Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Category : books

Flowers from the Bird Lady

BIRDLADY from FORTNIGHT LINGERIE on Vimeo.

Parkdale, my neighbourhood since 1993, is known for its many characters. People who make the place unique and colourful, people who definitely dance to their own drummer. For 90 some-odd years, one of those characters was Annie Ross. Born in the building that stands on the south-west corner of Queen and Dunn in 1913, she lived there her entire life until her death in 2004. Miss Ross never married, instead running her family’s flower shop at the front of the building, and spending her retirement years in a small apartment at the back where she was known for feeding the local pigeons; thus her nickname, The Bird Lady.

Miss Ross could tell you stories of how Parkdale had changed and grown. She could remember when the lot directly across the street from her on Dunn was a field for horses. She could tell about how the buildings went up along Queen, or how the mansions along Jameson came down to make way for apartment buildings. And she could tell you about books. In a 4-minute short documentary filmed before her death, she talks about how she began keeping track of all the books she read in her lifetime, some 8,600 different titles.

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Won’t You Take Me To Hungry Town

Tom Fitzmorris’s Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything
Tom Fitzmorris
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2010, 224 pages

Anybody who has ever strolled the streets of New Orleans, lazy with the humidity and history, overcome by the wafting smells of magnolias interspersed with a blast of jambalaya, knows that the crescent city is a town that loves its food. From beignets and acrid chicory-laced coffee at the touristy Cafe du Monde to po’boy sandwiches served up at some place in the 9th Ward with no sign to even let people know it exists, New Orleanians like to eat.

Nobody knows this better than food writer Tom Fitzmorris. The man who has been writing about food in New Orleans since the early 70s is probably the most knowledgeable person in the world on the subject of New Orleans restaurants and Cajun and Creole food. To say the guy is high-functioning would be an understatement – he does a daily 3-hour radio show about New Orleans food (can you imagine? 3 hours a day – just about local food and restaurants?), writes reviews almost daily, hosts a weekly dining event and runs The New Orleans Menu, a website on dining in New Orleans that is updated daily.

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Book Review – What’s to Eat: Entrees in Canadian Food History

What’s to Eat? Entrees in Canadian Food History
edited by Nathalie Cooke
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, 310 pages

I appear to have gotten seriously distracted from “book review week” but this is the last of the lot. I saved it for last because it’s actually my least favourite (which might explain the long delay in writing the review).

I’m not saying that What’s to Eat? is bad, it’s just very, very dry. While it runs the gamut of topics from First Nations cuisine to the introduction of chocolate in Canada to the demographics of cookbook usage in Quebec, this collection of essays about Canadian food is, at its base, a collection of essays, in food studies, that are approached from a predominantly clinical, statistical point of view.

So while the topics themselves are interesting; the rise and fall of red fife wheat; the debate on whether there is a “Canadian” cuisine, and what it consists of; the history of the tourtiere in Quebec, there’s not a lot of excitement in the writing itself. And I can’t help feeling that there should be.

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Book Review – Baking as Biography

Baking as Biography – A Life Story in Recipes
Dianne Tye
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 260 pages, $24.95

Most of us can look to a mother or grandmother as a cooking mentor; someone who taught us the basics of home cooking, and who shared their love of the craft and inspired us to try new dishes and expand our cooking repertoires. But what of the poor souls whose mothers didn’t cook, or worse, who didn’t cook well? What of the people who mothers cooked, but hated it?

Dianne Tye had one such mother. A minister’s wife in the Maritimes during the 70s, Tye’s mother was obligated to cook, not just for family, but for myriad church and community events, but never truly enjoyed it.

Tye herself went on to become a Women’s Studies professor at Memorial University, and tells her story in two distinct voices; first the clinical voice of science, observing trends in food and social norms during her childhood, and analyzing how they affected her mother, and in turn her family with regards to what she baked, when, and for whom. But when recalling specific stories about her mother, her baking for various events or a description of the dish, Tye’s voice becomes softer, more familial, verging at times on romanticized. This jump can be disconcerting as Tye attempts to distance herself from the information.

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Book Review Week – Feasting and Fasting

Feasting and Fasting – Canada’s Heritage Celebrations
Dorothy Duncan
Dundurn Press, 2010, 351 pages

Anybody who has every met Dorothy Duncan can agree on two things – that’s she adorable, and that she knows more about the food history of Canada than all the rest of us put together.

Arranged chronologically through a calendar year, Feasting and Fasting looks at the foods and food-related traditions that go with various holidays celebrated by Canadians. From Robbie Burns Day, Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year to Thanksgiving and Christmas, every holiday includes specific dishes or activities that include (or exclude) food. Duncan also examines some seasonal activities that centre around food, such as the running of the maple syrup in early spring and events like picnics and garden parties in the summer.

Each entry offers a bit of history and explains the evolution of the related feast, particularly as it applies to new immigrants in Canada in colonial times who might not have access to traditional ingredients.

