Sometimes Hipsters Get it Right

In this post, I will begrudgingly admit that there is some awesome food to be had in Toronto. Obviously as a stereotypical Montrealer, it pains me to say this, but there you go. (I am just kidding, folks, please do not take my Toronto ribbing too seriously.)

We all know that charcuterie is very hip right now, which is both awesome, because charcuterie is awesome, and makes me suspicious that it will lead to a lot of mediocre sausages out there in the world. It is without a doubt a wonderful thing that so many people are embracing previously marginalized ways of preparing often difficult cuts of meat; charcuterie is truly an art form at its best, while retaining a certain rustic humility that makes it simultaneously transcendent and comforting. It is also at the heart of current discussions of food ethics, particularly because charcuterie makes use of a lot of offal, which allows us to be thrifty in our meat consumption, and less wasteful. So we are big, big fans, but as I have expressed previously, I do worry about the fancification (if I may be allowed to invent a word) of what is, effectively, “peasant food”. I have found, though, that my dividing line between what “works” and what doesn’t seems to be how good a job people are actually doing with these foods and methods. Make it tasty, and I will have a lot less anxiety about it.

In that vein, there is a running theme on this blog where some “next hot foodie thing” is super hyped and I am skeptical of it, until I actually taste said source of hype and come around. See my post on the Au Pied de Cochon Cabane à Sucre , for example. This probably says a lot more about me, and my grumpiness, than anything else. In any case, this weekend I had a similar experience in the great Canadian metropolis of Toronto, where I spent a little over 24 hours on a work trip. Most of my time in the city was therefore spent in a windowless room staring at powerpoint slides, but I found the time to venture into the city first to meet up with my sister and her family, and then to meet up with my college roommate, the inimitable Kevin. Kevin is a dear friend who lived with me back when I was still a vegetarian, and who looks a lot like Captain Highliner these days. For real. Check it:

Apparently Captain Highliner was wringing his hands for weeks as to where to take me for dinner during my one evening in Toronto, because he thinks I’m scary. I’m not really scary, I’m just kind of a jerk to Kevin. He finally took me to The Black Hoof, a new-ish restaurant specializing in offal and charcuterie, which he loves, but he was worried that I would dismiss it as overly trendy. Indeed, The Black Hoof is, as far as I can tell, a current hotspot in the T-Dot, full of well-dressed young things with perfectly tousled hair and expensive clothes meant to look cheap. The Black Hoof folks make all of their own charctuerie and serve it in a”small plates” format, which is also very trendy right now, but like with charcuterie, I kind of love it because I love family style meals, for all their sociability and because they allow you to try lots of different things. (I have a problem with indecisive ordering.) So I was down with some small plates gluttony.

So here you had a place that seemed to have every current food trend all rolled in to one. Of course I wanted to hate it. And of course, I actually loved it. Say what you will about the “hipness” of the restaurant, they make some damn good food, and that overshadows any pretentiousness. To be fair, the actual space felt far less pretentious than what I had expected given their website, which is a little bit precious for my tastes. The service was excellent, friendly, and not too “quirky”, and the portions were perfect (enough but not too much) for a small plates menu. The space is very cool, but not so cool that it will look dated in six months. The whole restaurant felt much more effortless than I had expected, which was nice.

And then there was the food. We had a very hard time deciding, but eventually we shared, while sipping pints of Beau’s Lager (which was good, but not nearly as good, in my opinion, as their ales that we’ve tried):

A plate of pickled vegetables, and their insanely velvety and perfect duck liver mousse, which you can see here just under Kevin’s smiling mug, served with an applesauce that complemented the mousse so awesomely that it made me really reflect on the possibilities of food pairings. I love eating stuff that makes me feel like I’m learning in a way that will enhance my own cooking at home. My only complaint about this mousse is that, as you can see in the photo, the presentation, in my opinion, looked a bit like a turd. The presentation on the rest of the dishes we tried was beautiful, so I am not sure what was up with this one. We seriously ate every bite of this mousse despite a fairly generous portion. It was silky and delicious, as was the bone marrow that we ate next, which was served with a sort of gremolata (I don’t think that’s what they called it), toast and Maldon sea salt, which is pictured at the start of this post. The marrow was melt-in your mouth and addictive as soon as you added a couple of flakes of salt to it. I have never eaten marrow like that and I feel like I could seriously eat it every day. We even mopped up its juices with our bread.

