Food and Drink Essays

An Umbrian Trattoria - Authentically Italian

With a little help from Wikipedia, I've managed to correctly define trattoria (see below) although a less complex definition would simply be “a warm and friendly place to eat good food”. Several years ago, I was in the trattoria you see pictured below, called Locanda il Verziere. It’s located in the Umbrian village of Montefalco and I loved it. The place was hugely atmospheric, the service friendly, and the food, hearty and plentiful.  

A trattoria is an Italian eating establishment that is less formal than a restaurant. As a rule, there are no printed menus, the service is casual, and wine is sold by the decanter. Emphasis is placed on low prices that draw a steady clientele. The food is modest but plentiful mostly following regional and local recipes, and in some instances is served family-style at common tables.

The pizzeria featured above, Forno Roscioli, was an amazing place to have lunch in Rome. The long rectangular-shaped pizzas that you see in this photo were routinely passed through a wooden chute from the chefs in the back who were madly baking them in a brick oven, to the chef in the front of the house who wielded a very large knife. Customers chose the type of pizza they wanted from those that were currently available. The chef whacked off a portion, folded it in half, wrapped it in paper and handed it over.  Molto bene.

Celery for Christmas

Several years ago, I spent a weekend in December with my soon-to-be 95-year-old father. After a long day of shopping at Christmas bazaars, we had just finished a supper featuring roasted beets. Dad mentioned that beets appeared to be having a renaissance as a vegetable of choice on Canadian dining tables. He noted that when he was a child, his father routinely planted a long row of the ruddy root vegetables in the family garden. Along with numerous other varieties of vegetables, a bushel of beets was kept in the cellar to be used over the long winter months. Those that were not placed in the cold were sliced and pickled, or shredded and mixed with horseradish as a savory condiment. My grandfather grew the horseradish as well, of course. In fact, over the summer months, he supplied his family with a huge variety of fresh fruits and vegetables from the garden.

Root vegetables and stodgy heads of cabbage were a great winter food source then, as were the summer fruits and vegetables that my grandmother canned for later use, but it occurred to me that lacking the ready supplies of fresh goods from warmer climes that we now have available to us year-round, families in the early 20th century might have started to really crave leafy greens over the winter. When I asked my father about this, he reminded me that in his neck of the woods, they did have access to a mid-winter leafy green vegetable...they had celery.

The dark rich soil in the drained bogs outside of Thedford, Ontario, the small town near the farm where my father was raised, was perfect for growing celery since its growth requires wet mucklands. After harvesting, the celery was kept in earth in cold storage buildings that were built in town specifically to house and blanch the vegetable. The trains that at that time passed through the small town took the produce to large markets in Toronto and Montreal. Ultimately, the Holland Marsh farmers north of Toronto took over the demand for production of celery for that city and Thedford's production faltered, but in 1931, when my father was a 13 year old boy, celery was still going strong. An exciting headline in the Montreal Gazette dated October 22 alluded to 300 carloads being shipped by train in special refrigerated cars.........."Thedford, Ont has its Best Celery Crop in Years." Eight decades later, fragile testaments to the status of this vegetable linger in many Canadian sideboards and buffet cabinets. For as anyone who has an interest in perusing antique shop shelves has no doubt noticed, there remain many forms of the shallow, pressed- glass baskets and unusually stout vases steadfastly reminding us of their specific purpose as celery dishes. As a youth, it greatly amused me to imagine anyone so particular as to have a dish that they used only for celery. In retrospect, it is now clear that a special food deserved a special vessel.

Christmas on the farm in the '20s and '30s was cause for a large family gathering. My father remembered a year that it was his family's turn to host the large meal for thirty-five. It was perhaps 1931. Being a highly capable boy, he was in charge of preparing the fowl for the meal. His family did not eat turkey, preferring other birds. Dad remembers plucking and gutting at least five big roosters and five ducks for the meal. They had heaping bowls of coleslaw, boiled carrots and mashed potatoes with gravy. All sorts of pickles were also placed on the table; briny beets, nine-day pickles, dills, and of course, the horseradish relish.

In addition to his other chores that Christmas, my father was charged with turning the rich vanilla custard that his mother made earlier in the day, into ice cream. He remembered chopping ice from the cattle water trough and mixing it with salt to freeze the creamy treat in their ice cream churn. But it wasn’t the roasts and the gravy, or even the ice cream that Dad found most memorable; no, what he remembered most fondly about Christmas in those days was the half crate of crispy fresh celery that his Uncle Orley would bring to the meal. There was enough for every family member to eat their fill of the refreshing, sweet hearts of this delectable treat, the very same highly regarded vegetable that so elegantly graced the linen-covered tables of fine restaurants and homes in the big cities to the east.

