New Things for Spring: A book, a tour, and a talk or two

After over two years of research, cooking, writing, editing - and a lovely photo session - Pantry and Palate is finally hitting bookshelves in May. 

Because I've spent so much time living within that book for so long, I will admit I am at a bit of a loss for words when it comes to tell you what it's like to live outside of it. The work is done. The book is being printed and bound as I type this.  I will have a copy in my hands in a couple weeks. Copies of it will be sent to pre-sale buyers in Canada after May 30th. You can pre-order your copy at Amazon.ca, over at Indigo.ca and via Nimbus Publishing. But for those of you who can wait until it's in stores, might I suggest you check out your local independent bookstore? It's always a good idea.

But the buzz has already started. Chatelaine magazine mentioned it in their 10 Cookbooks We Want This Spring and Amazon has listed it in their  Hot New Releases in Canadian Cookbooks.  And the book isn't even out on shelves yet. (Excuse me while someone helps me pick my jaw up off the floor.)

Now begins the promotional part of the book, and I'm headed to the Terroir Symposium in Toronto on May 29th at the Art Gallery Of Ontario. I'll be on a panel with other speakers reflecting on the origins of French-Canadian cuisine (and Acadian as well!) and its current path. It also looks like I'll be doing some interviews and a bit of promotional work while I am there.  

After that I am off to New York with the gang from Nimbus Publishing to  Book Expo  America where I'll be signing copies of Pantry and Palate. And if I know myself, I'll be heading to a few bookstores - namely Kitchen Arts And Letters and Bonnie Slotnick - to fill up my suitcase for the trip home. Last time I went, I kind of went overboard and ended up paying $100 at the airport because my luggage was over. But lesson learned: bring an empty carry-on just for books. 

But my favourite upcoming event is happening here in Halifax, with a book launch at the Halifax Public Library's Central Branch. I'll be talking about the process of how the book came to be, the importance of culinary history, documenting food ways, and of course, serving up a wee bit of grub. 

Now that the book is in the can - I should be holding a copy in my hands in the next week or so - expect to see more updates, more stories, and more info about Pantry and Palate and much more. Stay tuned!

Filling up the Pantry

It’s one thing to write about food: the making of, the context, the eating. But to capture it in the blink of an eye - or a shutter - is to see it in the way that we experience it. Visceral, pleasurable, and immediate. 

When I saw my blurred hands in the frame, it all strangely came into focus.

Image by Noah Fecks, Noahfecks.com

It was the first day of shooting for my upcoming book, Pantry and Palate. My photographer, Noah Fecks, had arrived the day before from New York, and we were settling in at the location for the shoot. Bags upon bags of fabrics, plates, utensils - and more paper towels than you would ever think you would need - were strewn about the kitchen. 

Noah and I were working on shots of ingredients for the book. I wanted people who may not be familiar with certain ingredients to know what they should look for, and I also wanted them to see a certain kind of beauty in the ingredients themselves. Even the most humble of ingredients can be well packaged, let alone quite striking on its own if you look at it in a new context. 

But we only had a few days to shoot. The list of shots was long, time was short. Today’s last ingredient shot was for salted onions, a condiment/seasoning used in a lot of Acadian cooking in southwestern Nova Scotia. “Tell me how you would make this, and what it would be used for,” said Noah. I explained how it was used to season soups and stews, and even went into the history of salting herbs throughout much of french-speaking Canada. “Yeah, but I want you to show me how it’s made.”

I had tested most of my recipes - and sent them to others for testing - but this was a recipe I had yet to make.  I grew up in a household where every summer, bunches upon bunches of green onions would be collected - either grown in the backyard, or occasionally bought - and the salting of the onions would begin.  When I was a kid, I thought it was a horrible smell, a harsh sulphuric haze that hung in the kitchen. My parents eyes would be slightly misty from the incessant chopping, and the windows would be open to air out the place. 