We then shared a pig’s tail pozole, which was a much meatier soup than I expected from, you know, a pig’s tail. With cilantro and lime it was really lovely, although probably the least memorable part of the meal (which is hardly a diss, the rest of it was just so good.)

And finally, we ended the meal with two smoky dishes: the smoked sweetbreads, with fiddleheads and other veggies (left) and beef tartare, with toast, egg yolk, parmesan, horseradish, and other goodness (right, and I have to admit that while the presentation of that dish is lovely, I wish it didn’t hide the meat!). Kevin had warned me that the sweetbreads had been controversial the last time he’d eaten there, as some folks found them too smoky, but we both agreed that while the smoky flavour is certainly strong in them, we love that kind of thing and it was delicious. This is probably one of the only times I’ve met a fiddlehead that I adored as well; generally I find them pretty underwhelming. My only complaint about the sweetbreads was that they could have been fried better; they were not as crispy as one might have hoped, and that would have really knocked them out of the park. But they were otherwise delicious, and had that awesome complex texture that I love so much from sweetbreads and that have made them an obsession for me as of late. The tartare was possibly my favourite dish of the evening; all the elements on the plate worked perfectly together, and I loved the gooeyness of the yolk with the crunch of the bread with the subtle spiciness of the horseradish. It really highlighted how great tartare can be. I was only sorry that it was the last thing we ate because I was so full already by that point. We still managed to devour the whole damn thing though.

Beyond some minor quibbles, my only real complaint came at the end of our meal, when the waiter asked us if we wanted a dessert or drink. I tried to order a mint tea (seriously, after a meal like that one needs to digest!) and was informed that they did not serve tea or coffee. What? It was not explained to me if this was a temporary state of affairs or not, but I hope that it is, because it is pretty unacceptable for a restaurant not to serve such standard drinks, and if it is a deliberate decision then this is the kind of “different for the sake of being different” that I find so irritating about trendy restaurants. Please, hipsters, put some tea and coffee on your menu and I will be loyal to you forever. Don’t try to mix things up when it comes to these sorts of dining expectations. Please.

So there you go. The moral of this story is that I should perhaps learn to be more open-minded about trendiness than I  have been in the past; whatever the “hipster” factor at The Black Hoof, these are folks that clearly take their meat very seriously and do absolutely beautiful things with it. They are clearly very talented and are cooking thoughtful, precise food. It is a really lovely place to eat, both in terms of food and atmosphere, and it was a great space in which to catch up with an old friend. All of that stuff is more important than how cool a place is or isn’t, so good for them. And now I have to go learn how to cook me some bone marrow.

On Fancy Comfort Food

I always feel conflicted about the current trend towards restaurants serving upscale versions of comfort food. On the one hand, because I believe so strongly in food being about care and social connection and because this is just what I love to eat, I am a a diehard devotee of comfort food. These are the kinds of foods that connect us to our families, our cultural heritages, and each other. And so I am thrilled that when I go out for dinner, I increasingly have the option to indulge in this kind of eating. On the other hand, I am very skeptical of the commodification of traditionally “peasant” foods, which are re-appropriated and marked up to become acceptable to our yuppy palates. I hate the pretension of some of these efforts, and I am not sure they always do justice to the cultural traditions they claim to represent. They often seem like expensive versions of food that are tastier, and more satisfying, when I make them at home. Additionally, I wonder why we need fancy restaurants to rehabilitate these foods for us. In this post, I talked about rediscovering head cheese in one of Montreal’s nicer restaurants. It was absolutely amazing and I have no objection to a nice restaurant serving a delicious food that they’ve done super well–in fact, I am obviously glad that they’re perpetuating an often maligned form of charcuterie–but I kind of hated myself for only trying it within a fine dining context. And I hate that culturally, we increasingly talk about what used to be the food of the poor like it is exotic and mysterious. It makes me feel like Marie Antoinette playing in my peasant village or something.

(And of course, all of this reclaiming of “poor people food” is happening while very real issues related to actual poor people’s access to food are a huge social problem. And a problem that the very same “foodies”, while savouring their/our gorgonzola mac and cheese, tend to treat patronizingly as being about laziness, negligence and ignorance, rather than, you know, poverty. But this is a rant for another time.)

