Canadian Cuisine Research Articles

Review of Canadian literary fare by Nathalie Cooke, Shelley Boyd, with Alexia Moyer

This review looks at Canadian Literary Fare by Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd, with Alexia Moyer. The book gives an unconventional exploration of 'food voices' in Canadian literature. The authors examine the food narratives of celebrated Canadian writers, like Alice Munro, Eden Robinson, Fred Wah, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tomson Highway, Rabindranath Maharaj, and others. The book explores the interactions between literary characters and food, challenging preconceptions about Canadian cuisine. It highlights the voices of Indigenous and immigrant writers, emphasizing the role of food in decolonization and reshaping identities. The authors discuss iconic Canadian foods, the symbolism of food markets, and food as demonstrative of struggles with poverty. Canadian Literary Fare is a valuable resource for those interested in the interplay between food culture and identity. It provides a refreshing departure from traditional approaches, examining Canadian culture through alternative 'food voices'.

Deconstructing ‘Canadian Cuisine’: Towards decolonial food futurities on Turtle Island

As scholars and community activists, to secure a just food system, we must first acknowledge our complicity in hierarchal power structures that shape structural inequities by questioning the underlying socio-political currents and interrogating the dominant relationships within our food system. In this commentary, the authors reflect upon their intersectional lived experiences interacting with food systems in the settler nation of Canada. They explore the complex interplay of systemic racism, settler colonialism and neoliberalism within the Canadian food system by deconstructing the indefinable essence of “Canadian cuisine” and mapping these situated insights onto the process of gastronomic multiculturalism. The authors provide their perspective that an entry point along the ongoing process of securing decolonial food futurities on Turtle Island requires a conscious commitment to building interrelational solidarity across differences, reckoning with colonial land politics and supporting food sovereignty for both racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples.

Decolonizing the learning of sitopias in Toronto

The Canadian Cuisine Photography Challenge is a pilot experiential learning activity created at Ryerson University for the class FNU100-Canadian Cuisine: Historical Roots, a first/second year liberal studies course offered to students from diverse programs and cultural backgrounds. This activity is both a fun challenge and a required course assignment. It aims to engage students with Canadian cuisine and is inspired by a decolonial pedagogical approach (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Santos, 2018) to food studies, and elements of photovoice methodology (Wang & Burris, 1997). The Canadian Cuisine Photography Challenge consists of a field trip to different food places or sitopias in Toronto with the goal of learning about their histories and developing an appreciation of the role of food and people in the city (Newman, 2017). The activity includes a map, instructions and a set of ten challenge questions that students answer through photographs taken during their field trip. The field trip is followed by students’ presentations in class and a reflection of their experiences. In the first phase of the project, students explored two sitopias: Kensington Market and Chinatown.
 This paper will first describe the co-creation of the Canadian Cuisine Photography Challenge with students from the School of Nutrition at Ryerson University. This was a collaboration between the course instructor, two School of Nutrition students and included input from other students who had previously taken the course. It will present key learnings from the feedback of students who participated in the challenge in the fall of 2019, including how they described their experience, what they learned and suggestions for the future developments of this project. In particular this field reportwill discuss the use of a decolonial pedagogy in food studies, recognizing and challenging a Western hegemonic view of food places as representative of Canadian cuisine, while at the same time outlining the co-construction of experiential learning activities to engage students and provide content that reflects the multiple identities and food cultures of Canadians in Toronto. The main purpose of this field report is to share our experience co-creating and implementing this pilot project as one contribution towards decolonial food pedagogies. 
 