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Book Review Week – Out of Old Ontario Kitchens

Out of Old Ontario Kitchens
Christine Bates
Pagurian Press Ltd. 1978, 190 pages, out of print

My local used book shop, besides being supervised by one of the coolest felines ever and occasional guarded by Thor the Thunder Poodle, is a treasure trove of cool old stuff, and the food writing shelf almost always contains something that just has to come home with me.

I grabbed Out of Old Ontario Kitchens thinking is was the Upper Canada version of Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens, a cookbook that I grew up with in Halifax. While it’s similar, the Nova Scotia book is straight-up recipes, while the Ontario book also has bits of history and anthropology that offer explanations of the many dishes included.

Christine Bates, at the time that she wrote this book in the late 70s, was a senior historical interpreter at Montgomery’s Inn, a historic museum just outside of Toronto. Bates began a search for pre-Confederation recipes and food references in conjunction with her work at the museum which boasts a working Victorian-era kitchen, and besides hosting tours, also hosts a variety of food-related events throughout the year.

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Book Review Week – 97 Orchard

97 Orchard An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
Jane Ziegelman
HarperCollins, 2010, 254 pages

97 Orchard Street is known today as the New York City Tenement Museum. Built in 1863 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, over the course of 70 years, it was home to over 7000 people. Initially lacking in gas, electricity and running water, and some rooms having no windows, it was the lowest, cheapest, dirtiest housing available to new immigrants.

Lack of amenities, and often lack of access to ingredients they were familiar with meant that immigrant families living in the tenements of the Lower East Side had to adapt. Ziegelman traces the stories of five immigrant families (Irish, Italian, German and Eastern European Jews) and looks at the influence these cultures had on the foodways of New York City. From German-owned breweries, Russian tea rooms, Jewish delis and Italian restaurants, each successive wave of immigrants altered the local food culture.

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Book Review Week

Writers sometimes joke that being a writer is like doing homework all the time. The essays and book reviews we are relieved to be rid of when we leave school are a constant in our daily work lives. If someone had told me 30 years ago that I’d willingly write “book reports” for a living when I grew up, I’d have been one very unhappy girl. And choosing to write book reports doesn’t mean that writers don’t procrastinate, especially if there’s no deadline or pay cheque to act as an incentive. Which explains why I have enough books stacked up here by my desk to fill a week with reviews of books on food history. Perhaps a self-imposed deadline and announcing it to the world will do the trick.

Four of the five books I’ll be writing about this week are by Canadian writers, covering Canadian food. The last, while focused around the tenements of New York, shares enough parallels with the changes in Canadian foodways over the years that I’ve included it, as it also reflects the experience of Canadian immigrants and their contribution to Canadian food culture just as US immigrants changed the way people in that country eat.

Check back each morning this week as I review a new book, and get into the back to school spirit by doing homework without the incentive of pay OR a gold star.

This Is the Chinese Cookbook You’ve Been Waiting For

I appear to have created a recurring series of food and recipe book reviews based on books I’ve found in my building’s laundry room. The Fabulous Chinese Cookbook by Harry K. Long dates back to 1965 and this particular copy has been much-used based on the dog-eared pages and splatters and spills, particularly for the “Broccoli with Beef” recipe. The previous owner appears to have been a smoker, so The Fabulous Chinese Cookbook won’t be staying in my collection as even flipping through it causes wafts of stale cigarette smell that give me a headache and make me nauseous. But I’ll endure for long enough to talk about it for a bit.

The preface about the author indicates that he was a well-respected Vancouver chef with a desire to share his recipes before he retired. It also indicates that Mr. Kam Long, who is presumably the Harry K. Long from the cover, “shares his experience in fine cooking by teaching you to prepare extraordinarily tasty and wholesome food, suitable for any diet and pocketbook.”

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Summer Reading – Lunch With Lady Eaton

Lunch with Lady Eaton – Inside the Dining Rooms of a Nation
Carol Anderson and Katharine Mallinson
206 pages, Ecw Press; April, 2004

When the first department stores opened across the country, they were considered to be (as they sometimes still are now) the death knell for small Mom & Pop stores that specialized in one niche market. And while some department stores like Wal-Mart continue to expand their grocery offering, higher-end shops have all but wiped out their food and grocery departments to specialize in higher-end luxury goods. But there was a time when Canadian department stores not only sold every dry good item imaginable, but they also made and sold food, both in their restaurants and as grocery items.

Case in point would be the long-defunct Eaton’s. The beloved Canadian department store chain began as a dry goods and hardware store under the guidance of founder Timothy Eaton. Early on, the store included coffee shops and restaurants in addition to a massive food hall. Eaton’s made their own baked goods on site, they owned dairies in rural Ontario which supplied the cream for the store to make its own butter, and by the early 1900s, the lunchroom of the downtown Toronto store was serving 5000 meals a day.

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