{"id":197,"date":"2010-07-09T11:15:35","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T16:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=197"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:20:21","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:20:21","slug":"three-good-reads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=197","title":{"rendered":"Three Good Reads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three fine new Canadian cookbooks have just arrived at the Cookbook Store, each one offering more than just recipes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Harrow Fair Cookbook (published by Whitecap, $29.95) is written by Moira Sanders and her younger sister, Lori Elstone, together with their cousin Beth Goslin Maloney. It\u2019s a beautifully evocative testament to rural Canada, specifically the Harrow Fair, a classic country fair which has been held in Essex County every summer since 1854. This is Canada\u2019s southernmost county, where Ontario dips a dainty toe into the American midwest, lapped by Lake Erie to the south and on the same latitude as Tuscany and Northern California. Think farmland, orchards and vineyards, hot, dusty, empty roads where all you can hear is the buzz and zip of insects in the parched afternoons; then think 70,000 people showing up every Labour Day weekend to go to the fair with its livestock shows, pie and preserve competitions, pony rides, craft exhibits and tractor pulls. Photographer Mike McColl perfectly captures the merry, good-hearted mood \u2013 an ambience which doesn\u2019t seem to have changed much over the centuries if the scattered vintage photos are anything to go by.
\nI\u2019ve blogged about Lori Elstone before \u2013 when she managed Tony de Luca\u2019s cheese shop outside Niagara-on-the-lake and made me a sensationally delicious panini. Now, she and her sister have created a record of the food at the Fair that not only reads deliciously well but will make anyone who has to live in a city ache with envy. \u201cCanning is very very cool,\u201d the authors assure us before the book has even begun, but so are the other recipes in the book, some of them 1st-prize winners at the Fair, others heirlooms from the authors\u2019 extended family \u2013 they have lived in Essex County for generations. I shall certainly try out cheddar loonies and summer pea soup and Elstone\u2019s rhubarb custard pie (which won a red ribbon at the fair). The sections on pies and cakes, canning and preserving are much stronger than \u201cmain courses\u201d but that is as it should be in a book that is born from and also brilliantly evokes the rich traditions of a true county fair.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Talking of Tony de Luca, check out Simply in Season (Whitecap, $39.95) his second cookbook. Tony has presented his food in many different ways and many different places during his 14 years on the Niagara peninsula. He created the restaurant at Hillebrand estates winery in 1996, opened his cheese store in the Red Barn, built a high-end restaurant in Si Wai Lai\u2019s reincarnated Oban Inn, put together the Old Winery as a sort of roadhouse on the main highway into N-o-t-L for pastas, pizzas and fairly generic antipasti and recently opened a new, small, fine-dining establishment called Deluca\u2019s Wine Country Restaurant a little way farther along the road, opposite Jackson-Triggs winery. This book is definitely at the fancy end of Tony\u2019s broad culinary spectrum, arranged month by month and starring Niagara\u2019s excellent farmed and foraged produce, all quickened by the warm and generous traditions of his Italian heritage. (Has anyone ever written about the vital Italian influence in Niagara\u2019s wine country \u2013 not just the families at the Falls, but the importance of the Ziraldos, Pennachettis, Picones, Pingues, Pavans, Pilliterris, and all the other food-and-wine founding fathers whose forebears came from Italy?)
\nFaced with a seasonal Canadian cookbook, devil\u2019s advocates immediately turn to the starvation month of April to see what, if anything, the locavore chef has found to recommend. He makes a sauce out of carrot-tops, inspired by Anton Mosimann, plays with tarragon and arugula (from a greenhouse, I suspect) but is redeeemed by his grandmother\u2019s delectable Easter recipes and a seafood sausage based on a dish he learned while cooking at Chewton Glen in England in 1988. And that is the other delight of this book \u2013 at least for a restaurant nerd like me. There\u2019s a long and detailed introduction in which Tony describes his entire culinary career to date, starting with the moment he realized he wanted to be a chef, at the age of 12, helping out in his parents\u2019 35-seat restaurant, L\u2019Altro Mondo, in Oak Ridges, Ont. The Windsor Arms, Chewton Glen, Oliver\u2019s Bakery, Langdon Hall, Truffles (in the Susan Weaver, Patrick Lin era), the Millcroft Inn (his first job as executive chef in 1992), Colori, briefly, on the Danforth and so to Niagara\u2026 everywhere gets a mention. Here and there throughout the text are little photos of various kitchen brigades over the years, snapshots of comradeship. Being a professional cook is like being an actor \u2013 you develop intense emotional relationships with the people you work with for as long as you work with them, then move on to a new kitchen or a new production with barely a backward glance.
\nTony\u2019s recipes lie on the cusp of domestic and restaurant cooking. They\u2019re elegant and professionally balanced, imaginative (I love the sound of shrimp minestrone, or fresh asparagus with oyster cream sauce) but they are also lucid and doable for a competent, careful cook with time to spend shopping. His cousin, Maria Giuliani, provides poetry to introduce the chapters and a high-school friend, Anna D\u2019Agrosa, took the photographs, though you have to comb the copyright page with a magnifying glass to find her credit.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The Boreal Gourmet by Michele Genest<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A third book that has pleased me inordinately this housebound week is Michele Genest\u2019s The Boreal Gourmet, Adventures in Northern Cooking (Lost Moose, $26.95). Miche and I worked together many years ago when she edited my restaurant reviews for enRoute magazine and, like me, she had spent serious time on a Greek island, but we lost touch. Now I know why. She went to live in the Yukon! This book drags us along with her, starting at the deep end with a chapter entitled \u201cInto the Wild \u2013 In Pursuit of Berries.\u201d Within a paragraph we are introduced to Linda, a friend of Miche\u2019s who becomes obsessed with the picking and hoarding of lowbush cranberries \u2013 their colour and firm roundness, the way their dark red lustre glows against the silver bowl in which she keeps them, hidden in the root cellar. We learn the unspoken etiquette of cranberry picking and the importance of keeping another picker\u2019s patch secret \u2013 only then, when we are thoroughly inveigled into local lore and anecdote, are we allowed to share the recipes.
\nThat is surely the chief delight of this book (along with Cathie Archbould\u2019s photographs and Laurel Parry\u2019s illustrations). Miche is a lovely writer who brings you in to the kitchens and out into the wilderness of the Yukon. This book will be cherished as a primary source of northern Canadian foodways as well as a treasure trove of household recipes from Whitehorse. I don\u2019t suppose I\u2019ll ever make elk liver pat\u00e9 or braised moose ribs with espresso stout and chocolate but it\u2019s enormously interesting to read about them, and the practical wisdom in the methods makes me feel as if I could master them all. What do you do with dry shaggy manes? Why, use them in a wild blueberry risotto. What do you do when sourdough goes bad? Throw it away and start again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three fine new Canadian cookbooks have just arrived at the Cookbook Store, each one offering more than just recipes. The Harrow Fair Cookbook (published by Whitecap, $29.95) is written by Moira Sanders and her younger sister, Lori Elstone, together with their cousin Beth Goslin Maloney. It\u2019s a beautifully evocative testament to rural Canada, specifically the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[102,1],"tags":[53,52,51,47,50,48,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2130,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/2130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}