STAPLES

CANADIAN C˜ SSICS

TEN ICONIC CANADIAN FOODS AND THE STORIES BEHIND THEM— ALONG WITH A HANDFUL OF EXEMPLARY RECIPES. BY ELIZABETH BAIRD PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES TSE

BUTTER TARTS

BUTTER TARTS

recipe on page 146

“One cup of sugar, 1⁄2 cup of butter, 2 eggs, 1 cup currants; mix. Fill tarts and bake. Mrs. Malcolm MacLeod.” This two-line recipe is thought to be the frst printed recipe for what we now call butter tarts. Together with its title, simply, “Filling for tarts,” it appeared in the Women’s Auxiliary of the Royal Victoria Hospital Cook Book, a 1900 fundraiser for the Barrie, Ont., hospital. Mrs. MacLeod didn’t o˛er plain, raisin or pecan as picky modern butter tart lovers demand. She couldn’t have predicted the many di˛erent versions of butter tarts Canadian bakers have devised—coconut, bacon bits, cranberries, blueberries and chèvre, raspberry jam, peanut butter, apple and cinnamon, candied ginger, peaches and pumpkin. Nor could she have envisaged that her tarts would become a Canadian icon boasting a self-directed butter tart trail north of Guelph, a 50-stop butter tart tour that winds through the Kawarthas and Northumberland County, and in Midland, Ontario’s Best Butter Tart Festival, where 120 bakers, professional and amateur, vie to be top butter tart baker. Now in its ffth year, the festival draws some 50,000 fans who have dibs on the 150,000 butter tarts for sale from vendors lining King Street. Although the frst butter tart recipe was sweetened with sugar, recipes like ours, which include maple syrup or corn syrup, became very popular. Syrup made for a runnier butter tart—for some the pinnacle of butter tart perfection.

POUTINE

Like it or leave it, poutine is us. Its parts—fries, gravy and cheese curds—all existed in diner/café cuisine, but when and how the threesome got together is disputed. Some believe it happened in the late 1950s at the Cafe Ideal in Warwick, Que.; others support Drummonville’s Jean-Paul Roy, self-proclaimed “l’inventeur de la potion” a decade later. But, once launched, poutine took o˜, invading every main street, mall and truck stop in Canada. It’s cheap and flling but can go upscale—the Canadian Embassy in Washington’s Trump Inauguration buffet featured a poutine station.

While poutine, a “mess” in Quebec slang, looks simple, the deliciousness is in the details. Quebec is a dairying province, and fresh cheese curds, the iconic Quebec snack, are sold everywhere. Curds, not grated cheese! No matter how fancy-pants the chef may be, it’s curds, and they must be squeaky, i.e. not older than a day. Shipped-from-away curds? Non. The gravy, chicken or beef has to be hot enough to soften but not melt the curds, and the frites must keep their crunch, in spite of the gravy.

SALT COD CAKES

recipe on page 147

SALMON

Six di˜erent species of Pacif c salmon—chinook, coho, sockeye, steelhead, pink and chum—and one Atlantic have nourished First Nations for millennia, a fresh feast in the summer and fall runs, and wind- and sun-dried for winter. Poached whole salmon has long been the pièce de résistance at fancy receptions; canned, it anchors tea parties and school lunches alike. Cold smoked salmon remains an upper crust canapé and a faithful companion to bagels with cream cheese. To cook salmon in a West Coast First Nations’ method, split the salmon along the backbone, gut it and rub it with salt and sugar. Thread it onto a sturdy stick; weave thin sticks across the salmon to hold it open. Press the stick into the ground with the salmon facing burning coals. Roast until it takes on crisp caramelized edges and a woodsy smokiness.

COD

The cod fshery in Canada has a long history, going back over a millennium to Vikings, then Basque fshers who caught and salted their catch before North America was oÿcially “discovered.” Everywhere salt cod was fshed or traded, it left its mark. It’s the prized Christmas Eve fare in Portugal, Spain and Italy, and the memory of salt cod lives on in Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and salt fsh. And certainly on the table of Canadians, notably along the Atlantic coast, cod was always king, the main ingredient in many colourful dishes. Take fried cod tongues—just what they are. Fish soup made with cod heads. Fish and chips served to the post-pub crowd with a side dish of dressing made of bread and onions, à la roast turkey. Cod au gratin—fresh fllets covered in a cheddar cream sauce, baked and crisped under the broiler. Fish and brewis—salt cod soaked to remove the salt, combined with softened hard tack and a generous topping of diced and crispy fried salt-pork scrunchions. No part of the fsh was wasted. Thrifty cooks took advantage of leftover cod and potatoes, mixed in an egg, and formed the mixture into cod cakes—a fne supper and an excellent breakfast.

MAPLE MUSTARD-GLAZED PEAMEAL BACON BARBECUE ROAST

recipe on page 146

PEAMEAL BACON

Peameal bacon is an Ontario thing. True, in recent years globalization has made it available in other provinces, and its distinctively salty-sweet taste has also encouraged visitors from the U.S. to take it home for a Canadian treat.

Peameal bacon starts as boned pork loin, trimmed of all but a thin layer of fat, and wet-cured in a salt and sweet brine. Unlike ham or side bacon strips, it is not smoked, so to give the meat longer shelf life, butchers roll the cured loin in corn meal (up to the end of the Second World War, it was rolled in crushed yellow peas, hence the name). This coating wicks up the moisture and gives peameal bacon its distinctive look and texture.