Zucchini Tales

I have a love/hate relationship with the zucchini. It’s low in calories, which is a good thing, and can be used in everything from chocolate cakes to fritters; also a good thing. But it’s almost tasteless and can be quite watery, so requires a lot of tarting up to be appetizing. Furthermore, it’s been a source of embarrassment to me. We were once asked out for dinner by a couple who were food and wine connoisseurs. During before-dinner drinks, the conversation turned to the foods to which we had allergies or aversions. My usual response to this question is that I’ll eat anything except Poptarts, but in this case, I foolishly added zucchini to the list. Inevitably, our hosts were preparing zucchini for dinner. What can I say, it was as bland as it always is.

A note from Wikipedia: In a culinary context, the zucchini is treated as a vegetable which means it is usually cooked and presented as a savory dish or accompaniment. Botanically, however, the zucchini is an immature fruit, being the swollen ovary the zucchini flower. Honestly, sometimes Wikipedia can be just a bit too descriptive. 

And finally, here is Tabatha Southey’s article describing the zucchinis of her childhood. It was published in the Globe & Mail on September 5, 2009. The author, who is both very clever and very funny, was kind enough to send it to me for use on my former food blog.

Squash it: Don't start in with me about the bounty of the harvest season, by T. Southey

It was around this time of year, in my home town when I was growing up, that our neighbours would begin arriving bearing baskets brimming with zucchinis, harvested from their gardens. And it was around this time of year, when I was growing up, that I began to hate our neighbours and wonder what it'd be like to live elsewhere, somewhere with less green space, where you didn't know most of your neighbours anyway.

It's true what they say about small towns: We answered the door to strangers. But not to people that we knew. At least not in September, when my mother used to say, pulling the curtains closed, “Pretend we're not home.”

Acquaintances would come by our house, empty-handed. Just to chat. Sure.

“Looking forward to going back to school?” they'd say.

As if. And as if they'd come by just to ask me that riveting question. And then, just as they were leaving, they'd run out to their cars and return with a shoebox full of zucchini, “Oh, I almost forgot, picked fresh this morning … ”

“We have … ,” my mother would start to say, but they'd be gone.

Sometimes people gave zucchini to innocent kids as they dropped them off from, say, ballet lessons. “Not a problem,” they'd say. “I'll drive.”

“It's our turn,” other, weaker, parents would protest, but those aggressive-gardening-car-pooling-monster-parents would happily dump a daughter on the curb outside her house with her little pink shoes in one hand and half of hell's harvest in the other and take off down the street, tires screeching, whooping for joy.

Some people feigned medical emergencies so their children would dial that special number by the phone. Over that good neighbour would rush and then, wham! Zucchinied!

Sometimes, after checking that no one was lurking around the back door of course, my mother would hand a plastic Zehrs bag to me. “Nip over on your bike and leave that for Mrs. Gorden,” she'd say.

And I'd do it – as if I didn't know what was in that bag. Even though Mrs. Gordon was so tiny and frail that I'm pretty sure she survived for 12 months entirely on the two boxes of Brownie cookies that I guilted her into buying from me every year. And yet I knew better then to argue with my mother.

One did not argue with one's mother. Not in September – unless one wanted to feel a hard, fresh zucchini across the back of one's hand.

Instead, I'd just step over the inevitable bushel of zucchini left, with ninja-like skill, outside our screen door and do what I was told – which was to give a woman I believed to be 250 years old a cash-crop-sized amount of vegetablematter and then peel out of there before she caught me.

My mother, meanwhile, would set to work retaliating for that bushel of zucchini by baking up a nice, fat whole-wheat zucchini loaf for Mrs. McLachlin, who'd apparently left the bushel basket there, and “whose mother had passed away.”

“Eighteen years ago,” my father reminded her.      

“Still, she's our neighbour. In fact, I'll double the recipe,” my mother said, shredding away.

“Gill's mother's not looking too robust these days!” she added, brightening.

Zucchini is prolific. One zucchini plant can meet the zucchini needs of an entire block – accepting the fallacy that humans even have zucchini needs. Still, gardeners feel compelled to plant an entire row and then to share the inevitable bounty with everyone they can corner.

