Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore

by Dorothy Duncan

  All kinds of edible items were consumed — pigweed, lamb’s quarters, groundnut, and the plant called Indian cabbage. The bark of certain trees was cut in pieces and boiled, as were also the leaves and buds of the maple, beech, and basswood. Occasionally, a deer was shot and divided among the members of the rejoicing community. Frequently, also, great flocks of wild turkeys were seen in the marshy lands, and it did not require an expert shot to bring down the unsuspecting birds. Fish were also easily caught so that as soon as the first year or two had passed the settlers had abundance for themselves and for many strangers “within their gates.” Tea was a luxury for many years, with hemlock and sassafras used as substitutes. As historian L.H. Tasker has written:

  Still, a rude plenty existed. As to meat, the creeks and lake supplied fish of several kinds — black and rock bass, perch, carp, mackerel, pickerel, pike, and white fish, and above all speckled trout; the marshes — wild fowl, turkeys, ducks and geese; the woods — pigeons, partridge, quail, squirrels, rabbits, hares and deer. As to other animals in the woods, there were many (too many) wolves, bears, lynx, wild cats, beavers, foxes, martins, minks and weasels. Bastards and cranes also were found by the streams. As to grain, they soon had an abundant supply of Indian corn, wheat, peas, barley, oats, wild rice, and the commoner vegetables.

  The ingenious housewives of those times tried to make up for the various articles of food, which they could not produce by the invention of new dishes, and to make the ordinary menu as palatable as possible by some change or addition. One of the most appreciated of the “delicacies” was the pumpkin loaf, which consisted of corn meal and boiled pumpkin made into a cake and eaten hot with butter. It was generally sweetened with maple sugar.

  Another “Dutch dish” was “pot-pie,” which consisted of game or fowl cut up into small pieces and baked in a deep dish, with a heavy crust over the meat. On such fare were developed the brawn and muscle, which in a few years changed the wilderness into a veritable Garden of Eden.[15]

  From these tentative and uncertain beginnings, the United Empire Loyalists became the founding families in many communities in eastern and central Canada, for they were not just travelling through looking for a better place to settle or to make their fortune. They came from a farming tradition and wanted to be farmers again in their new homes.

  Food traditions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have stayed surprisingly constant among the Loyalist descendants. The beehive ovens, cauldrons, danglespits, and butter churns have been replaced by modern equipment, but the traditional foods of their ancestors are still enjoyed, particularly on special occasions. Hearty soups and stews, pancakes, roasts of beef and pork, well-known root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, turnips, and onions, pots of baked beans, cakes, cookies, puddings of bread, rice, custard, dried fruit, and oatmeal, and fresh fruit pies grace their tables in various combinations and on the pages of community cookbooks.

  When the Loyalist Bicentennial was celebrated in 1984, many communities sponsored contests and special events to highlight their favourite foods. Recipe books were published, and newspapers ran special food columns about Lobster Cake, Hare Soup, Brown Bread Ice Cream, Fish Stew, and Spice Cake with Boiled Icing.[16] Several Maritime communities marked the Loyalist landing with pancake breakfasts and country suppers that featured baked beans, scalloped potatoes, homemade bread, and desserts, all washed down with lashings of tea made with the little leaf that helped to spark a revolution. Tea has become one of the most popular beverages, not only in Canada, but around the world.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Victorians at Table: I Looked Forward to Every Meal

  WHEN QUEEN VICTORIA CAME TO THE THRONE in 1837, Canada was still an emerging nation, with Upper and Lower Canada on the brink of rebellion against the government of the day. There were a few cities — Quebec, Montreal, Halifax, Saint John, and the newly minted Toronto (formerly the Town of York). The villages and towns were strung out in a long line from Gaspé to Lake Huron, often with the forest at their backs. It was a time of uncontrolled emigration, often on crowded, disease-ridden ships as thousands of people were dumped into the ports of Halifax and Quebec City. The new arrivals were often forced to depend on the charity of the inhabitants until they could establish themselves or find transport farther inland where they could seek employment on a farm, in a lumber camp, or on a construction gang that was building a new canal or a short railway line.

