Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore

by Dorothy Duncan

  It would have been at community and social events that many specially prepared dishes were served such as sweetmeats, cold tongue, chowder, pumpkin pie, mock turtle soup, and some very good cakes.[22]

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “We Greatly Missed Our Tea”

  ON THAT DECEMBER DAY IN 1773 WHEN a new shipment of tea arrived in Boston’s harbour and a well-organized crowd, disguised as members of the First Nations, seized the ship and dumped 342 cases containing 90,000 pounds of tea into the water, the American Revolution became a reality. The Boston Tea Party, as it was dubbed, was not only an act of defiance against the British government, which had imposed a new tax on tea earlier in the year, but was also a symbol of the unhappiness that plagued all the colonies in British North America, from Quebec and Nova Scotia in the north to Virginia and Georgia in the south.

  A bowl of tea was a favourite beverage at any time of the day, whether at breakfast, after dinner at noon, or with a light supper before bed. Tea combined mystery and myth, with its ancient beginnings in China in 2737 BC. It was described by Emperor Shen Nung as “good for tumors or abscesses that come about the head, or for ailments of the bladder. It dissipates heat caused by phlegms, or inflammation of the chest. It quenches thirst. It lessens the desire to sleep. It gladdens and cheers the heart.”[1]

  By the eighteenth century, tea had become England’s national beverage and the country’s subjects in the colonies were outraged with the new tax on their favourite drink and medicine. However, in 1783 and 1784, after the American Revolution ended, some fifty thousand men, women, and children remained loyal to Britain (despite the taxes and other grievances), and they streamed into the Canadian colonies to the north. The British authorities at Halifax and Quebec were suddenly faced with the monumental task of feeding, sheltering, and settling waves of refugees who in many cases far outnumbered the resident population. The United Empire Loyalists, as they were to become known, went on to change the face of the Canadian colonies, and their arrival led directly to the formation of the provinces of New Brunswick and Ontario.[2]

  Tea was both a beverage and a medicine in colonial Canada, and this locked tea chest reflects the drink’s value and importance. These chests were fitted with compartments for storing the imported teas and a bowl for blending the special mixtures.

  With the evacuation of New York City in 1783, the last British stronghold in the new United States of America, close to forty thousand refugees were transported to the British colonies of Newfoundland, Île Saint-Jean (later Prince Edward Island), Nova Scotia, and Quebec. For those on the ship, the voyage usually took from a week to a fortnight, depending on the weather and on whether the navigator took a “wrong tack.” The army-style rations of bread or flour, salt beef and pork, butter, peas, and oatmeal were sufficient but dull, and no rum was issued. Many were sick and frightened for, of course, the greatest danger was shipwreck, particularly in the stormy Bay of Fundy. Surprisingly, only one disaster was reported. In September 1783, the Martha struck rocks off Sable Island near the entrance to the Bay of Fundy and “in the course of a few hours wrecked in a thousand pieces,” with the loss of 115 men, women, and children. Some fifty survivors were rescued by fishing boats. Another six floated on a piece of wreckage for a couple of days, during which time two died of exposure. Eventually, the remaining four reached an island, where they lived for a week on “a few raspberries and snails” before they were found.[3]

  Arrival was a mixed experience. Loyalist Sarah Frost recalled hers when the Two Sisters sailed into the harbour of Saint John, New Brunswick: “our people went on shore and brought on board spruce and gooseberries and grass and pea vines with the blossoms on them, all of which grow wild here.” She added, as if in disbelief, “They say this is to be our city. Our land is five and twenty miles up the river.”[4] Another Loyalist refugee shared her thoughts after landing: “I climbed to the top of Chapman’s hill and watched sails disappearing in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness came over me that, although I had not shed a single tear through all the war, I sat down on the damp moss with my baby in my lap and cried.” That lady became the grandmother of Sir Leonard Tilley, New Brunswick’s Father of Confederation.[5]

