Book Review — The Fruit Forager’s Companion

The Fruit Forager’s Companion
Sara Bir
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018

If you know where to look, there is fruit growing everywhere, even in most cities. Much of this fruit gets wasted as it ripens, falls, and rots; either it is too much for the owner of the land on which the tree grows, or the property in uninhabited. Within my own city of Toronto, the growing season offers a variety of good things to eat, hidden away, or sometimes in plain sight, on public property; berries, quince, rosehips, greens like lamb’s quarters, and coveted black walnuts where a wily forager appears in a public park some evening in October with a ladder and a hook, and clears off entire stands of the trees, not a single precious nut left behind, like the Grinch at Christmas.

Having grown up in a semi-rural area in Nova Scotia, I spent my childhood in the woods, picking berries, fiddleheads, and mushrooms (with the guidance of my Grandmother), and on the beaches digging clams. Let’s just say Sara Bir is a gal after my own heart and I was excited to have the opportunity to read and review her book.

Bir concentrates on fruit, leaving other wild foods such as mushrooms to people with more experience. Rule number one of foraging – don’t eat the poison stuff. Rule number two – ask first, especially if the fruit you want to take is on private property. Bir encourages readers to knock on doors and ask, most people are usually happy to have you take all that fruit away. Bir also encourages readers to be safety-minded; if you can’t reach it easily, you probably don’t need it that badly. She also provides a list of necessary tools such as containers and the all-important gloves, because nature is pointy.

The recipe section of the book is comprised of fruit-based creations, sorted alphabetically, with each fruit introduced with a lovely drawing and basic overview of the fruit, its uses, storage, and cooking tips.

Recipes range from the expected sweet offerings (pastries, cakes, scones) to preserves and pickles, with a few main course dishes such as pork tenderloin with rosemary roasted figs and onions or trout with gooseberry sauce working the savoury abilities of the fruit. A few entries, such as the one for juniper, have no recipes, and Bir goes into varietal detail for some specific fruits but not all.

Happy to see: a reference to Not Far From the Tree, an organization here in Toronto that teams up with homeowners, volunteers, and charities to harvest fruit on private property and share it. Sad to see: Bir joyfully mentions Japonica quince but dismisses them as too much work. They’re not! I foraged Japonicas from my local park for years before they were removed in an effort to control some wandering bamboo, and they made the best face-puckering jam.

Depending on your geographical region, not all of The Fruit Forager’s Companion will apply to you, but even if you have no local lemon trees, the recipes can still be used for purchased fruit. And while the recipes are great, the real treasure here is the information Bir provides for aspiring foragers.

Usability (based on a pdf file): very good. Recipes are straightforward and easy to follow. Directions are in paragraph format with no step numbers or line breaks. Fonts appear to be a good size but this may depend on the overall dimensions of the finished printed format. Measurements include metric (yay!).

With thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing and NetGalley, this book was reviewed from an Advance Reader Copy and may not include exactly the same content or format when published.

Book Review — Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life

Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life
Susan Seligson
Simon & Schuster, 2002

If you don’t bake bread, can you write a book about bread? Susan Seligson attempts to do so in this book about bread-making in different cultures. She travels to Morocco to follow daily loaves through the fes; to upstate New York to try the sourdough; Jordan for Bedouin flatbreads; Ireland to study soda bread; Maine to understand the ubiquitous Wonderbread; Brooklyn to watch matzo being made; India for roti; New Mexico to get a look at the special, hundred year-old bread ovens called hornos; Alabama for biscuits; a military R&D kitchen to learn about how bread is made to last in MREs (meal, ready to eat) for soldiers; and finally to Paris where she cannot score an interview with the famous baker Lionel Poulaine, and so settles for his brother.

Despite the fact that this is a lot of bread, many of the chapters touch on bread only briefly — Seligson is more of a travel writer than a food writer, and while she asks questions and observes the processes, and describes them, this book often meanders off into the personal memoir realm, such as the chapter on India where she mostly talks about her rich friend, the friend’s home, and the friend’s servant, who, incidentally, is the one who makes the rotis covered in that chapter.

While I found myself laughing at Seligson’s often-caustic observations of the people and places she encounters, other readers might find her a bit too critical and mean-spirited as opposed to observant and forthrightly honest. To be fair, there are chapters where the author does come off as a grade-A jerk. In the chapter about the New Mexican hornos, she complains incessantly about her inability to access the local villages to get a good look at the ovens, the hostility of the Native American people on the pueblos towards Anglos, and the cheap jewelry and crafts sold to tourists. At other times this attitude can be be kind of charming, such as when she spends a day at a matzo factory where they are stringent about keeping out chametz (leavened bread of any kind), only to discover after she leaves that she’s been walking around with part of a chocolate chip cookie in her pocket.