How can we honour these foods, and genuinely love and enjoy them, without fetishizing them? I don’t know, but this has been on my mind ever since we visited the Au Pied de Cochon Cabane à Sucre this weekend. For the non-Montrealers, Au Pied de Cochon and its accompanying cabane  à sucre, are the creations of Montreal’s prodigal chef, Martin Picard. The former has been one of the most talked about restaurants in the city ever since it opened a little over five years ago. I first heard about it in the context of one of the restaurant’s most well-known dishes, its foie gras poutine, and I was instantly annoyed; I thought it sounded gimmicky and stupid, and a bastardization of a food that is meant to be cheap and simple. I came around, though, once I actually ate there, and understood what Picard was trying to do. Rather than simply trying to make “fancy” versions of local dishes, Picard has made it his mission to do justice to québécois foods such that they are recognized and taken as seriously as the French classics that have for so long dominated local fine dining. There is this fine line between bastardizing local dishes like pouding chômeur (literally “unemployed person’s pudding”) and doing justice to them that epitomizes my ambivalence with the fancy comfort food trend that I discuss above. And somehow Picard, who bathes half of his food in local foie gras that he miraculously manages to present totally unpretentiously, really pulls off the latter. I am not quite sure how he does it, but I think a large part of it is the genuine love and affection for these culinary traditions that pours out of the food his restaurants serve. They do not feel like a re-appropration; they feel like a love letter. While his restaurants are pricy, they are oddly good value given the generosity of the dishes and their richness (bringing home doggie bags is pretty much the only way to survive one of his meals). Despite the upscale nature of what he’s doing, the food is profoundly satisfying and comforting, as it should be. And it is absolutely delicious.

The cabane à sucre is the latest effort in Picard’s mission to pay hommage to québécois cuisine. For those not in the know, going to the cabane à sucre, or sugar shack, is an awesome springtime tradition in Québec; around the time they tap the trees for maple syrup, folks head out of town for their first breath of fresh air after a long winter, and generally eat a disgustingly rich meal of a dozen different kinds of pork/ham/lard, as well as pancakes and eggs, all bathed in maple syrup. This meal is usually finished off with tire, which involves one’s kindly host pouring lines of hot maple syrup into a trough of snow, which you then pick up and wrap around a popsicle stick and savour as it hardens. Trips to the cabane à sucre usually happen in big groups and often end in square dancing, or in another local “tradition” of sorts, crappy 80s disco music (a remnant of failed attempts to make the cabane à sucre “hip”). This is the stuff of extreme food nostalgia when you’ve grown up here, and so, as we headed out to Martin Picard’s version of the venerated institution, I was, again, skeptical. Cabanes à sucre are not meant to be fine dining experiences, I protested!

But it was so, so, so good. And once again, you had this space that certainly reinvented and fancified traditional québécois foods, but it was still so hearty, and so generous, and kind of sloppy and indulgent and food coma-inducing, that it worked. It still felt like a cabane à sucre, albeit a clearly unorthodox one, and I think I loved the food there even more than what I’ve eaten at the Montreal restaurant. My one complaint is that I do wish the cabane was able to offer the larger experience that one generally enjoys at a traditional cabane à sucre–such as walking trails in the surrounding areas, or dancing–but otherwise it did real justice to my food memories, and was absolutely delicious to boot. I won’t bother “reviewing” the meal further as there are a million reviews of the place floating around the internet. I’ll just finish by posting photos of the ridiculously indulgent meal that we enjoyed there (and that we enjoyed the next night, too, as we had enough leftovers that all six of us were able to take plenty home!). Sadly, probably my favourite dish of the night is not pictured–probably because I was too busy gorging myself on it–which was this amazing salad of arugula, cubes of ham, cubes of cheddar, walnuts and a dijon dressing topped in the lightest, crispiest oreilles de crisse (literally “Christ’s ears”) I have even eaten. I swear I could eat that salad every day, although it probably would not be a good idea.

Thoughts on the Possibilities of Food

While Graeme and I love cooking, eating, and talking about food, we have always been resistant to terms like “foodie”. I know a lot of people have called out the rise of “foodie” culture as exclusionary and elitist, which is a critique for which I unsurprisingly have a lot of sympathy. But I also have another problem with it. I worry about the ways in which “foodie” as a category of people who have made a hobby out of food has made the whole project of loving cooking and eating about its fetishization; about working with and consuming things that are rare, or difficult, or special, or, yes, expensive. What especially bothers me is when we talk about loving food with no context; when the conversation becomes only about food as a means and as an end in and of itself. To me, a huge part of why I am someone passionate about food is its social context. Food brings us together, helps us learn about each other, helps us learn about our pasts, and makes us feel cared for and loved. Food is a form of communication. Talking about food outside of its social importance strikes me as, more than anything else, really quite dull.