  The Fall Fleet from New York City brought officers and men and their families, who proceeded to temporary locations where they lived in tents under deplorable conditions. Some of the group continued on immediately to build themselves shelter more substantial than a tent. One of these was Sergeant Benjamin Ingraham, whose eleven-year-old daughter, Hannah, recalled the day they moved into their new house:

  One morning we waked to find the snow laying deep on the ground around us, and then father came walking through it and told us the house was ready and not to stop to light the fire then, and not to mind the weather, but follow his tracks through the trees, for the trees were so many we soon lost sight of him going up the hill; it was snowing fast, and oh, so cold. Father carried a chest and we all carried something and followed him up the hill through the trees. It was not long before we heard him pounding, and oh, what a joy to see our gable end. There was no floor laid, no window, no chimney, no door, but we had a roof at last.

  A good fire was burning on the hearth, and mother had a big loaf of bread with us, and she boiled a kettle of water and put a good piece of butter in a pewter bowl, and we toasted our bread and all sat round the bowl to eat our breakfast that morning and mother said, “Thank God, we are no longer in dread of having shots fired through the house. This is the sweetest meal I have tasted for many a day.”[6]

  The Ingrahams soon had a door, a floor, a window, and a chimney, and were as snug as they could have hoped for under the circumstances. Others were less fortunate, particularly those such as Mary Fisher and her family who, for one reason or another, had failed to erect some sort of rude shelter or cabin and continued to live in the tents. The Fishers, along with thousands of others, had landed at St. Ann’s (later Fredericton). This enormous influx led to the division of Nova Scotia, and in June 1784 the colony of New Brunswick was created. As Mary describes it:

  We pitched our tents in the shelter of the woods and tried to cover them with spruce boughs. We used stones for fireplaces. Our tents had no floor but the ground. The winter was very cold, with deep snow, which we tried to keep from drifting in by putting a large rug at the door. The snow, which lay six feet deep around us, helped greatly in keeping out the cold. How we lived through that awful winter I hardly know. There were mothers that had been reared in a pleasant country enjoying all of the comforts of life, with helpless children in their arms. They clasped their infants to their bosoms and tried by the warmth of their own bodies to protect them from the bitter cold. Sometimes a part of the family had to remain up during the night to keep the fires burning, so as to keep the rest from freezing. Some destitute people made use of boards, which the older ones kept heating before the fire and applied by turns to the smaller children to keep them warm.[7]

  Death by freezing and exposure was not the only threat that confronted the Loyalists. The danger of starving to death was every bit as real. True, they were entitled to government rations. The daily ration per person was a pound of flour, half a pound of beef, and an “infinitesimal quantity of butter.” In addition, each received per week a pound of oatmeal and one of peas, and occasionally a little rice. Children under ten were entitled to half the amount. Such a ration, while not exactly luxurious, would certainly keep a person alive; the problem was they did not always get it. There were all sorts of difficulties involved in the distribution of these provisions, which had to come all the way from Britain — troubles created by logistics, supply, graft, and bureaucracy.

  Needless to say, the Loyalists were often hungry, even on the verge of starvation, during the winter of 1783–84. In desperation the men made long trips on snowshoes and hauled supplies back on hand sleds or toboggans from distant warehouses. They fished through holes in the ice; they hunted moose and deer. Even so, many did not survive until sp
ring.[8]

  Spring finally came and with it relief from the interminable cold, but not from hunger. “A full supply of provisions was looked for in the spring,” Mary Fisher recalled,

  but the people were betrayed by those they depended on to supply them. All the settlers were reduced to great straits and had to live after the Indian fashion. The men caught fish, hunted moose and shot pigeons; they ate fiddleheads, grapes and other wild plants. Some ate weeds, which proved to be poisonous, and several died as a result. In the spring we made maple sugar. Men started to clear land but had to desist from hunger. Others had to dig up the potatoes they had planted and eat them. It was a bleak period, but eventually a schooner arrived with cornmeal and rye. The winter was over — most of the refugees had survived, but a substantial number lay in their graves on the riverbank.[9]

