools, a pencil in a cup would be emblazoned with slogans like, “Don’t say salt, say WINDSOR SALT”  (I still have the pencil). When I received the pile of cookbooks and pamphlets, in my head, I simply though, “Ok, cool, more promotional items.”

At the time I was so thoroughly focused on writing Pantry that I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the pile. Two of the books ended up on a shelf as decorating accents, with the gentle promise of “I’ll get to you later.”  In a procrastination-based cleaning flurry the pamphlets ended up being bundled up with random papers, put aside, and somewhat forgotten. 

But as I started digging further and further into the recipes for Pantry - let alone all the cookbooks and culinary history tomes I was reading at the time - the more connections I kept seeing. And I’m not talking about specific dishes being found in random community cookbooks. So much sameness that it was interesting onto itself.  That pie recipe in my book? I’m pretty convinced it used to be on the side of a box of shortening. 

No, that pie dough recipe did not come from here. But the first page of this booklet is filled with wonderful quotes such as, “Man’s most important food, fat.”

This is nothing new, really. Culinary historians have pointed this out before, as have food writers and chefs. Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson pointed it out while doing press interviews for The Nordic Cookbook. You see, the thing is that we all love a good recipe, and we love a recipe that works for everyone.

And that’s what a lot of these pamphlets tend to be; trends, notwithstanding. 

Nutrition, especially during times of war rationing, was mentioned often in a lot of these books and booklets. This also speaks to how we viewed the people who created the information in these books, the
Domestic Scientists of the day.

The cookery books of the early 20th century - tempered by war rationing, nutritional science, technology, and so much more - have a lot to contribute to today’s foodstuffs. Can’t find any recipes in your latest cookbooks on what to do with all those random foodstuffs you’ve bought because you saw them on Instagram? I’m looking at you, my beloved quinces. Bored by the same old ideas on what to do with all those blueberries/apples/tomatoes/insert random seasonal item? Five will get you ten you’ll find something unexpected and beautiful in one of those books.

This is not to say that there aren’t strange and arguably unpalatable duds. No, we don’t need another recipe for an overly sweet punch, and the cooking times for some of those meats may be debatable, but that recipe for Irish Moss Blanc Mange is kind of interesting. Coffee Jelly wouldn’t be out of place on a modern dessert plate. What is old is new again, and worth examining.

And don’t forget about the visuals. Yes, that colour plate by today’s standards seem anachronistic at best, unappetizing at worst, but those typefaces are beyond beautiful, as are some of the illustrations placed higgledy piggledy on the pages.

But the beauty for me in all of these books, the thing that sparks my interest in them, is examining them for what they are: conveyers of convenience, archives of alimentary apocrypha, and testaments to taste. They tell you how and what people were truly eating, all the way down to the specific brands - who else was going to teach early 20th century women how to use Magic Baking Powder? And who else would tell you which apple is best to use in what manner like a pamphlet on Nova Scotian apples.

I’ve decided to praise these old cookbooks and pamphlets over on my Instagram feed, under the title Old Recipes, New Recipes (#oldrecipesnewrecipes). The idea is to show that there really is nothing new under the sun, and that sometimes, the old guard is the most interesting guard of all. Check out the hashtag #oldrecipesnewrecipes, and feel free to send me any of your fave old cookbooks at simonathibault@gmail.com.

Trusting your head, your heart, and your hands.

Talking, writing, doing, and dealing with food is all about trust - trusting you have the right story, words, the right seasoning, the right touch.

That trust is what I talked about in a recent Saturday that I spent at the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, teaching a workshop on food writing. 

Many thanks to Sara Jewell for the image.

About a dozen people showed up, and we talked about everything from nostalgia to ethics, culinary history to personal storytelling, and everything in between. I brought up classic examples of food writing from Brillat-Savarin to MFK Fisher, culinary historians and chroniclers like Paula Wolfert, as well as contemporary writers like Julia Turshen and Nik Sharma. I wanted to show that food writing is as varied as it’s authors, and that it’s scope is more than just a recipe that tells you to dump and stir. 

I’d like to thank the WFNS for having me, and for the wonderful group that showed up. If all goes well, I’ll be teaching other workshops like this one later on in the new year.

But back to cooking, and to the seasons: 

A box of fragrant quinces from my parents’ orchard.

I can’t decide if fall is for the heart, or the head.

I’ve closed the windows in my apartment, but the oven door is in a state of constant flux. Open and close, baked goods in and out.  Fall makes us want to settle in, ruffle pillows and blankets to warm us, and seek out sources of heat. The biggest source of heat in my apartment these days is my oven. 

And I think my heart likes it that way.