  Eating on the move for the newcomers was often a challenge, as we learn from the accounts of those who experienced it. The quality of food and service at the inns and taverns varied widely, even within a few miles, something John Howison, travelling in the Kingston area, found in the nineteenth century: “Most of the taverns in Upper Canada are indeed a burlesque upon what they profess to be. A tolerable meal can scarcely be produced at any one of them; nay, I have visited several which are not even provided with bread.” But compare this to what he found a short distance away: “After waiting a quarter of an hour, we were conducted into the second room, and there found a table amply furnished with tea, beefsteaks, cucumbers, potatoes, honey, onions, eggs, etc. During this delectable repast, we were attended by the hostess, who poured out tea as often as we required it, and having done so, seated herself in the door-way, and read a book.”[1]

  Despite the uncertainty of their food, beverages, and service, the inns and taverns were a welcome port in the storm along the transportation routes. Before the arrival of the railways in the 1850s, there was a tavern roughly every mile or two along the major roads in what was to become Southern Ontario, and a Nova Scotia travel guide listed twenty-nine on the busy route between Halifax and Digby.[2]

  Unfortunately, many of the inns and taverns became notorious for brawling and drunkenness in their barrooms, and even outside their premises, fuelling the temperance movement and the opening of temperance hotels. Travellers headed for the temperance hotels lured by advertisements such as the one that appeared in the Cobourg Star on August 31, 1859:

  ST. LAWRENCE TEMPERANCE hotel Corner of Division and James Streets, Cobourg.

  The above hotel, lately opened for the reception of the public in the building known as McConnell’s block, is pleasantly situated near the centre of business. As the proprietors are determined to make it a First Class House, no expense will be spared to make it comfortable, and every attention will be paid to the wants of their guests. A variety of temperance drinks always on hand. Warm meals or luncheons and suppers at all reasonable hours. The stable accommodation is the largest in town, the stable being 1200 foot in length. An attentive ostler in attendance.

  The temperance movement, the temperance hotels, and “those damned cold water drinking societies,” as Colonel Thomas Talbot condemned them, may now have faded from memory, but the tangible evidence of their existence lives on in Canadian hotels and restaurants where pitchers or glasses of water are served at your table even as you are being seated.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century in larger centres such as Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, and even Cobourg, new hotels were opening to serve a more elite and sophisticated clientele. Unfortunately, few of the early-nineteenth-century bills of fare have survived, for in many hotels, whether temperance or not, everyone was served the same food. There were fixed times for meals, rich in fat and sugar, with breakfast at 7:30 a.m. with “beef-stake, fried pork and buckwheat cakes”; dinner at one with roast of beef or pork, wild game or fowl, vegetables and pudding; supper at

  7:00 p.m. was a lighter meal often made of leftovers from dinner at noon. All three meals were washed down with strong lashings of tea.[3]

  The cooking fireplace in the Victorian home, hotel, or inn remained popular long after stoves became available.

  Thomas Montgomery’s Inn, Toronto

  It was a land in transition as the colonies swelled in population. New Brunswick was building dozens of ships every year, Nova Scotians were to be found on every ocean. Inland, the trees we
re falling fast, and new fields, new villages, new towns were appearing. Everywhere there was vigorous local life. Every colony wished progressive reform; none wanted change in allegiance. Confederation was the solution the politicians explored at their now-famous meetings in the shady village of Charlottetown (population seven thousand) in September 1864. We learn from the newspapers of the day — Ross’s Weekly or the Protestant — that it was not all dry speeches, debates, and compromises, and this notion is confirmed by Harry Bruce in Canada 1812–1871: The Formative Years:

  Yes, those same stiff-necked characters in the famous group portrait … those fellows with the mutton-chop whiskers and the dark, heavy, discreet narrow-legged woollen suits … with their cheeks full of potatoes and their apparently glum, Victorian, Sunday-morning faces … those same men, the whole rollicking bunch of them, they stayed up all through the night of September 7–8, 1864, at the Grand Ball at Province House in Charlottetown.

