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| Sentier des Saveurs 2013 (Photos: Sarah Watson) |
by Jessie Duffy
“Every bite of food we chew has a story” - California Food Literacy Centre
The stories found in food are vast and telling but identifying a food culture is no easy task. The omnipresent experience of food pervades every day of our lives, whether we are eating or not, and links us to a complicated web of connections too profoundly large to truly understand in its whole. In snapshots, we stand a chance. Through our experiences in the places we live, we can use food as a lens to examine our community identity and appreciate the complexity of its nature.
In an opportunity to examine food culture in Vanier, I felt I was presented with an intriguing snapshot at a recent event. The Sentier des Saveurs (Pathway of Tastes), as part of the celebrations for St Jean Baptiste, offered various delectables prepared and presented by organizations and businesses from the community. Representing the VCA, our group mustered up a menu of items for the event, sourced as locally as possible and intended to invoke linkages to Francophone cuisine. Armed with tomato tarts, rhubarb crumble and strawberry punch we began a journey into the cuisine and culture of Vanier.
The strawberry punch was the immediate and clear hit. On an abysmally grey, mist-filled day in June it was hard not to see why it was the top-seller. One woman ended up returning every five minutes or so, coyly stating that this one was for her husband, this one her daughter, and so forth. A likely story. Interestingly enough, the strawberry juice, or Strawberry Agua Fresca, is a recipe for a popular sweet drink found in the bodegas, taquenas, and amongst the foodstuffs of street vendors in Latin America and the southern States. A far cry from Francophone cuisine. Even though we had sourced the strawberries from a local farm in Quebec, if any dish was stretching a cultural designation, this was it.
We prepared our puff pastry tarts with generous smears of lemon goat cheese or chevre, a slice of tomato (also from a Quebec farm), and a few dashes of a thyme-infused honey-sherry vinegar. A more appropriate choice would have been apple cider vinegar as the use of apples made into vinegar (also brandy, known as Calvabec, a Quebec version of Calvados) would have been much more prolific. While not quite traditional we felt that the tarts were ultimately Francophone in spirit: classic ingredients and utterly delicious.
Despite our multiple attempts to explain the tarts it was obvious that the masses already knew what they really were: Pizza! In the end it was not a misrepresentation for our tartes au tomate et chevre. After all, pizza in its simplest form describes a bread, typically a flatbread, topped with tomato and cheese. The classic Neapolitan version was introduced to the Americas by Italian immigrants and gained its dominance after WWII with the advent of chain restaurants. Most people know a pizza when they see one and that day our fellow Vanier residents were not to be fooled.
On to dessert.
How could we possibly go wrong with rhubarb crumble? Golden crusts of oats, brown sugar and butter (lots of butter) layered over crisp apple and tart rhubarb caramelized in maple. An infamous recipe made with all local ingredients had to be a sure-fire bet at the Francophone festival.
Alas, it would turn out that this classic pioneer recipe of British origin was not as traditional as we might have assumed. It required just as much explanation as the tarts and seemed to elicit more confusion than anything. One fellow had himself convinced that we were serving Chinese food! And no, he was not confusing the dish for the infamous pâté chinois although one would think the two are related. Pâté chinois, or Shepherd’s Pie, stems from a19th century recipe brought home by Quebec migrants. It consisted of layered meat and potatoes, a common meal during their stints in the milling town of China, Maine.
Meanwhile Dominic, our resident chef and translator, was stealthily gathering all of the succulent items being served up on the tables around us. Tortière, creton, fèves au lard, soupe au pois, sucre à creme, tarte au sucre, all the usual suspects were there including that profound powerhouse, poutine. Distinctively Francophone, undeniably tasty. We gobbled these up with gusto (at least, the omnivores among us did; traditional fare was not overly friendly to our vegetarian confrères) and slowly came to realize maybe we had slightly missed the mark.
There was no denying the time-honoured eminence of those dishes. Our neo-traditional menu invoked some unexpected reactions and highlighted the perplexing intricacies of identifying a food culture in our unique community. If poutine and tortière are permanently embedded in Francophone cuisine, then surely there is a beloved place for pizza in the culinary landscape of Vanier.