Maintaining Traditions: Food and Identity among Early Immigrants to Upper Canada

A critical examination of the relationships between food and identity is explored among early British and American Loyalist settlers in Upper Canada (southern Ontario) from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries. This research synthesizes zooarchaeological data from the region and interprets these alongside historical texts to address how meat was incorporated into early immigrant diets. Previous scholarship generally agreed that pork played a dominant role in Upper Canadian cuisine and that residents first settling in the area were particularly reliant on wild meat resources. Archaeological evidence suggests this was not the case. Results and discussions highlight the influence of British working-class traditions on Upper Canadian identities and the development of regional cuisines in southern Ontario. Parallels are drawn to anthropological and sociological studies of migrant foodways, encouraging archaeologists to consider the importance of maintaining food traditions when examining early immigrant assemblages.

Tried, Tested, but not Proved: The Home Cook Book and the Development of a Canadian Culinary Identity


 
 
 This article considers the creation, publication, and reception history of The Home Cook Book, Canada’s first community and fundraising 
 
 
 
 cookbook. Published initially in Toronto in 1877 as a fundraiser for the Hospital for Sick Children, the text of the work was heavily derived from a volume of the same name issued in Chicago several years earlier. Comparison of the text of the 1877 Toronto edition with the earlier Chicago text proves many of its recipes were not Canadian in origin. As a result, the work offers a clear demonstration of how American food preferences and cooking practices came to permeate Canadian cuisine.
 Although its affiliation with the hospital quickly faded away, the Canadian version of The Home Cook Book remained continuously in print for fifty-two years, its content undergoing only very modest changes across that half century. We locate The Home Cook Book as a hybrid of two genres: the commercial domestic manual and the community cookbook. Our analysis combines Lynne Ireland’s and Elizabeth Driver’s frameworks for interpreting historic cookbooks as a method for understanding the impact of The Home Cook Book. With those frameworks in view, our study examines the origins of this cookbook, with particular emphasis on the influences on its content, design and development, and its publication history and reception. In particular, we focus attention on the selection and attribution of the recipes in their geographic and historical contexts, the bibliographical evidence associated with the original source text from which the cookbook derives, and the textual variations that appeared in its later iterations. In addition, the larger impact of The Home Cook Book is considered through a review of selected Canadian community cookbooks that appeared in its wake.
 
 
 
 
 

Wild Cuisine and Canadianness: Creeping Rootstalks and Subterranean Struggle

Canada is commonly depicted as a rugged wilderness. Defining the characteristics of its food as wild is a contributing factor in this narrative. While there may be some truth to this image, there are also overlooked implications in perpetuating links between the notion of Canada as a nation, and the trope of wilderness as its defining feature. In this article, I draw on visual analysis as well as theory from sensory studies to complicate the concept of “wild” food at the root of discourse on Canadian cuisine. The focus of this analysis is a case study of wild berries on the northeastern coast of Québec, Canada. Throughout the article I quote from interviews that I conducted with Anglophone, Francophone, and Innu locals of Québec's Lower North Shore. The intimate experiences of residents with the foods that grow in their home do not connect smoothly with representations of wilderness in promotional materials for wild berry products and tourism in the region. In fact, personal accounts of picking, preparing, and eating wild berries complicate master narratives of wild Canadian cuisine, thus enriching this country's national food culture through complexity. These stories show that wilderness is not a state of purity but a fiction that obscures the multifaceted natural-cultural negotiations among humans, plants, animals, climate, and more in the making of what we call “wild.”