  Despite the challenges, there were some happy accounts in Mary Fisher’s narrative, and these included the discovery of some large patches of pure white beans, marked with a black cross. These had probably been originally planted by the French, but were now growing wild. The Loyalists called them “Royal Provincials’ bread,” and later “the staff of life and hope of the starving.” Mary also reports that “The first store was kept by a man named Cairnes. He sold fish at one penny each and butternuts at two for a penny. He also sold tea at $2.00 per lb. which was to us a great boon. We greatly missed our tea. Sometimes we used an article called Labrador, and sometimes steeped spruce or hemlock bark for drinking, but I despised it.”[10]

  Meanwhile, on Île Saint-Jean the new arrivals fared slightly better. William Schurman, his wife, Elizabeth Hyat, and their family of five boys (ages two to thirteen) were able to set up storekeeping in a log cabin room in Central Bedeque near Summerside. From his account books, George Leard, writing in the Loyalist Gazette, tells us that:

  Food purchases were a small item and it would appear that the most important were tea and pepper. These are in almost every account. Flour was bought from the miller, or ground in some poor way at home. Salt, so important in diet and food preservation, must have been obtained from schooners landing it for the fishermen, because it does not appear in the accounts till 1795, when it sold at eighty cents a bushel. Sugar was not charged till 1794, when it was twenty cents a pound. This was likely West Indian brown. Maple sugar was the staple sweetener up till that time, supplemented of course with molasses, which sold at eighty cents a gallon in 1787.

  Tea, the most popular beverage, sold for ninety cents in the cheaper quality called Bohea with Shoushand tea selling in 1795, at two dollars the pound. Coffee is not mentioned except in the first year, when it sold very reasonably for thirty cents a pound. Nutmegs at ten cents a piece, and a stick of cinnamon for twenty cents, made spices luxuries in the earliest accounts. However, by 1800, ginger and allspice were sixty cents a pound and pepper seventy.

  Schurman took butter on account from Bedeque women and gave a shilling, a pound, no more, no less, for practically the whole time he was in business, from 1784 to 1819. It was good value sometimes, yet during the war years, 1812–1814, when it took ten to twelve pounds of butter to buy a pound of tea, it must have seemed like a starvation price. In the meat department which was a barrel of pickle at the back of the shop, beef seldom varied in price at ten cents a pound, with pork two to four cents dearer, and lamb and veal between eight and nine cents.[11]

  In Upper Canada (later Canada West, and eventually Ontario), the experience was again slightly different for the seven thousand Loyalists and their First Nations allies who had walked from Vermont, western New York, and Pennsylvania and settled on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. The Loyalists were without food, clothing, shelter, and land. They were moved by bateaux (long, flat-bottomed cargo and passenger boats crewed by six men and holding two tons of goods) from Quebec up the St. Lawrence to fourteen newly surveyed townships and settled by religious and military groups on land drawn by lot.

  An encampment of the United Empire Loyalists at Johnstown (later Cornwall), a new settlement on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, June 6, 1784. From this base camp the soldiers and families of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York moved to their new land along the river.

  Archives of Ontario

  To the west of them, along the west bank of the Niagara River, Butler’s Rangers under Colonel John Butler had been building houses and sowing crops since 1780, and in 1782 sixteen farmers with their families had cleared 236 acres of land. Peter Secord produced two hundred bushels of corn, fifteen of wheat, seventy of potatoes, and four of oats on twenty-four acres; John Depue grew two hundred bushels of corn and fifty of potatoes on sixteen acres; and Michael Showers produced forty bushels of corn, six of oats, and fifteen of potatoes on twelve acres. The Rangers prepared the Government Farm for planting Indian corn. In 1784 they had established Butlersburg, later Newark, and eventually Niagara-on-the-Lake.[12]

  There were success stories. William Jarvis, a Loyalist militia officer later appointed secretary and registrar of Upper Canada, writes to his father-in-law, the Reverend Samuel Peters, on November 22, 1793:

  I shall leave my family well provided for. I have a yoke of fatted oxen to come down, 12 small shoats to put into a barrel occasionally which I expect will weigh in from 40 to 60 lbs., about 60 head of dung-hill fowl, 16 fine turkeys, and a doz. ducks, 2 breeding sows, a milch cow which had a calf in August, which of course will be able to afford her mistress a good supply of milk through the winter. In the root house I have 400 good head of cabbage, and about 60 bushels of potatoes and a sufficiency of excellent turnips.