This isn’t to say that my relationship to my oven is strictly emotional. In fact, these days my head is swimming with ratios, queries, decisions, calculations. 

I’ve been working on a recipe for a whole grain cornmeal skillet cake, something which at first seemed pretty basic. It all started with a recipe from Erin French’s The Lost Kitchen (Sidenote: if you grew up in/near the New England states, or Atlantic Canada, do yourself a favour and read it, as so much of it will sing to you). 

I’ve bastardized her recipe, replacing this with that, trying this ingredient with another. Part of it is hubris: I want to see what I can make. How far can I adapt, what can I learn in playing around? But the other part is an exercise in humility: the cake is not where I want it to be. There is much work to be done, things to tweak, figure, play with. I won’t ignore the original, and when people ask where I got the idea, I make sure they know it started with that recipe. But a really good recipe can give you a bit of agency, a bit of liberty.  And if you really want to see what you can do, and you pay attention while you’re doing it, the head will lead the heart to a place where both can speak.  I fell in love with possibilities, and I enjoy the thought process. I’ll let you know when my head and the heart both enjoy the cake.

I recently had an exercise in letting my heart, or more precisely my hands, lead the way, without thinking too hard. I trusted that I could do it if I just let it be.  

My friend Pat had contacted me a few months ago about a french-language television show he was working on. I won’t get too much into details, but let’s just say it involves hunting, a house that’s off-grid, and a bunch of hungry mouths to feed. Now I knew about the hungry mouths, but I was expecting six, maybe eight. Nope. By the time things got underway, there were over a dozen people to feed.  

Ok then.

I’m used to knowing where the pots and pans are, used to the amount and variety of ingredients I have in the house,  how heavy the cake pan is, how hot my oven runs. But this wasn’t my kitchen. I was making a fricot - a hearty acadian stew - but this time I was making it with partridges they had caught. 

One of the aforementioned partridges - technically a grouse, but we colloquially call them “pardrix” amongst ourselves in french-speaking southwestern Nova Scotia.

Have I mentioned I’ve never cooked partridge before?

I mean, I’ve had it, as I grew up in a household where it was present, along with a lot of other forms of wild game. The flavours, the challenges of cooking with game are not uncommon to me, and thankfully not too intimidating. But I was asked to make a fricot with said partidges. And even though I’ve written a book that features fricot, I’ve not made it umpteen times like many of the people who would be sitting at this table would’ve. These were my people - a table of Acadians, not to mention a few extra crew members who had never had the dish before.

So I winged it, no hunting puns intended.

I sautéed onions, more onions than I thought I might need. When making soup, you can never have too many onions.  I seared the meat ever so slightly, to create the beginnings of a fond, that rich meaty base for so many soups. I added the water, a carrot or two for flavour, and let it simmer. Once the partridge was cooked, Pat and I took the meat off the bones - those tiny, tiny bones - and put them aside while the broth simmered away, reducing ever so gently. He and I rasped the potatoes for the potato dumplings, or poutines for our fricot au poutines rapées à la perdrix. While the fricot was cooking, the broth reducing and slowly growing in flavour, I started to work on the pies. And this is where my hesitation was put aside.

Like I said earlier, this wasn’t my kitchen. I didn’t have the comfort of my mixer, let alone a pastry cutter/blender. I’m of a generation that relies on machines to do the work for me in a kitchen. A stand mixer, immersion blender, tools that give you time and ease. I had flour, lard, a couple eggs, a bag of apples, and my hands. And to be honest, I learned to stop using my head, and trust my heart. Or rather the next best thing: my hands.

I have to admit, the capacity to trust my hands has taken time. That agency I mentioned above? It’s not an overnight thing. It takes time. Trust in one’s self. And a gentle push.

At that moment in time, that push was feeding people, and not fucking up in front of cameras. 

My hands knew to cut the lard into small pieces, and that it should feel a certain way when mixed into the flour.  They knew the dough needed just a bit more water to come into it’s shape.  My stand mixer would’ve told me to look, but my hands told me more than I can glean from looking. In fact, this felt way more usable, practical, and doable than any other pie I’ve made.

Before you ask, of course I was nervous. This wasn’t a recipe testing session for just me and myself, or a family gathering where I could pawn it off. This was for an audience, an audience of people in this room, and for the people who would be watching this later on television.

Did I mention that I was doing all this cooking with a camera crew following my every step?

But I’d read the recipe before. Heck, I’d written it. But it was in the doing, not the reading or writing, that it felt right.

The aforementioned pies, via Pat’s IG feed.

The pies turned out great. In fact, these were some of the flakiest pies I’ve ever made. Because I was gentle with the dough, because I pushed myself, just a little, because my hands, my head, and my heart, told me that I could, and should.