The charming and interesting part of Going With the Grain is being able to see different types of bread and the culture around them (how loaves disappear into the Moroccan fes, for instance, and get returned, properly baked, to their rightful owners), or the intensity of the baking process for a sourdough savant. While Seligson occasionally meanders too far from the subject at hand, she paints vivid pictures of each type of bread and how it comes to life. The recipes at the end of each chapter are a nice touch.

This is a good food-lovers read if the reader can ignore — or find a way to enjoy — Seligson’s personality as it comes through her narrative.

Book Review — Sourdough

Sourdough
Robin Sloan
MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

It might be too early to call it, being only February and all, but Sourdough is already a contender for my top fiction pick of the year.

This work of Magical Realism (a genre that combines fact with magical elements) is subtle enough on the weirdness that I often found myself looking things up to see if they were true. Does sourdough “sing” while it is rising? Does it emit light or sparkle? (Hey, you never know with yeast and gas.) Is there really such a thing as a Lois club?

Here’s the deets: Lois Clary moves from Michigan to San Francisco where she takes a job at a tech start-up programming robotic arms. Her co-workers often sleep at work and eat a nutritive gel called Slurry instead of real food. One night while at home she orders soup and a sandwich from a not-especially-legal restaurant run out of someone’s apartment and gets hooked on their amazing sourdough bread. When the owners have to leave the country because of visa issues, they show up at her door with their crock of sourdough starter (because she has become their best customer) and give her a quick lesson on how to care for it and make bread.

From there she starts baking, first for herself, then for friends and co-workers, then the cafeteria at her office, where the chef encourages her to apply for one of the local San Francisco farmers’ markets. She doesn’t get into the main market system but is offered a spot in a new underground market (literally – it’s housed in an old missile bunker) where all the vendors are creating food with some combination of old school tradition and current technology. Lois borrows one of the robotic arms from her work to help her knead the bread with the promise that she will teach/code it to break eggs, as this is one of the hurdles for robotic arms in the food prep industry.

It gets even weirder than this by the end of the book, but Sloan does an amazing job of keeping all the elements together while creating a work that asks more questions than it ultimately answers. There’s the whole dichotomy of old skills and traditional ingredients up against technology – once the robotic arms can be used in industrial-scale bakeries, hundreds of people will lose their jobs. There’s also an Alice Waters-esque character, who even owns a restaurant in Berkeley that matches Chez Panisse in description, who represents the old foodways and traditions while the market Lois takes part in has a mandate to help find solutions to feed people en masse.

Throughout all of this is the relationship between Lois and the sourdough. Sloan integrates the food writing part of his work seamlessly with the rest of the story, which can be a huge problem for many writers trying to incorporate food writing into fiction. His descriptions of the sourdough as it rises and sings, as it takes on a personality, becomes depressed, and goes to battle against King Arthur (the flour, not the guy from the round table), are not only charming and engaging but mouthwatering. I dare you to read this book and not want to crack into a boule of fresh sourdough bread and slather it with butter.

Sloan goes beyond a fun story about bread. Sourdough takes on questions about philosophy, technology, tradition, ethics, history, and relationships of many types.

 

Book Review — The Cake Therapist

The Cake Therapist
Judith Fertig
Berkeley, 2015

There are many genres of food fiction that we’ll explore on this site as we go along, but the most prominent are the food-themed mysteries and food-themed romances. Cookbook writer Judith Fertig makes an attempt at combining the two in her first novel The Cake Therapist.

After a failed relationship in New York, baker Claire “Neely” O’Neil returns to her hometown to set up her own bakery. This happens quickly and immediately, as does Neely’s renewal of all her old friendships she left behind.

Neely sets up shop and starts offering baked goods with an extra dash of psychic advice, because she can associate people with flavours and feel their emotions, as you do when you run a bakery (joke). Fertig laces these stories, along with Neely’s own relationship problems (should she stick with the solid, handsome and local Joe, or be lured back to NYC by her charming pro-athlete husband?) with flashbacks to a mystery about a pair of local sisters. It sort of comes together in the end but the historical mystery and the modern day romance have nothing to do with one another and it’s not a smooth melding of stories.

The food bits — vivid descriptions of cakes being made and decorated — are gloriously detailed, as would be expected from a cookbook author, but they have almost nothing to do with the rest of the story other than the fact that the protagonist runs a bakery.

Secondary characters are flat and often cliched (the troubled, black-clad Goth girl who helps out at the bakery, for instance, is written with such a patronizing tone that it was almost uncomfortable to read), and do little to propel the story other than to tie the two distinct story lines together.

Fertig wrote a follow-up book called The Memory of Lemon that is supposed to tie up the loose ends of The Cake Therapist, but the description makes it sound even more complicated and uneven than this title, so I don’t know if there’s enough draw for me to track it down.

