“The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.”

– Somerset Maugham

Edith’s War is Andrew Smith’s new novel, and layers of meaning are rife in this tale of two Liverpool families during World War II. The book opens a window onto the impact of living through war as a civilian, on living a daily life that includes the aerial bombardments of the Blitz, and on being left behind.

For me, the book’s deepest meaning is dished up in its confluence of Italian and English culture, which — whatever the time or place — is never better focused than when people are gathered around food. For the Maguires and the Baccanellos, the two neighbouring and emotionally enmeshed families at the centre of Edith’s War, food rationing was the order of the day. At the beginning of the war, the UK imported over 70 per cent of its food and 50 per cent of its meat. Rationing began in early January, 1940, initially with bacon, eggs, butter and sugar, and not long afterward, meat.

Although both families have kitchen gardens, which help them become self-reliant and creative in putting food on the table, it’s the scramble for meat that puts both rabbit [coniglio] and horse [cavallo] on their plates, and not always happily.

These characters hunted their rabbit, but when I was growing up, we never went any further than our backyard for fresh, live rabbit. It was a family staple, and from it I learned the relationship of eating to killing.

From about six or seven, I was my father’s accomplice at slaughter. Thinking back, I’m not sure how I felt about my dad asking me to hold the hind legs while he held the rabbit’s neck and sunk a knife into it. Together, we’d hold the animal until it stopped moving. After letting the blood drain, he would start the ceremonial skinning, cutting a seam around the neck and paws, tipping his knife under the membrane separating the pelt from the body. Then, surreally, he would pull the pelt clean off, like a sweater. Then came the belly incision, revealing a collection of perfect, moist organs joined together in their purpose, and now sorted out for ours.

This crazy childhood experience could explain why I became a chef. Looking back, I can see that I was able to manage my task because of the natural and ironically safe atmosphere my father created. He acted like he was doing the most natural thing in the world. Of course, he was.

It turns out I would never be queasy about meat, but horse is something else.

Horse makes an appearance in Edith’s War when the Baccanello matriarch, Anna, tells the two families gathered for an Italian-style Christmas Eve feast, “I tell that butcher over and over to find some horse. It’s not rationed and there must be many people round here only too glad to sell their animals. Finally he took my advice. It’s good, yes?”  Hmmm. Her son gobbles up some remaining scraps with gusto, but Liam Maguire, who’d been eating his fill blithely unaware, is horrified.

The year I cooked classical French food in a posh restaurant in Quebec, I cooked horse for the first and last time. Although I didn’t want to, I ate some. It was beautiful, moist, purple-red flesh that tasted delicate and sweet. I ate it like I ate sweetbreads, brains and sea urchin. I needed to know how they tasted, and I can be happy going to my grave never eating them again.

When I looked closely at my problem with eating horse, all I could come up with was the archetype. Horses are dealt a genetically gifted hand. In my eyes, they’re grand and noble, suited only for riding or work or some combination of both, but never as part of the food chain.

Here’s the thing: it’s no different from my young childhood friends who cooed while petting our lovely, soft bunnies and then violently popped their eyes and dropped their jaws when they found out the rabbits would eventually be supper. As adults, we can indefinitely cling to our emotional sentiments concerning food, but like the Maguires and the Baccanellos in Edith’s War, we’ll continue to take culinary cues from other cultures, whether contending with our survival or not.

You can get a great deal on Edith’s War here and the eBook here.

Follow Andrew’s blog, tweet him @andrewaxiom and fan him on FB.

Despite the atrocities of our culture’s animal husbandry, I’ll never give up meat.

More and more, I’m satisfied with very little of it. Also, frankly, I can’t always afford to buy organic or naturally raised. Better food remains the domain of fuller wallets than mine. But that’s another issue for another day.

Forget organic and naturally raised, says author Jonathan Safran Foer [Everything Is Illuminated], whose new book Eating Animals was released this week.

In this Q&A by Sarah Boesveld, he says:

Even if you want to be an ethical omnivore or a selective omnivore, just given the realities of farming, it means you’re going to eat vegetarian almost all the time.

I’m having trouble thinking of myself as unethical, but I’ll own up to thinking that the best efforts of the local food movement, microfarming and CSAs are still a drop in the bucket and not really impacting factory farming in any real way.

Which is not to say microfarming and all the related efforts around it are for naught. Quite the opposite. It’s just that, when I hear complaints about factory farming followed by one form or other of boycotting, I think, “There’s got to be a better way.”

When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle [1906], his exposé of the Chicago meat industry, it led to historic reform. His book was responsible for the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, including better working conditions for workers.

I want to hear more about reform for large scale operations. Is Canada as bound to nepotistic relationships among government agencies to protect corporate profits as is the case in the U.S. [See Food, Inc.], or are we more likely to succeed in changing food production on a grand scale?

Image via Tiny Evil Hog | via Burstoid

…the long hours and what that meant to her kids, whom she was raising alone

…the tenuous hold her restaurant owners often had on their businesses

…the struggle to build and train a great team, only to lose great key people, again and again

…those difficult cooks and kitchen helpers who turn out to be fiercely loyal, enduring and true, but still prickly…

I particularly enjoyed Clark’s most telling display of visionary womanhood: to open her own restaurant despite her kids’ challenges. She said her kids deserve a mother who has the courage to follow her dreams. This would show them how to follow theirs.