Gardening-wise, zucchini's relatively easy, yet it looks impressive. People like to show their zucchini off – it's the Smoke on the Water of vegetables.

Rhubarb is the Louie Louie.

The Zucchini Wars continued until October. The loaf would draw zucchini-muffin fire. We'd respond with zucchini pie. They'd deploy fritters. “Kids will eat anything if you put it in Jello!” people shouted as they hurled zucchini tied to other zucchini through someone's living-room window.

Who started that rumour, I wondered. Had there been actual research? It gave me nightmares. Even if it's true, I thought, surely this behaviour shouldn't be encouraged?

Once Canadian Living mainstreamed ratatouille, it was best to avoid dinner invitations. You'd sit through a meal while they played a little cat-and-mouse with you: The appetizer? No? The soup? A zucchini casserole? Or the cruellest deception ever practised on a child – the zucchini chocolate cake?

Why, once I remember driving back from just such a dinner. We were all wondering how we'd escaped it, when my father, who'd been smacking his lips uncomfortably from the driver's seat, sighed. “Those bastards,” he said – “the wine.”

He shook his head sadly. “The wine.”

Dining in Paris in a Nudist Restaurant....I can't think of anything less appetizing

Here's the link to a New Yorker article on just that issue.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/dining-as-nature-intended-at-onaturel?te=1&nl=cooking&emc=edit_ck_20180114

What Craig Learned in Scotland

A real woman is a man's best friend.She will never stand him up and never let him down.She will reassure him when he feels insecure and comfort him after a bad day.She will inspire him to do things he never thought he could do; to live without fear and forget regret.She will enable him to express his deepest emotions and give in to his most intimate desires.She will make sure he always feels as though he's the most handsome man in the room and will enable him to be the most confident, sexy, seductive and invincible...
No wait...Sorry.
I'm thinking of scotch. It's scotch that does all that.

Never mind.

Getting Carried Away by Cinderella's Pumpkin

I first posted the following story several years ago. It's a tale of seasonal woe. This is how it went...


My friend Suzie was visiting this past weekend, so I took her to see our colourful local market with its abundance of fall produce. Rejoicing over the bounty of the harvest, I proceeded to load up on way, way too many vegetables. Our last stop was at the stall of an organic farmer who frequently arrives at the market in the fall with a cartload of (incredibly interesting) designer pumpkins, squashes and gourds. Having already purchased a perfectly acceptable Halloween pumpkin at Loblaws for $2.50, I'd pretty much convinced myself that additional pumpkin purchases were both unnecessary and wasteful. That was before I spied a large, squat, green and orange specimen sitting on the ground beside the cart, looking for all the world like Cinderella's carriage, and topped with a perfectly twisted  artisanal stem. With elbows out and adrenaline surging, I ran to grab the pumpkin and hoisted it to my chest by the fragile stem. Clearly under unreasonable strain, the stem promptly broke, allowing 300 pounds, or so, of vegetable matter to free fall to the cement. Remarkably, the pumpkin remained largely intact with only a couple of splits in its taut skin. (Later I realized that the flesh was about 6 inches thick all 'round and that it would've taken a jack hammer to cause any real damage). The owner of the pumpkin, who had carefully watched these antics, sauntered toward me. Recognizing an idiot when he saw one, the farmer informed me of the rarity of the vegetable genre. That's a "Russian fairy tale pumpkin de Provence" he mumbled, looking me straight in the eye. It sounded something like that at any rate. After a brief lecture on never lifting a pumpkin by its stem, he suggested crazy glue for easy repair, then charged me $10. He offered to keep the brutish vegetable at his stall until I could drive by with my car to pick it up, however, I was so mortified by the whole encounter that I could hardly wait to take off. I therefore refused his kind offer and struggled, hump-backed with pumpkin in arms, over the 200 yards to my parked vehicle. Thank God for strength training. 
  

When I finally got the pumpkin home, ( and realized that I didn't own crazy glue), I began to view it in a less illustrious light and so decided to pop the thing in the oven. Five hours later it was cooked. As a result, I have enough pumpkin in my freezer to feed a small village until well into next year. What can I say, I'm a sucker for foodstuff that is either really big or really small and has the word miniature, Mennonite, maple, fairy-tale or Provence in its name. For example, I frequently buy sweet-looking miniature aubergines. Since I don't know what to do with them, I keep them in my fridge until they rot, then put them in my green bin for composting.  

Pumpkin in the oven. I know that it looks like I was baking a troll's bottom but I wasn't. My cell phone camera distorts things.