The Cake Therapist gets points for some gorgeous food descriptions but overall, it should have had a bit of editorial therapy to tighten up plot lines and fill out one-dimensional characters. Fertig is a good writer, but this is really two or maybe three stories in one. Like an over-decorated cake that needs fewer sprinkles and a slightly better sponge.

Lucky Dip – Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Michael Schmidt is now on day 19 of his hunger strike over the lack of legalization for raw milk, and says he will continue until Premier Dalton McGuinty grants him a meeting. [Toronto Star]

When it comes to shoplifted items, cheese is the most popular food for people to steal. I’m guessing this is because it’s usually small enough to slip into a pocket. Shame about the crackers being so bulky. [Sky News]

The blood is the life… just in time for the season of ghouls and vampires, Toronto chefs are cooking with blood. And while, IMO, items like blood sausage tastes like rank death, some of the stuff (like a tart where blood is combined with chocolate) are actually really good. [Globe and Mail]

For all of those 99% complaining that they can’t get a job, any job at all, maybe they can explain why, all over the US, in the face of a crackdown on illegal immigrant workers, farmers are having to either turn to prison labour or destroy their crops because they can’t find unemployed people willing to do field work. [Wall Street Journal]

Confirmed – The Four Seasons‘ “mystery chef” is indeed Daniel Boulud. [Toronto Star]

Continue reading “Lucky Dip – Wednesday, October 19th, 2011”

Where Can I Find – Cake and Candy-Making Supplies

Despite the fact that we here at TasteTO have officially declared the cupcake to be soooo over (enough already, please?), it seems that more and more people are becoming interested in cake decorating. Based on the number of emails we get from places looking for coverage for their cupcake or baking business, it’s an industry that is taking on a life of its own. But with many equipment supply places open to the trade only, finding the necessary equipment and ingredients can be difficult, especially if you’re a home baker.

Sure, tracking down basic baking pans, plain cupcake papers and some simple cookie cutters is easy enough, but once you get into the serious stuff, special molds, pre-made fondants, specialty pans and decorative items might be more of a challenge.

Here’s a list of GTA-based businesses where aspiring pastry chefs and candy-makers can find their gear and supplies.

Nickolaau
629 Queen Street West
416-504-6411
This rabbit’s warren of restaurant equipment has lots of stuff for pastry making, from piping bags and tips, cake stands, palate knives and cake pans. It’s all professional quality gear, though, so don’t be surprised to blow the dust off that cake stand and discover that it’s $70.

Placewares, St. Lawrence Market
92 Front Street East
Toronto, ON M5E 1C4
416-603-1649
This is probably the easiest place to access in the downtown core, and they have everything from a huge wall of cookie cutters to piping bags, tips, cake pans and moulds, fondant sculpting tools, cupcake papers and (usually seasonal) decorations such as non-pareils and dragees. They also stock some colours of Wilton fondant.

Bulk Barn – Loblaws Leslie St. Market (and others)
17 Leslie Street
416-466-4512
Cake pans, including novelty shapes; they also offer a pan rental service if you know you’re never going to use that teddy bear cake pan again. They also have cookie cutters, icing paste and gels, cake decorating supplies, candy molds and couverture wafers, plus wedding, birthday and seasonal supplies.

McCall’s School of Cake Decorating
3810 Bloor Street West
416-231-8040
This is kind of the motherlode; pans, cutters utensils, gum paste, sprinkles, cake stands, moulds, food colouring, decorative paper products. They offer classes as well. Bonus – there’s online shopping if you can’t make it out there.

Katie’s Cakes
1531 O’Connor Drive
416-757-6896
Offers courses in everything from basic cake decorating to working with gumpaste and fondant.

Foodstuffs Inc.
89 Main Street South, Georgetown
905-877-6569
Technically out of the GTA but if you’re in the area, it’s a good source of baking pans, chocolate and candy-making supplies and cake-decorating equipment.

Starting a Baking Business – It’s Not a Cakewalk

At least once a week we receive email here at TasteTO from someone wanting us to cover some small local food business. The majority of these appear to be bakery-type businesses selling cupcakes, cookies or custom-made cakes. The emails are often referrals from friends or customers, and sometimes come in the form of professionally-written press releases from the business owners themselves.

As we’re always looking to support local independent food artisans, we always check out these leads, and often find professionally-designed websites, gorgeous photos of even more beautiful products, and what appears to be really skillful bakers and artisans wanting to take their hobby to the next level. Unfortunately what we also almost always find is that these businesses are operating illegally out of a home kitchen.

That’s right, I said “illegally”. People who make food at home and sell it to the public are breaking the law, because it is completely and utterly illegal to sell food to the public that has been prepared in a home kitchen.

Continue reading “Starting a Baking Business – It’s Not a Cakewalk”