Other People's Families

Other People's Families Hannah Rahimi (bio) Apparently vacation means never having to cook. Evenings they drive to one of the nearby restaurants, swell up with salt and eat the leftovers for lunch, until everyone is so sick of it that finally Shira says, "I'll make something tonight." How grateful they are, except she can tell her mother-in-law Claudia is hiding disappointment that she doesn't cook something Traditional. Claudia is all about traditional. To her mind, the only thing better than traditional is Authentic. Helping herself to another taco, Claudia says an Indian restaurant just opened in Duncan. "We'll have to take the ferry over one night," she says. "Shira can tell us if it's the real deal!" To which Gabe, knowing Shira's buttons, grips her shoulder and says, "Why don't we let our chef go relax in the living room while we do the dishes." You want traditional? My family had a Sunday-night tradition of eating Kraft dinner with ketchup (and, I admit, a sprinkle of garam masala) while my father blasted his favorite Harry Belafonte and my mother scoured the Reader's Digest for knitting patterns. Is that traditional enough for you? (Is what she wants to say.) ________ Apparently marriage means vacationing with in-laws. When Gabe first brought it up, she assumed it was optional, as it had been before they were married, but then she saw his face when she casually declared she would stay home and catch up on her reading. She teaches fourth grade, which means she has a summer. People think that means her time is theirs. They are spending June in a rented cottage on Salt Spring Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The family has been coming here since Gabe was twelve. Steps from the back deck lead down to the ocean. The air smells of jasmine and pine. There are so many deer that the islanders consider them pests. They are not at their best. Claudia goes around solicitous and eager to please and shooting herself repeatedly in her Birkenstocked foot, while Mark offers smug financial advice to everyone they meet and alienates waiters with excruciating attempts at working class jocundity. Gabe tries hard, but slips into the entitlements of an only child without even realizing it. At restaurants he orders cocktails just because his parents are paying. He doesn't even like to drink! One night Claudia makes chili; everyone is taking turns now cooking, the restaurants abandoned and scorned. (Never, says Claudia, trust a place that says Chinese and Canadian cuisine. They'll put celery in everything.) She has [End Page 82] forgotten to buy cheese for the chili, which makes Mark muss up her hair and say, "Classic Claudia." He is always saying that: Classic Claudia. For their benefit he says, "Claudia here has been known to steam artichokes without water in the pan. Claudia has been known to cook up beans and rice without the rice. My beautiful space cadet," he says, nudging her in the side and looking at them, demanding complicity. Shira hates him for it. Gabe laughs easily, like he too is thinking, Classic Claudia. "It's just cheese," says Shira, but no one will meet her eye. ________ She wakes early here and takes her coffee to the porch, grateful for that brief time before anyone else is up. She has lost all desire to read. Instead she watches the ocean and lets her mind go. It goes, without fail, to Caleb. It is the thought of him that wakes her every morning, or really the feel of him, a writhing at the base of her. He is actually rendering her incapable, not just of reading but of general attention. She'll be listening to Claudia prattle on about chia seeds only to realize her mind has strayed. Worse, she'll be listening to Gabe. Over and over she luxuriates in the same memories, dipping into them for the reliable jolt of pleasure. She is scared that in this way she will wear them out, as one does repeating a word until it's senseless. ________ The family develops...

Introduction to Cookbook Narratives from within the Covers and between the Lines: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, Issue 4:2

Committed to documenting the changing landscape of social food studies in Canada as well as the diversity of Canadian food cultures, and due to the Student Writing Award,CuiZineis delighted to offer two articles scrutinizing one important line of influence for Canadian cuisine: British cookery. Undergraduate award winner Priya Grant compares two books, written by Royalists (supporters of King Charles I), which shape perceptions of the two consort queens: one the widow of Charles I and the other, wife of Oliver Cromwell. Graduate student award winner, Claire Saffitz, provides a historiographical work that offers additional insights into these same two books, in addition to two others written by professional male chefs, as well as those by well-known cookbook author Hannah Wolley. Saffitz' particular contribution to the scholarly discourse lies in her bringing these six texts together as a lens through which to view the Restoration period as one in which there was a robust negotiation of ideas about gender, politics and domesticity.

