Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Category : food memories

Foie Gras Faux Pas

January 6th 2012 - Posted in Food, food memories
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Every year we buy a food-related calendar for the kitchen. I’m not sure why – in this age of personal electronic devices, wall calendars are pretty much obsolete, and the selection becomes more and more sparse each year. But we have this one section of wall that needs something, and it’s kind of fun to mark the passing of the months by flipping the page and enjoying a new picture for 30 days.

This year, our kitchen calendar is a collection of vintage food ads. None of them are exceptionally remarkable, but they meet the criteria of being food-related and vaguely retro. Like most calendars, we don’t really look at the pictures as “art”; that is, we just enjoy the image and don’t really analyze it too much.

On new year’s day, we opened up the new calendar and flipped it open to January, where the ad is for a brand of foie gras; Edouard Artzner of Strasbourg, France, a company which has been around since 1803.

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Apple Pissybeds

August 21st 2010 - Posted in baking, downeast cooking, Food, food memories, Life, pie
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I’ve written before about learning to cook at the side of my Grandmother. I’ve also written about the revelation that this same Grandmother, who has been responsible for preparing 3 meals a day, for a varying number of hungry mouths, for the past 70 years, actually hates to cook. My cousin and I always assumed that the fun things she let us do while helping her prepare food were meant to be, well, fun. For us. As it turns out they were often ways for her to make the process more interesting for herself, and if she was able to take a shortcut or two in the name of “fun” then all the better.

The “pissybed” is really just a free form pie. In France, it would fall under the header of “galette” if galette meant “shit, my pastry is crap today and isn’t going to roll out properly!” Because this kind of pie is usually what you end up with, albeit unintentionally, if your pie crust is crap. You can make them if your pie crust is fine, as was my Grandmother’s – and mine – but know that unless they get to taste it, people will think this is because your dough is a no-go. My Grandma wouldn’t know a galette from a whosit – there weren’t a lot of fancy French people in rural Nova Scotia. Well, there were once but the English shipped them off to Louisiana to become Cajuns.

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How to Make a Lobster Roll Wehn There’s More Than One Maritimer in the Room

March 11th 2010 - Posted in downeast cooking, fish and seafood, Food, food memories
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We were lucky enough last week to be in on a delivery of Nova Scotia lobster. It seems that, once again, the supermarket chains are undercutting the fishers and are offering a dollar less per pound than it would cost to catch the things. So one enterprising fisher from Yarmouth decided to fill a truck with lobster and head to Toronto. Word went out through a local CSA network and at the appointed date and time, we all showed up, happy to pay $7 a pound  – a couple of bucks less than the cheapest local price and $3 more per pound than the chains were offering the fishers. There were even some local restaurants getting in on the deal, and the general concensus was that it was the best lobster we’d ever had outside of the Maritimes.

Greg and I were relatively conservative, buying only a half dozen. Our plan was to eat a couple, put two more into risotto and freeze the meat from the last two to pair with fiddleheads in a quiche at a later date. That didn’t happen, of course, because last Saturday, despite having had lobster for dinner the night before, we both had a hankering for lobster rolls.

The lobster roll is a specialty of the Atlantic provinces. McDonald’s even offers them in Nova Scotia. They do show up in the occasional fancy restaurant, but they are, for the most part, a roadside treat, purchased while driving around places like Peggy’s Cove; sweet chunks of fresh lobster meat presented on a soft white bun.

Problem is, there are as many ways to prepare this simple dish as there are Maritimers. And none of us can agree on the correct way to do it.

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Bye Bye Beep

March 7th 2010 - Posted in beverages, downeast cooking, Food, food memories, in the news
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Okay, so it was never a healthy drink. On par with Tang, Sunny D or Kool-Aid, Beep was mostly sugar with some juice thrown in, but for many Nova Scotian kids, it was the beverage of choice.

I haven’t had the stuff since my early 20s. Even after I moved to Toronto, my folks would always buy a carton of Beep for me when I was back in Halifax for a visit. And then one time I forgot about it, or maybe my tastes and attitude had changed and I told them not to bother, I can’t remember.

But when news came down that Farmers Dairy was shutting down production of the lurid orange fruit drink, I think we all heaved a nostalgic sigh for childhood innocence. And started remembering the stuff with fondness.

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Chipping Away at Flavour

October 13th 2007 - Posted in comfort food, Food, food memories, products
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Earlier today at brunch, Greg and I were discussing Stella McCartney’s spring line in which she has purportedly brought back the drop-crotch pants of the 80s. No, not those “MC Hammer” pants… that was a the death of a style. I’m think more Visage-era New Romantic drop-crotch pants. In any case, we joked that it would be funny if we had a teenage daughter, because, come spring, we could go to Le Chateau and relive our new wave youth by buying drop-crotch pants, just like we did 20 years ago, only with matching pants for the kid.

What has this got to do with chips? Well, it also made us think that we are now… “of a certain age”, whereby revealing our familiarity with an item from the first time around would date us specifically to a certain time in history.

Again… chips? Well, if I said, hey, remember that one summer when they came out with fruit-flavoured chips? Because anyone who remembers those chips remembers EXACTLY the time and place when they first had them. For me, it was at a peewee baseball game in the field on the next street over and my friend Carol Stewart had a bag of grape-flavoured ones. They came in grape, cherry and if I recall correctly, orange, and tasted like someone had dipped the chips in sweetened Kool-Aid powder. Disgusting doesn’t begin to explain it.