Credit for popularizing this method of curing pork goes to the entrepreneurial English-born Toronto meat curer and butcher, William Davies. Starting in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market selling his cured hams and bacon, he took advantage of the late-19th-century British demand for bacon, and made a fortune selling a superior leaner pork to Britain.

Of late, peameal bacon has earned the reputation as the signature dish of the St. Lawrence Market, where shoppers line up at Carousel Bakery for a stack of griddled peameal doused with honey mustard and tucked into a soft kaiser bun. At the market, and increasingly in supermarkets, peameal bacon is available as a roast. The 2-lb (1-kg) size called for in our recipe is easy to cook on the grill or in the oven and slices easily with a mustard and maple glaze—ideal for your celebration of peameal bacon.

MAPLE

If you ask anyone what’s the most Canadian food, the answer is bound to be maple syrup. Maple is so much part of our symbolism—the flag, “The Maple Leaf Forever,” the hockey team… In the maple belt (what’s now Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), First Nations watched for the sugar moon, the start of maple season, and gathered to celebrate, collecting sap into birchbark containers and reducing it to syrup and sugar in clay vessels.

Aside from today’s usual products—syrup and sugar—there’s tire à l’érable, or maple ta˜y, beloved in Quebec’s cabanes à sucre (sugar shacks). Commercial sugar shacks in other provinces, notably Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario, are now catching on. It’s so easy to create this crowd pleaser—all you need is fresh clean snow packed down into troughs or pans, wooden sticks (tongue depressors will do fne) and maple syrup. On-site dentist optional.

TOURTIÈRE

There’s more to tourtière, Quebec’s Christmas Eve dish, than pork and flaky pastry. Named for the vessel in which it bakes, tourtière comes in di˜erent regional styles. In Montreal, tourtière tends to mean ground pork, sometimes beef or veal as well, seasoned with savoury (eastern Canada’s signature herb) and always sweet spices, cinnamon and cloves, plus, at times, nutmeg. The thickener that binds the meat, making the pie easy to cut, varies—maybe mashed potatoes, bread crumbs or, revealing past Scottish infuence, rolled oats.

Heading to the Lac St. Jean-Saguenay region, tourtière gets heartier. Cubed meat, onions and potatoes are conveniently sold in supermarkets, to be layered deep-dish-style in a pastry-lined casserole. There’s chicken in the mix, and often game; it’s rich and needs a tart-sweet condiment: pickled beets are popular, as is ketchup aux fruits, a chunky chili sauce with peaches and pears.

CANADA DAY STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE

recipe on page 144

PRESERVES

Preserves once meant survival. Eastern First Nations made sagamité, a mix of dried hominy corn and animal fat, easy to convert into a nutritious stew. In the West, they had pemmican, a nutritious convenience food of dried bu˜alo, berries and fat. To prepare for winter, Canada has taken advantage of every preserving technique: salting fsh, pork and beef; smoking hams; fermenting cabbages into sauerkraut; canning peaches and tomatoes; pickling beets and eggs; and jamming fresh berries. Thanks to modern freezers, we no longer need to preserve the harvest to survive. But many Canadians continue to make their grandmother’s garlicky chutneys or enjoy a corned beef sandwich.

Strawberries also preserve well, and I’m not the first Canadian to encourage Ottawa to proclaim Strawberry Shortcake as Canada’s National Dessert. It’s perfect! Not only is it red and white, but strawberries are in season on our national holiday. And they have a long history— from First Nations festivals honouring “the leader of the berries” to strawberry socials, bringing communities together from Victorian times until today.

True strawberry shortcake is made with fresh baking powder biscuits and combines whipped cream and berries, whole and crushed. But in this recipe, to celebrate Canada’s prowess in preserving, the strawberries are preserved in an old-fashioned Platter Strawberry Jam.

CORN

Corn is the gift of Mexican development thousands of years ago, grown in our part of North America a good half millennium before Europeans arrived, and an honoured part of the Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash) of First Nations agriculture. Canadians love corn, but eating it on the cob breaks the rules of fne dining. In Through Cities and Prairie Lands: Sketches of an American Tour, novelist and travel writer Lady Du˜us Hardy described fellow passengers steaming up the St. Lawrence River in 1881. At the captain’s table, noticing a dish of corn cobs “looking white and tempting,” she asks for a small piece. Flummoxed about how to proceed, she glances at her neighbours: “Every one is holding a cob with his two hands, and, beginning at one end, nibbles along as though he were playing a fute till he gets to the other. I don’t think is worth the trouble of eating, though is considered a great dainty on this side of the Atlantic.”

Well, Canadians have paid no heed. Corn is summer—barbecued and boiled, as street food with lime and chili, as tamales, porridge, polenta, fritters and chowder, salads, cornbread, muffns, relishes and festival food. And we still pick it up in our hands and nibble from one end to the other.

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WILD RICE

Wild rice is a uniquely North American crop and, like corn, salmon and maple, an essential source of the First Nations diet and culture. With its nutty taste, it has long been a Canadian delicacy, an elite crop, but bringing wild rice from its traditional habitat, the still waters of the Great Lakes region, to your plate has always been hard work. Gathering it is “a tedious process” in the words of Catherine Parr Traill in The Canadian Settler’s Guide, published in 1855, especially since wild rice doesn’t ripen all at the same time. The time-honoured method was to bend the wild rice over the gunwales of canoes while crisscrossing rice beds and to tap the kernels into the canoes. Drying, then parching and pounding to remove hulls, followed. Harvesting is now mechanized. Air boats scoop up the kernels into catch trays as they skim the rice beds, and the rice is mechanically dried and threshed. Look for long slender shiny kernels and reward yourself with a taste of Canada.

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