Blackberries: Canadian Cuisine and Marginal Foods

Blackberries: Canadian Cuisine and Marginal Foods

“Muskrat French”: Origins of a Culture, a Language, and a People

“Muskrat French”: Origins of a Culture, a Language, and a People by James LaForest Nearly every year, usually in late winter or early spring, the media pick up on a story about a Detroit River region culinary tradition: the eating of muskrat as a Lenten custom. Generally the stories focus on the area of Monroe (part of an area known as Frenchtown) and other downriver Detroit communities that observe the custom. The tradition is explained in two ways: either that the early French Canadian trappers lived off muskrat, learning from the Indians that it was edible, or that Father Gabriel Richard, pastor of St. Anne’s parish in Detroit from 1802-1832, granted a special dispensation to the local habitants to eat muskrat during Lent. The media stories then continue with a description of the meal itself, the taste of the meat, and assurances that it is both safe and legal.1 Historians of the Detroit River region have provided more in-depth research on the topic. Ralph Naveaux, former director of the Monroe County Historical Museums and member of the Michigan Commission for the Bicentennial of the War of 1812, described the eating of muskrat in the context of a much broader regional French Canadian cuisine that emanated from the métis (mixed aboriginal American and European French) culture of the fur trade areas.2 Dennis Au, Historic Preservation Officer of the city of Evansville, Indiana, has also written extensively on Michigan’s French Canadian culture. According to Au, it was media coverage of the annual muskrat dinners in 1988 that precipitated a ban on the public sale of muskrat meat once it reached officials at the Archdiocese of Detroit and the Department of Agriculture. The Archbishop, appalled by the thought of muskrat as meat, declared the 1 John Holusha, “Wyandotte Journal; Where the Muskrat is a Delicacy for Lent,” New York Times, April 1, 1988; “What’s for Dinner? In Michigan, it’s Muskrat,” USA Today, March 1, 2013; “Muskrat Love: A Lenten Friday Night for Some Michiganders,” Catholic News Service, March 8, 2007; “You Haven’t Lived Here Until . . . You Eat Muskrat,” Detroit Free Press, November 25, 2012. 2 Ralph Naveaux, “Remnants of ‘Mushrat French’ Cuisine in Monroe County, Michigan,” Repast (Spring 2007): 3-6. THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 40:2 (FALL 2014): 87-100 @ 2014 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved 88 The Michigan Historical Review legendary dispensation void. What followed these actions was a groundswell of support for the local custom and ultimately a reversal of the decisions. 3 These Lenten muskrat dinners are part of a much broader regional culture, the “Muskrat French,” also known as “Mushrat French.” This term, as Marcel Beneteau notes, refers both to a living culture and to the French dialect that was widespread in the area from the eighteenth century onward and is still spoken in areas around Lake St. Clair.4 Though these accounts point to who the Muskrat French were (Detroit River region French Canadians), it is less established when this term came into being, and why, and how it has been used over time. They forged a unique regional culture better understood by its origins, development, and experience rather than by just one element of its cuisine, albeit unique. In order to better understand the development of the term “Muskrat French” and their culture, it is necessary to examine how the early French Canadians of Detroit and the Pays d’en Haut (Great Lakes Upper Country) were viewed by the British and Anglo American officials who began dominating the region in the late eighteenth century. In 1764 British General Thomas Gage referred to the French of Detroit as “a People . . . as wild as the Country they go in, or the (Indian) People they deal with, and are far more vicious and wicked.” He wrote that the French were “vagabonds” and “a terrible set of people who stick at nothing true or false . . . roving in the Desarts [sic] and seating themselves among the Indians,” living with “different Tribes, moving from one to another as fancy leads them.”5 Another opinion of Detroit’s French populace comes from the journals of Jonathan Carver, a Massachusetts...

Structural Elements in Canadian Cuisine

Food is often an intrinsic element of national identity and pride, but articulating what constitutes a Canadian cuisine has proven elusive. The challenge lies in the absence of a coherent hegemony, an absence arising from a diverse immigrant population and a political tradition that respects its differences. Nonetheless, the notion of a Canadian cuisine finds expression in the country’s public and private institutions, in the way that recipes originating elsewhere have been interpreted, and in the use of native ingredients and practices.

