click here for the recipes...➢

A GOURMET FEAST, WESTERN CANADIAN STYLE

By CINDA CHAVICH

Everywhere in the world, food is connected to the land and culture, based squarely on indigenous ingredients, popular crops and the cultural history of the people who live there.

Western Canada is no exception – our proclivity for meat-and-potatoes meals began with the beef and game, root vegetables, fresh water fish and other wild foods found here. And our peculiar prairie affection for things like beef jerky, perogies, vinatarta, fruit cake, bannock, sushi and smorgasboards stems directly from those families who first put down roots.

When fur traders, explorers and the settlers came West more than a century ago, they followed the First Nations’ lead and learned to live off the land.

They hunted game like elk and bison, fished the coastal and inland waters for salmon, trout and pickerel, foraged for wild strawberries, saskatoon berries, morel and chanterelle mushrooms, and the nutty seeds of aquatic grasses we now know as wild rice.

The Hudson’s Bay Company employees and North-West Mounted Police were some of the earliest arrivals, and their accounts describe Christmas dinners of moose nose and beaver tail – local delicacies, but hardly the usual festive fare. But their own seasonal traditions weren’t far behind. By 1895, the HBC in Calgary advertised a $10 holiday hamper (delivered free within 100 miles of town) that included Scotch whisky, claret, sherry and crusted port, Tetley tea, English mincemeat and “choice caramels,” likely what every homesick Cockney cowboy  craved for Christmas.

Cattle were the first domestic animals to populate the plains, driven north onto huge Canadian ranches by American cowboys in the 1880s. This quickly put a distinctively Texas slant on local recipes, with things like chili powder, beans, chicken-fried steak and biscuits added to the collective western Canadian  table.

Before the advent of trains, groceries arrived sporadically in western towns. Bull trains hauled supplies across the west and rural cooks became creative with pantry staples like flour, sugar, coffee, beans, rice, canned tomatoes, dried prunes and molasses. They learned to smoke meats, preserve seasonal fruits and vegetables, and create dishes like tomato aspic salad, roast wild duck, carrot pudding and rhubarb crisp.

With every new wave of immigrants, a new layer of culinary culture arrived, too.

Many of the earliest settlers were British, Scottish and French, fond of steamed puddings, roast beef, baked beans and meat pies. Later, workers from China and Italy helped connect the fledgling country by laying miles of railway track. Many of the former were bachelors who became ranch cooks or opened cafes, bringing a Canadian style of Chinese food to small towns across the west. Soon immigrant farmers, lured by free land, arrived with their families from places like Iceland and Germany, Ukraine, Holland and Austria to plant grains, raise cattle and run small mixed farms from Winnipeg to Wetaskawin.

That great surge of western settlers came between 1896 and 1914, each bringing a particular style of cooking, recipes and family traditions. With the ability to raise animals like pigs, sheep and chickens, and grow grain, vegetables and tree fruits, even the poorest western families had varied, seasonal diets. With the ingredients at hand, they made their own sausages, noodles and dumplings, cabbage rolls and goulash.

But at the upper end of the culinary scale, the Canadian Pacific Railway made sure its fine hotels served the best food available. Linked from coast to coast by rail, these hotels could serve imported foods and wealthy westerners enjoyed posh meals and rare delicacies like Malpeque oysters and Stilton cheese at hotel restaurants or on the trains themselves.

In1886, when the first transcontinental rail trips were made, the CPR advertised regional Canadian cuisine on its dining car menu, promising  “local delicacies such as trout, prairie hens, antelope steaks, Fraser River salmon, succeed one another as the train moves westward.”

And while local foods gained cachet, classic cuisine still held sway in the best restaurants.  A circa-1905 menu from the former Alberta Hotel (Calgary, NWT) lists a very British selection of dishes ranging from Scotch broth and curried egg on rice, to prime rib with Yorkshire pudding, steamed fruit pudding, tipsy trifle cake and vanilla ice cream.

By the end of the First World War, the selection was more continental. A Christmas 1919 menu at the CPR Palliser Hotel featured green turtle soup, mignonette of sole, Blue Point oysters, roast turkey with chestnuts and cranberries, candied sweet potatoes, fresh raspberries, fresh peas and hearts of lettuce  - all imports from warmer climes, delivered to their door via the rolling stock of its parent company.

The transcontinental railway tied the West to the rest of the food world, delivering mandarin oranges from Japan (via Vancouver) in mid-winter and live oysters from the east coast to communities  across the prairies. Without the trains, the landlocked west would have been bereft of ocean fish and shellfish. But rail travelers always had these delicacies  – a1920 CPR dining car service manual lists hundreds of seafood recipes from breakfast omelets filled with creamed oysters to broiled live lobster or breaded and crisply fried soft shell crab and scallops with tartar sauce.

Today planes and refrigerated trucks bring the foods of the world to the doors of the west. But we haven’t forgotten our roots.

We still relish a good steak, and indulge as often as possible in wild sockeye salmon and saskatoon pie. We compete in chili cook-offs and slow barbecue competitions, inspired by our cowboy heritage. We know how to cook wild rice, what makes a perfect perogy, and where to drop a trap for crab or a fly for rainbow trout. And we’re rediscovering wild foods from the west – from morel mushrooms to bison and wild game meats like venison.

So while things have changed dramatically on the western food scene over the last 100 years, they’ve also remained remarkably the same. It’s a function of where we live and who we are.

Here’s an elegant  modern menu to celebrate those deep western roots. Be sure to serve an Okanagan-grown  chardonnay, gewurztraminer or pinot noir alongside.

THE MENU

WILD RICE FRITTERS WITH COLD-SMOKED SASKATCHEWAN TROUT

PRAIRIE PICKEREL CHOWDER

MIXED GREENS WITH BISON CARPACCIO AND COLD-PRESSED CANOLA OIL

VENISON LOIN ROAST WITH SASKATOON BERRY SAUCE

WILD RICE AND BARLEY RISOTTO

SASKATOON AND RASPBERRY CRÈME FRAICHE TART

click here for the recipes...➢

(this feature first appeared in West magazine)

©Cinda Chavich 2006

www.tastereport.com