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.

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!

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.