  They arrived at 10, and they danced the local women around the hall, and they boozed it up, and they made florid speeches, and they didn’t even start to eat till one in the morning. Then, somewhere around 5 a.m., they all made their way down through the warm island fog to the harbour and climbed aboard the steamship Queen Victoria for a trip to Nova Scotia.

  There they would continue their “deliberations.” They were founding a nation, and all through that astonishing, euphoric and frequently comic summer and autumn of 1864 they were proving that man does not found nations on bread alone.[4]

  By 1865, Saint John’s Weekly Telegraph was crudely describing the historic Charlottetown and Quebec conferences as “the great intercolonial drunk of last year.” The Perth Courier referred to Confederation as “the measure of the Quebec ball-room and the oyster-supper statesmen,” and even while the Quebec Conference was still underway, the Berliner Journal was so bold as to suggest that, no matter what the delegates did on their forthcoming trip to Canada West, they could not possibly expect any worse hangovers than they had already acquired.[5] Hangovers aside, it is obvious there was far more warmth, passion, intemperance, and colour to the founding of Canada than one would expect from this Victorian colony.

  Meanwhile, the floods of newcomers to Canada continued as letters “home” from those already established praised its opportunities. As the century progressed, what was really happening on the dinner tables of the nation?

  The 1877 Home Cook Book gave suggestions to those needing guidance — and who had the means to make or produce the ingredients and the time to prepare the dishes. Under bills of fare were included menus for three breakfasts, two lunch parties, two dinners, two teas, and two suppers, as well as four alternatives on how to vary cold lunches for washing days, or other days of extra labour. There is also an economical dinner recommendation for every day of the week.

  There must have been scores of housewives in Victorian Canada like Anna Leveridge, who in 1883 brought her seven children from England to make a home with her husband, David, in the backwoods of Hastings County, Ontario, where he had found work in a lumber camp. Her letters home describe the joys and hardships of her everyday life and confirm how little help the publications of the day with their bills of fare would have been to Anna or many of her contemporaries:

  The shanty cost quite a bit to build, about 40 dollars, and it cost us quite a bit to move up here, so that we are got pretty bare again….

  I should feel lonely indeed if it were not for my neighbours…. I go in now and then and get a good dinner or tea, which is all the same, for they eat meat and potatoes three times a day. They killed three fat pigs a little time ago. Then they pack it in salt in large barrels and it lasts them till they hunt deer. Then they live on them. I tried to get some meat of them, but they will not part with any, so we have to live as we can. We don’t get very fat.[6]

  Anna and David walked to church, a journey of four and a half miles, accompanied by one son, Arthur. Edward, another son, had grown out of his boots, and “they could not get him any more yet, until they were out of debt.” She went on to say “The children all round go barefoot all the summer, and most of the women too, Mrs. Foster and Mrs. Hewton and all other Canadians.”

  There were some good meals, for on that occasion she tells us: “We had a famous dinner, to which I did ample justice, my walk having made me ravenous … stewed chicken, mashed potatoes, and custard pie, i.e., custard flavoured with ess [essence of] lemon on a short crust, on soup plates, and the whites beaten up and put on the top.” On Christmas Day, Anna’s neighbour, Mrs. Tivy, sent “a large piece of pork, nearly a qr. [quarter] of a pig.”[7]

  For those living in the growing towns and cities, Christmas was the time for festive meals and entertaining. Merchants’ shelves and counters would have been loaded with spices, lemons, oranges, English cheese, dried fruit, nuts, and other exotic imported items. Local Christmas markets, such as the one in Saint John, New Brunswick, advertised “500 turkeys, geese, etc., all fine looking birds, many with labels. One magnificent turkey carcass weighing 23 pounds is christened the ‘Beaconsfield,’ the ‘Marquis of Lorne’ rolls up 20 pounds, and ‘Sir John A Macdonald’181/2 pounds.”[8]

  Christmas Eve, often called the Holy Eve, brought French Canadians first to worship and then to their homes for special services, singing, and symbolic foods in the hours after midnight. This was, and still is, a time of reunions, with midnight mass followed by a Reveillon, with pastries, wine, and other delicacies such as tourtière, the centrepiece of the feast. Other favourite foods included head cheese, green-tomato relish, and potato candy at this celebration in Quebec and everywhere else the French had settled.