And then there would be salt. What seemed like an obscene amount of salt would be poured over the onions, covering them in a fine salty snow.  They would sit overnight in that dry brine, their moisture leaching slowly overnight and pooling at the bottom of the big tupperware containers that held them.  The next morning there would be more salt poured over them, and then they would be packed into jars, to be put up for the upcoming winter and fall.  Later in my life, my mother told me a secret that if I were to freeze the jars, that the onions inside would keep their vibrant colour. “It just looks better than the dull green that it turns into,” she would say.

And so here I was, chopping scallions, waiting for Noah to tell me when to stop and go so he could get the perfect shot. I joked that my knife skills are less than stellar, and he kept on clicking.  I grabbed a large wooden bowland scraped the chopped scallions into it. 

I had written down the recipe, as dictated to my father, as it had been told to him. “Add salt, and then more salt. And when you think you have enough, add some more.”  I called him once again, just to make sure. “Yup,” he said, “that’s the way to do it.”

Even though I had never done this, my nose told me what to do.  As he clicked away, Noah noted that I wasn’t joking when I'd said that I would be using almost the whole kilogram of salt for what seemed like a paltry amount of scallions. I repeated what my father and grandfather had said. “When you think you have enough, add some more.”

We started setting up another shot, this one of me tossing the mixture together. Noah stood over me slightly, holding the camera at an odd angle. “I’ll tell you when to start,” he said. My hands hovered over the bowl. I wanted people to see what this looked like. I wanted those who had never done this before to feel confident, and that they too could make this. And cook with it.

“Go.”

Image by Noah Fecks, noahfecks.com

When we were done, Noah pulled me aside to look at that day’s shots.  There were shots of  salted fish, molasses, a very large blood sausage, and even a pig’s head. But there was something about the tossing of those scallions. A little life. A little history A little pride. 

Pantry And Palate - a centuries old discussion

When it comes to food, it’s hard to say that any food culture is completely isolated from those that surround it, no matter how different the surrounding regions and populations may be. This is something which has become drilled into me in my work as a journalist and food writer. There are questions of colonisation, economics, geography, and so much more.

But when you start digging into these topics, you never know how far back in time or how far in terms of geography you will go. This is what I’ve discovered as I work on finishing my book, tentatively titled, Pantry and Palate. It will explore the history and food of my ancestors, the Acadians of Atlantic Canada, and examine those very qualities.

On my kitchen table is a small collection of little black notebooks. Handwritten notes in perfect cursive fill their tan pages. These are recipes written down by my grandmother, and by my great-great-aunt. But they resemble lists of ingredients, rather than what we would call a recipe today.  For example, a recipe for a Molasses Cake asks for :

1 1/2 cups molasses

1 1/2 tsp soda

1/2 cup of grease

1 cup milk

2 cups flour

That’s it. That’s all that either of these women needed to be able to make and bake this cake. No notes on how or in what order to add the ingredients. Not to mention temperatures or baking times. There was a hard-earned and encyclopedic knowledge behind these recipes, and it was located at the fingertips of these women. These lists were reminders of the necessary ratios necessary to execute a dish. It’s a confidence that most home bakers rarely possess these days, let alone on the scale that most women would have possessed when these notes were written.

And yet these notes are vital in my search for understanding the cookery of my ancestors.  They give me insight into the kind of knowledge that the people who cooked these meals had in their possession, as well as the necessities of cooking. There are variations on most recipes, with names of people long gone. “Zita’s molasses cookies” could be found next to a recipe for a “Golden Cake.” It didn’t take me long to realize that this cake was referring to the flour company that used to exist and distribute its wares in the first few decades of the 20th century, and not to the colour of the cake. That recipe didn’t make it to the book, but it still told me what and how people were cooking, and sharing cooking knowledge. Even the stuff that doesn’t immediately fit the the mold, has a place, somewhere, somehow. It’s all important.

This recipe for Scalloped Cabbage assumes that the home cook knows how to make a white sauce. Luckily, my grandmother had gone to finishing school and knew how to make one without thinking. Today, however, that white sauce would have its own recipe, written underneath.