Foreword to Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, Issue 2:1

This issue of CuiZine looks at ways in which our food choices and practices have been shaped by cultural encounters. We begin with Hersch Jacobs’ study of some constituent elements of Canadian cuisine, as well as attempts to define and appreciate this cuisine in recent years. Just as our national palate has been shaped by the food preferences and practices of new Canadians, so too has it tempted them to welcome some of the nation’s iconic foods into their own homes. Gwendolyn Owens, in her study of kitchen wallpaper, reminds us that over the years Canadian homemakers have welcomed not only new foods, but also new designs, colours, food stories, and traditions. In “Migrer et Manger,” Pierre Sercia and Alain Girard explore the food practices of recent immigrants to Canada, and the push and pull of food preferences over time and generations.

Canadian Cosmopoiesis: Meditations on Cuisine and Architecture

Architecture and cuisine manifest themselves in the making; both evolve and last in the form of memories, tastes, and time, which generate cosmopoietic feats able to fashion signifying universes out of the sensual material of the world, and both are based on thinking with things rather than thinking about things. They are expressions of the human sapience for transforming terrestrial materials and products into edifying substances. They are both world-making expressions of a “maternal region” and, consequently, Canadian architecture can be understood through Canadian cuisine and Canadian cuisine through Canadian architecture.

The Cuisine of the Tundra

During the long decade of the 1960s, Canadian cultural icons were sought as a means of crystallizing a cohesive national identity. At Expo 67, Canada's centenary celebration in Montreal, the Canada Pavilion—the principal display area of the host country—was uniquely positioned to frame the idea of “unity and diversity” among the nation's subcultures, and its two restaurants can be interrogated as displaying what may be described as a national culinary narrative. The goal of this paper is to investigate how this conceptualization of a Canadian cuisine was an inclusive endeavor accommodating dishes and practices derived from the diverse ethnicities of the country; from the incorporation of “modern” practices related to food and eating; and from the legacy of Canadian history. At a regional scale, restaurants in the pavilions of Ontario, the Atlantic Provinces and Quebec, reveal similar themes. In this way, mid-twentieth century Canadian food culture can be demonstrated as resonating with wider manifestations of national consciousness.

Editor's Note to Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, Issue 1:1

A Tuscan chef recently asked Lara to describe Canadian cuisine. She began by describing the colour and particular viscosity of maple syrup but quickly felt compelled to speak of the way Butter Chicken Roti, Lahmajoun ‘sandwiches,’ and Sushi Pizza characterize Canadian cuisine as well. While Saskatoonberry jam, feves au lard, and P.E.I. Mussels represent regional foods across Canada, new hybrids and variations are continually being thrown into the mix, inspired by local surroundings—cultural and culinary. In our nation of immigrants, multiple foodways form a distinctive and evolving repertoire that is neither hodgepodge nor smorgasbord. CuiZine aims to set the table for discussions of how we as Canadians procure, produce, cook, consume, and think about food and culture.

Selling Canadian Culinary Tourism: Branding the Global and the Regional Product

ABSTRACT Canadian identity with respect to attracting tourists is often associated with the natural environment. Canadian society is, however, also associated with the policy of multiculturalism and diversity. Agencies such as the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) have recognized the growing interest in cuisine and have begun to promote Canada as a culinary tourism destination. One of the challenges facing agencies such as the CTC is that there is not an easily definable Canadian cuisine. Canada's culinary traditions have been influenced by a long history of immigration, together with regional product availability. Chefs have combined cultural traditions and local products, creating new forms and styles of cooking. Efforts from different geographical regions across the country will highlight the rich diversity available in Canadian culinary tourism influenced, not only by global but also by regional forces, which can be branded under the umbrella of cuisine in Canada.

Northern Bounty: A Celebration of Canadian Cuisine

(1996). Northern Bounty: A Celebration of Canadian Cuisine. Journal of the Association for the Study of Food and Society: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 9-10.