Obviously I do not mean to suggest that anyone who uses the term “foodie” is subscribing to the strange way of seeing food that I am problematizing above. Of course not. These terms take off and take on lives of their own that can mean a million different things. But I do feel, in my reading of food books, magazines, blogs, etc.–and I read about food quite a lot–that that fetishizing and decontextualizating is a pretty recurring feature in the current landscape where food is the new rock’n'roll, so to speak. I think the trendiness of food right now can be really promising–amazing new restaurants open every week and grocery stores increasingly stock more and more diverse ingredients–but again, when it is divorced from any sort of deeper meaning (why do I care that I can buy eight thousand different kinds of chiles now?) it falls kind of flat for me.

I am thinking about this this morning as I laze around on the couch in an attempt to recover from the last few days. When not cooking or eating, I am an academic, and I just finished organizing the most ambitious conference that I have been involved in to date. When my co-organizer and I first started conceptualizing the conference, about a year ago, we thought about the previous academic events we had attended, and how much hospitality had played into our experiences of those events; not just in terms of how much we “enjoyed” them, but also how being treated well, and feeling cared for, opened up spaces for conversation and allowed us to deepen the academic conversations we were having and build stronger connections to each other. Academics have often been criticized for wasting money on wining and dining, which is kind of nuts because if you’ve ever been on the other end of these things, your budget, and how you are allowed to spend it, tends to be so restricted (as a way of preventing accusations of excessive wining and dining), that it becomes very difficult to spoil people who have travelled very far to attend your conference, at all. This plays into a larger politics and discourse of seeing what academics do as being lazy and self-indulgent, but that’s a post for another time (and really another blog).

I joke a lot about being a crazy child of immigrants who is obsessive about hosting and feeding people, bu beyond the self-deprecating humour, I am constantly thinking about how such a focus affects my life and my social world beyond just keeping everybody well fed. And this conference that I am currently recovering from is an amazing example. My colleague and I, in planning it, explicitly prioritized making sure that people felt hosted and cared for. We did not do anything fancy at all; we are in the humanities, where there is never money for any kind of upscale dining or anything remotely luxurious. We mostly ordered inexpensive foods from local restaurants that we loved, and made sure there was plenty of it. We made sure that there were ample opportunities for us to all eat together, as these are the spaces in which the formal conversations that occur in conference sessions are deepened, and in which collaborations are begun. And the results were incredible; despite the fact that we didn’t really do that much to create these socially welcoming spaces, people could not stop commenting on how well cared for they felt (also a testament to how few academic events will do even this much). And the resulting conversations, and academic work that happened, were a result of that warm and fuzzy feeling. People are not robots; how well they think and work has everything to do with the circumstances in which they do so. Treated well, people felt like they wanted to give back what they had been given; their contributions to the conference were generous and engaged. There was a general sense of good will and desire to work across our disagreements and find common ground. We had all eaten together so we were all in it together. Eating together creates a sense of collaboration that changes how people relate to each other personally and professionally. It allows conversations to ripen and to go places where they would not and could not in more formal settings. Simply put: many of the best discussions that happened simply would not have happened had we not created an intimate and collaborative space through, among other things, food.

That is what loving food is about to me; I love the spaces that food creates. I do not love food as a status symbol, but rather as something that can create social intimacy. When I obsess over the perfect corn bread recipe or where in this godforsaken city I can find a decent taco, what I am searching for is not just an especially transcendent combination of flavours and textures (although obviously that’s part of it). I am also looking for the way a food makes you feel, such that it opens up possibilities. This is something that I want to keep in mind as we build this blog–that it is not merely about this recipe and that restaurant, but also about how food and drink make us feel, and especially how they help us relate to each other. I think it is important to talk explicitly about food as something that can create social intimacy in a world where food is so pathologized–we tend to talk about food as this dangerous thing that can only do us harm if we dare to enjoy it too much–what about the power of food beyond physical health? What about what it does for us socially, and even politically? That is some powerful stuff that is far more interesting to me than truffle oil or whatever the next trendy ingredient is.