â—Š

I met Jeff in 1999, when we were both sous chefs at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He worked in the restaurant, and I was on special events, so we never worked side by side, but I kept my eye on him, because his ideas were always very interesting to me.

He favoured simple executions with high-quality ingredients, constant reminders of the influence of Alice Waters, of one of his culinary heroes, and mine as well.

Waters was famous for telling her cooks, “Humble yourself in front of your ingredients,” which made a lot of sense to me. It was about how the cook would honour the ingredient’s best qualities and bring that to the plate.

Often, just before lunch service, I’d wander over to Jeff’s station to see what he’d done for the day’s special. My favourite was a treatment for the fish of the day, a sauce of olive oil, lemon, parsley, currents, capers and pine nuts.

As he showed it to me, he ran his spoon through the sauce to show its characteristics. Everything was fresh, balanced and simple. I knew immediately how it would taste and saw that each ingredient’s flavour had been given its due, and that all together, they would deliver something they couldn’t on their own.

It’s rare to be captivated by a dish in this way and for so long, but then, simplicity and elegance are irresistible.

::

Jeff’s talk at the September Women in Food Industry Management meeting caused a bit of a stir. A slide of his winter salad of root vegetables begged the question: where was the lettuce and tomato?. There wasn’t a speck of each , “because they aren’t the best of what earth is producing for us in winter, “ he told the crowd.

“We have to reconsider our notion of salad,” said the chef of The Ancaster Old Mill Restaurant. In fact, Jeff would also like us to reconsider our notion of food in general. As the person who brought Slow Food to Ontario, Jeff is an advocate and ambassador for the international movement, which is named for the antithesis of fast food.

“My idea of fast food,” says Jeff, “is prosciutto and the other charcuterie we make at the inn,” which illustrates the Slow Food principle rather well. Charcuterie is traditionally made during the winter months, so that it can cure in a cold cellar and continue to develop in flavour until it’s ready to eat in the fall. It’s fast, because you simply slice and serve, ideally with good bread and some wine.

The Slow Food Movement was born in Italy in 1989. It calls itself “a non-profit, eco-gastronomic organization to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

Showing us the gorgeous slides that will illustrate his upcoming book, Jeff also took us on a tour of how he and his kitchen brigade forge relationships with local farms or compete for culinary recognition in Europe.

Watch for From Earth to Table, to be published by Random House March 2009

Drop by to see Jeff at The Ancaster Old Mill.
Check in with Toronto’s Slow Food Movement
Subscribe to Jeff’s gorgeous blog Earth to Table.

How many ways has Bonnie Stern distinguished herself?

I can confidently say …

:: no other Canadian cooking teacher has written as many books,

:: invited as many acclaimed chefs and cooking instructors to teach at her school

:: or hosted as many respected authors to discuss their work with a dozen of their fans at a time — while serving them a meal inspired by the book.

I’d like to know which American would match her accomplishments. [An unofficial mission beginning today]

Count’em…
Books

Food Processor Cuisine, 1978
At My Table, 1980
Cuisinart Cookbook, 1985
The Bonnie Stern Cookbook, 1987

Appetizers, 1990
Simply HeartSmart Cooking, 1994
In the Kitchen with Bonnie Stern, 1995
Cooking with Bonnie Stern, 1996
More HeartSmart Cooking with Bonnie Stern, 1997
Simply HeartSmart, 1997
Desserts, 1998
HeartSmart Cooking, 2000
HeartSmart Cooking for Friends and Family, 2000
Simply HeartSmart Cooking, 2003
Bonnie Stern’s Essentials of Home Cooking, 2003
HeartSmart: The Best of Bonnie Stern, 2006

Chef/Cooking Teachers
[a partial list]

Marcella Hazan
Giuliano Bugialli
Carlo Middione
Thomas Haas
Rick Bayless
Rob Feenie
Nina Simonds
Madhur Jaffrey
Caprial Pence
Susur Lee
Mark McEwan
Mark Bittman
and more

Authors
[another partial list]

Vincent Lam
Stuart McLean
Margaret Atwood
James Chatto
Margaret MacMillan
Marnie Woodrow
Lori Lansens
Camilla Scott
Nino Ricci and more

Cooking school means one thing to the would-be professional chef, and another to the home cook. Bonnie Stern’s School of Cooking is one of the latter. She opened it in 1973, long before there were foodies, foodtv or molecular gastronomy. She was a pioneer for selling the city on the idea of cooking classes long before we got the choices we have today. She also gets kudos for lasting as long as she has. There’s a lot of to be said for constancy, and she’s a great example of that.

Because my training was for the professional kitchen, I knew little about Bonnie, until now. I was going to be in New York for a few days, so I looked into which celebrity chef would be cooking at James Beard House. The Greenwich Village home of the father of American gastronomy is a culinary destination. And there was Bonnie, doing a Saturday workshop and cooking a Sunday brunch during my stay there. I quickly signed up for both, and in the meantime made an appointment to interview her here before watching her in action away from home.

I met with Bonnie on Valentine’s Day, ostensibly to talk about her school from a business point of view, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Which is not to say she didn’t give me a warm welcome. She certainly did. She put on a friendly pot of coffee, laid out some cookies, set me down in her dining/classroom, with the kitchen at one end, where two women were doing some prep for an upcoming class.

But she didn’t want to talk about business, no matter how I approached it.

“For me, it’s all about food and cooking,” she says. “I’m passionate about it. I love it.”

Happy Valentine’s, Bonnie.

More on Bonnie to come.