  For Canadians of British ancestry, the traditional Christmas feast was held on December 25 and included roast turkey or goose, seasonal vegetables, and rich desserts such as mince pie and plum pudding, all old favourites and sure to please the gathering. This menu appears to have survived for over two centuries, as Canadians who kept diaries confirm, for in 1800, Joseph Willcocks, a resident of York (Toronto), describes Christmas Day in his diary: “Went to Church. Weekes dined with us. We had for dinner, soup, roast beef, boiled pork, Turkey, Plumb Pudding and minced pies.”

  The Galt Cook Book, published in Toronto in 1898, recommended a similar menu with several additions:

  BILL OF FARE FOR CHRISTMAS DINNER

  Oyster Soup

  Roast Turkey Cranberry Sauce

  Mashed and Browned Potatoes

  Onions in Cream Sauce Tomatoes

  Chicken Pie Rice Croquettes

  Plum Pudding Foaming Sauce

  Mince Pies Lemon Tarts

  Salted Almonds Celery

  Crackers Cheese

  Fruit Coffee[9]

  F.J. Shipman, the proprietor of the Seldon House in Owen Sound, Ontario, offered an appealing menu for Christmas in 1891.[10] The nineteen-course meal consisted of Blue Points on the half shell, soup, fish, pickles and relishes, beef, duck, young turkey, wild turkey, English partridge, black bear, English hare, venison, vegetables, English plum pudding, assorted cakes, kisses, bon-bons, fruit, cheese, nuts, green or black tea, coffee, port, and sherry. This menu, like so many others, was printed in both English and French, no doubt to persuade the guests there was a French chef in charge of the kitchen!

  As well as serving local residents on those special occasions such as Christmas, local hotels hosted the growing number of fraternal and benevolent organizations and the dinners and banquets they sponsored.

  The Victorians loved picnics, either indoors or outdoors, with the ladies supplying a bountiful collation of hams, fowls, meat pies, tarts, and cakes, while the gentlemen were expected to provide music and games, carry baskets, and if outdoors, pick flowers, climb trees to free kites, bait fish hooks, and offer any other services required.

  Archives of Ontario

  Fortunately, travellers in the last half of the nineteenth century left first-hand accounts of meals at many hotels. The scholarly Englishman, George Tuthill Borrett, staying at M
ontreal’s St. Lawrence Hall in 1864, discovered that the way to impress a waiter was to pretend to order almost everything — even if you didn’t want it. Here is his description of his first breakfast:

  I found myself in about two minutes surrounded by a multitude of little oval dishes, on which were fish, steaks, chops, ham, chicken, turkey, rissoles, potatoes (boiled, roast and fried), cabbage, corn, cheese, onions and pickles, besides plates of hot rolls, buns, crumpets, toast and biscuits, flanked by a great jug full of milk and an enormous vessel of coffee. However, in the midst of my bewilderment, which seemed to puzzle the waiter, who had taken my order as a thing of every day occurrence, my friend the banker turned up, and with his help I succeeded in demolishing a considerable portion of the formidable array of dishes.[11]

  As the Victorian period drew to a close, Canadian food traditions were a study in contrasts. Hotel dining rooms and newly opened restaurants were expanding their services in larger cities and attempting to entice ladies to patronize the establishments.

  The impressive Terrapin Restaurants were opened in the Crystal Block, Notre Dame Street, Montreal, and at 89 King Street East, Toronto, and in 1863 the bill of fare covered thirty pages, with an equal number of pages of advertisements in both cities.

  TERRAPIN RESTAURANT

  Crystal Block, Notre Dame Street, Montreal,

  AND

  No. 89 KING STREET, EAST, TORONTO.

  THE MOST ELEGANT, SPACIOUS &