There is a recipe for doughnuts, written directly below a recipe for making boudin, or blood sausage. At first glance, this seemed to be a strange, yet arbitrary placement. It wasn’t until I spoke with a few people did I realize that this was no coincidence. Boudin was often made on the same day that pigs were slaughtered, due to the freshness of the main ingredient, pig’s blood. But there was another abundant and fresh ingredient on days of the boucherie, or slaughter. Fat. Creamy, white, pure back fat, perfect for deep frying. Acadians were fans of salted pork fat, as it was a major part of their pantries in the days before refrigeration and supermarkets filled with shelf-stable fats.  But fresh fat could almost be considered a rarity, since boucheries were often only held in the fall. So why not treat yourself to a hot and tasty treat after all that hard work? 

But this is only the beginning of what I found in digging into my ancestry’s culinary past. One of the recipes I found in those same notebooks was for a molasses and cornmeal bread.  Funny enough, I also found a recipe for the same bread in a community cookbook, published by a nearby church group in a neighbouring english community. This community is also populated by descendants of former Loyalists, both black and white. Many of these loyalists came from parts of the American south, where cornmeal is king. My ancestors spoke mostly french, were catholic, and white. Yet here was an english speaking, protestant, and black community, not far from my own, and our pantries and bellies were filled with the same food. Just goes to show that food is food, and good food is contagious. It travels from mouth to mouth, from community to community. It creates dialogues that last centuries and connect cultures.

The first draft of Pantry and Palate is due at the start of next month, and I am furiously finishing recipes, writing up the last of my interviews, and remembering all the little details I wanted to include. This act of writing may be one of solitude, but the recipes and information found within show that when it comes to food, no one is alone.

Get out the Gravy

This spring, I had the chance to meet two very lovely people. John T. Edge and Tina Antolini from the Southern Foodways Alliance. The two of them were on cloud nine after having won the James Beard Award for Gravy, their magazine and podcast. 

Tina and started chatting, and soon the idea of telling an Acadian/Cajun story came up.  From that idea came this story, The Cajun Reconnection. 

The front page of the SFA's website. The photo shown was taken in 1936, of a delegation of Cajuns visiting Nova Scotia. 

Doing the research and interviews for this story has been not only a great experience, but a familial one as well. Talking to the subjects, I kept coming across  more and more intricate Acadian and Cajun connections. This person knew that person, that person was related to this one, and even some of the stories I heard were even connected to Gravy itself.  At one point, Georgette and Rachelle were talking about Tante Sue, a well known patron of Fred's Lounge. 

It's a small world indeed. But this is a big story. Take a listen on the Southern Foodways website, or on iTunes.  You can also listen to it on Gravy's Soundcloud page. 

How is a region of the far north—Canada—intimately connected to a region 2,000 miles away in the Deep South? In this episode of Gravy, the story of the Acadians and the Cajuns, and how they’re reconnecting… through gumbo.

Talking Culinary History, in both official languages.

Over the past few weeks, I have been repeating two words, over and over: culinary heritage.

One of the reasons for this is because I recently signed a book deal with Nimbus Publishing to write a book on Acadian cookery.   The book will be an exploration of the Acadian pantry and palate, looking at recipes, traditions, methods, and the items found in Acadian kitchens throughout the Atlantic region. 

Because of this research, I was asked to speak at the Festival de Clare-té in Church Point, Nova Scotia, on March 21st. The arts and culture festival is put on by the Fédération régional des arts et du patrimoine de la Baie. This was my second time at the festival, and this year I spoke on and about some of the research I have been doing, looking into the agricultural, economic, cultural, and historical connections that make up the Acadian kitchen.

In the same vein, I was asked to speak on two separate programs on Radio-Canada.  The first was on Le Réveil, Radio-Canada's french-language morning show for Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, talking about the conference, as well as my upcoming book. I also spoke on Tout Un Samedi, their Saturday morning current affairs program broadcast throughout the Atlantic Provinces. 

To top it all off, I was also recently asked to be a guest on CTV Morning Live, where host Heidi Petracek and I talked about the importance of - and interest in - older culinary traditions, methods, and recipes. You can watch the segment here. 

Joining CTV Morning Live's Heidi Petracek and talking about old kitchens and the meals that came out of them.

In the meantime, I plan on conducting more and more research, interviews, and digging around as much as I can on this topic. If you have any information or tips of any sort on this subject, please don't hesitate to contact me.