On Adventurousness and Galantine de Canard

Growing up in a house full of Polish and Russian food meant a lot of proteins cooked in jelly. My grandparents’ old world gefilte fish is served surrounded by jelly, and one of my mom’s most raved about delicacies is a Polish dish consisting of boiled chicken suspended in jelly. I could never bring myself to touch any of these wobbling creations. While I pride myself on generally being an adventurous eater, savoury jellies are still terrifying to me.

As always, though, I am coming to realize that you miss out on a lot when you irrationally reject a type of food. The first time that I discovered that a jellied meat dish could actually be delicious was at Montreal’s beloved POP! a couple of years ago, where we were served an excellent charcuterie plate that included the dreaded… head cheese. Yes, that perennial Eastern European favourite that was often in my parents’ fridge growing up, and that I made a face about any time it was trotted out. (Pun intended.) I am ashamed that it took a fancy restaurant to convince me of the possibilities of what is effectively a peasant dish, especially one that I grew up around. But this head cheese in particular was generous on the meat front and not too jelly-ish, making it a great entry level aspic for a wuss like me. I shocked myself by loving it, and going back for seconds and thirds.

It has been a couple of years since my aspic revelation, though, and despite having my eyes opened, I have hardly sought out these delicacies. Actually, my terrible confession is that until recently, I kind of didn’t get pates, terrines, aspics and the like; most of them just tasted like mushy fat to me. However, as Graeme has gotten into making his own charcuterie, and as I’ve learned more about traditional cuisines and cooking methods, I have really come to love these approaches to cooking and eating meat. It helps to have recently tried some truly fantastic versions of them; I realized that it wasn’t that I didn’t like pate, for example, it was just that there is a lot of mediocre, bland pate out there. The recent trendiness of charcuterie has been awesome in terms of offering a lot of cool stuff to try; between that and watching Graeme’s efforts at home, I have started to appreciate the diversity and possibilities of these techniques. It has especially been a pleasure to learn about a kind of cooking that brings me so close to Quebecois cuisine and the incredible work done by local producers. There was this transcendent duck terrine that I gorged myself on at Brasserie t! last summer, not to mention Graeme’s amazing first effort at a pate de campagne, which we served as an appetizer last Thanksgiving, made according to Michael Ruhlman‘s recipe in his incredibly informative book, Charcuterie.

But while the past couple of years have had me do a total 180 on the charcuterie front, I still was not sold on aspics. Until yesterday afternoon, when I browsed the Fromagerie Atwater, thinking that it would be nice to pick up a little something indulgent to eat with some matzah (augh) for dinner. I emerged with some lovely manchego cheese on special, and the above galantine de canard, made by Le Canard Goulu, a farm and artisan charcuterie company based in Saint-Apollinaire that specializes in duck products. I did not know what a galantine was, I just thought it looked intriguing.

It was only after I tasted it, that I googled “galantine” and discovered that it is, indeed, an aspic, specifically one in which the meat is stuffed with forcemeat, and then spiced/garnished and jellied.  I am very pleased that I only looked this up afterward, to give me time to truly taste it without allowing myself to be prejudiced about what I was eating. Because it was RIDICULOUSLY delicious. The jelly was subtle, and didn’t take too much of my attention, and the galantine tasted like duck. That’s it, it just tasted like the duckiest duck that ever ducked, which is precisely what I love about this kind of  food. It was unpretentious and very lightly seasoned, and possibly one of the most simple tasting bits of charcuterie that I have tried in recent years. I finished off over a third of the container in one sitting. I have to say that my newfound love of charcuterie has left me with very conservative tastes; all of the wacky flavour combinations that folks are producing are fun and all, but at the end of the day, these techniques are about bringing out the best from otherwise difficult to work with parts of an animal, and the absolutely tastiest thing you can do with a duck is not to make it taste like candied orange and lemongrass or whatever, but to make it taste like DUCK. That was what made this galantine so delicious, and yes, the jellied bit of it absolutely contributed to the overall ducky experience of it. I get it now, you guys. I get it.

Aaaaaaaaaaand now I might just have to raid the fridge and polish off another third of that tempting little jar.

[Edited to add: this jar was d-o-n-e within 24 hours. Yup.]