So why am I on about fruit-flavoured chips? Because I have some. In my house.

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We All Know Where the Rainbow Goes…

September 13th 2007 - Posted in candy, chocolate, comfort food, Food, food memories, Halifax, products
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I’m eating chocolates and it’s bittersweet. I had been craving “box o’ chocolates” (as opposed to the swank organic, fair-trade, single-origin stuff I usually eat) and grabbed a box of Pot of Gold the other day. They’re getting hard to find.

The Pot of Gold brand was developed in the 1920s by a confectionery company in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Moir’s. Moir’s had started in 1815 as a bakery, but by 1873 was exclusively making candy and chocolates. Moir’s was actually the first company to come up with a mixed assortment box, and the Pot of Gold was an instant hit, becoming and remaining the best-selling boxed chocolate in Canada for decades. In most of the Maritimes, it wasn’t Christmas without at least one box under the tree, although you might also find rival Ganong as well.

Moir’s was sold to Nabisco brands in 1967 and in 1975, moved across the harbour from their location on Argyle Street in Halifax, to a modernized plant in Dartmouth. Hershey acquired the Nabisco confectionery division in 1987 and expanded the Pot of Gold line to a variety of different assortments.

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Cravings and Squicks

April 12th 2007 - Posted in comfort food, Food, food memories, health and nutrition
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Warning – this post contains discussion of vomiting.

Food, being, ideally, a sensual pleasure, is one of those things that we either really love or really abhor. Individual foods, I mean.

As children, we go through phases where we dislike different things, based on taste, texture or smell. As we age, those tastes usually adapt and progress, and we willingly eat spinach or beans or whatever food it is we hated so ardently in our youth.

The one exception to this is when food becomes associated with a traumatic event, particularly something physically traumatic like a serious illness. Watching it all come back up can turn us off from ever desiring a particular food again.

When I was a kid, my Mom was a big fan of cream of tomato soup. She always added additional milk to our soup, in part to cool it and additionally to make it creamier. Except one day, the soup was too hot and the milk curdled, although I didn’t know it at first spoonful. Haven’t been able to eat cream of tomato soup since then. I can’t, to be completely honest, even watch other people eat it, especially if they break crackers into it.

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Healthy Breakfasts

October 23rd 2006 - Posted in Food, food memories, health and nutrition
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Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s true. That’s not just something made up by the cereal companies. Yet this most important meal is often overlooked or neglected by the majority of North Americans as we rush to get out the door each morning.

The way I see it, our problem is two-fold. First, we are over-scheduled and under-organized and just don’t have the time (or don’t think we have the time) to sit down each morning for breakfast. We rush and hurry and end up grabbing something supremely unhealthy like a donut or a granola bar. Secondly, North Americans just don’t think of their first meal of the day as being “breakfast” unless it looks like a Denny’s Grand Slam.

I mean, stop for a minute and think of your favourite breakfast foods. There’s probably some eggs, bacon, of course, pancakes, waffles, toast… Now who wants to get up and cook that for their family each and every morning? My Grandmother used to, but only because she had to, and just recently she admitted to me that she, the woman who inspired my love of food, hates cooking with every fibre of her being – mostly because of having to get up every single day for 50 years to cook breakfast! If my Grandmother, with her pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse isn’t up to cooking breakfast, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

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Le bouillabaisse de ma mère est meilleur que le bouillabaisse de votre mère.

June 7th 2006 - Posted in downeast cooking, fish and seafood, Food, food memories
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Can’t you just hear the French schoolchildren taunting one another? Much as we play the “my Dad’s tougher than your Dad” game here in North America, one expects children in the south of France to try to one up each other over bouillabaisse.

Because every family has their own recipe. And every family’s recipe is a closely guarded secret. What I found in my Googling adventure in an attempt to track down a bouillabaisse recipe is that they can vary greatly. The only commonalities are fish, tomato, orange peel and saffron; everything else is up for grabs.

This is very much the same in Atlantic Canada where every family has a chowder recipe, and every kid is certain that their family’s chowder recipe trumps all others. Nobody makes fish chowder like my Dad (well, except for me), and it was an alternative to my Dad’s recipe that got me thinking about bouillabaisse.

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You Like Shop Chinatown?

May 30th 2006 - Posted in Food, food memories, The World at Large, toronto
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It’s that invisible, emotional umbilical cord that ties us to our past. Chinatown, especially when it’s hot, reminds me of that day in August of 1987, when I stepped out of an airport limousine and into a different world.

The stench hit me even before the heat that day, and as long as I lived there, I wondered if I carried the smell with me; if I invaded nightclubs and restaurants perfumed with the smell of durian fruit and greasy bread and sesame oil and fish.

Today, my quick tour through Kensington Market and Chinatown is mission-based. Beads of sweat forming on the back of my neck, I want to get what I need and get out.

I don’t dally in the market, hitting the health food store and the fruit stands for what I need. It’s too hot, and I want to be home in front of a fan. On Spadina Avenue, in the crush of bodies and racks of knock-off Hello Kitty purses and cheap luggage, I move with purpose, sliding gracefully around the tourists and the delivery people pushing dollys full of boxes. Like riding a bike – this way of moving, thinking, looking up to assess the sidewalk – comes back easily. This is my ‘hood. Get out of my way.

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