  My cellar is stored with 3 barrels of wine, 2 of cider, 2 of apples (for my darling), and a good stock of butter. My cock-loft contains some of the finest maple sugar I ever beheld, 10,000 lbs. was made in an Indian village near Michellemackinac. We have 150 lb. of it. It was my intention to send you a small keg of it, but I was taken ill. Also plenty of good flour, cheese, coffee, loaf sugar, etc. In my stable I shall have the ponies and a good slay; the snugest and warmest cottage in the province. Thus you see I shall have the best of companions abundantly supplied with every comfort in the wilderness, where few have an idea only of lonely existing. In fact I am early provided with every requisite for a long and severe winter which is close on our heels.[13]

  The St. Lawrence settlers arrived too late to plant crops in 1784 and had to appeal to the government for extra supplies to see them through the first year. In 1787, just as they began to become established, they suffered crop failures and threats of famine as the Crown rations were ending. Leeks, buds of trees, and leaves were ground up to eat, and 1788 became known as the “hungry year” because of the shortage of food. One of the Loyalists reported:

  While many difficulties were encountered in the early settlement, yet we realized many advantages. We were always supplied with venison; deer was plentiful, partridge and pigeons in abundance, plenty of fish for all who wished to catch them, no taxes to pay, and an abundance of wood at our doors. Although deprived of many kinds of fruit, we obtained the natural productions of the country — strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries and plenty of red plums. Cranberries were found in abundance in marshes. The only animal we brought with us was a dog named Tipler that proved almost invaluable in hunting.

  After the first year, we raised a supply of Indian corn; but had no mill to grind it, and were, therefore, compelled to pound it in a large mortar, manufacturing what we call “Samp,” which was made into Indian bread, called by the Dutch, “Suppawn.” The mortar was constructed in the following manner: We cut a log from a large tree, say two and a half feet in diameter and six feet in length, planted firmly in the ground, so that about two feet projected above the surface; then carefully burned the centre of the top, so as to form a considerable cavity, which was then scraped clean. We generally selected an ironwood tree, about six inches in diameter, to form a pestle. Although this simple contrivance did well enough for corn, it did not answer for grinding wheat. The Government,
seeing the difficulty, built a mill back of Kingston, where inhabitants for seven miles below Brockville got their grinding done.[14]

  Merchants like Richard Cartwright in Kingston and Robert Hamilton in Niagara, who had been supplying the fur traders and the military, began selling food, clothing, housewares, and rum to the Loyalists and taking wheat, corn, potash, and pork in return. By 1787 the 300 residents of Marysburgh were raising 219 pigs — their faith was in salt pork and in trade! It was this very Great Lakes trading system that gave rapid rise to the development of many of the communities in Upper Canada, swelled by new arrivals from the Maritimes, the new United States, and Europe, especially Britain.

  Upper Canada had another influx of Loyalists when, in the 1790s, New Brunswick was becoming crowded. Many moved their families again up the St. Lawrence, through Lakes Ontario and Erie, to the Long Point country. They, too, had to get rid of the great forests of beech, maple, white and yellow pine, and walnut to clear fields for crops. One settler describes the daily round as “working from dawn to dark and then walking 3 miles to the river, catching fish by the light of the ‘fire jacks,’ using the bone of a pike as a hook.” The fish, buds and leaves of trees, and milk from one cow brought from New Brunswick kept the family alive until August when a little crop of spring wheat headed out sufficiently to allow a change of diet. The Long Point settlers were not eligible for three years of rations, because this migration was their second, so they all suffered hardships.