While some hopeful young women may have depended on the nutmeg to foretell their future, Norwegian girls settled in Manitoba relied on an almond. An old Norse tradition tells of families putting an almond in the Yulegrot bowl. Whoever got it was the next one married (or, some say, will have good luck in the new year). Yulegrot contains milk rice, raisins, salt, sugar, cinnamon and, of course, an almond, and is gently cooked for about two hours before serving.[14]
Many cultural groups served a light or dark fruitcake at a wedding, and traditionally the unmarried women take a piece of this cake home with them to put under their pillows, confident they will dream of their future husbands that night!
When members of a community passed away, whether First Nations or newcomers, friends and neighbours rallied around to honour the deceased and to support and assist the living. Champlain may have been the first newcomer to record this tradition in the culture of the founding peoples. In 1608 he noted that, following the death of a chief, the Natives would hold a banquet three times a year and sing and dance on the grave. A few years later, in 1613, he described a cemetery on the Ottawa River in which the tombs were like shrines and had embellishments that denoted the needs of the departed. If the deceased were a woman or a girl, a kettle, an earthen pot, a wooden spoon, or a paddle might be depicted.
On September 28, 1635, Father Le Jeune provided an account of the Feast of the Dead in which he related how he and Father Buteux discovered a band of Natives holding a feast near the graves of their dead relatives. The Jesuit said that the Natives gave the departed the best part of the banquet, which they tossed into the fire.
Newcomers to Canada appear to have brought with them the traditions of their cultures and their communities. One of the most positive ways many of these newcomers showed their support was to provide ready-made dishes of food delivered to the door of the mourning family. Arrangements also had to be made to feed, water, and care for the horses of the mourners, many of whom travelled long distances and stayed for several days upon hearing of the death of a relative or friend. When the service was over, whether at home, at a place of worship, or at the graveside, and the deceased had been buried, everyone was invited back to the house for “refreshments,” and long hours would be spent with old acquaintances and friends. A funeral rated a good supply of liquor. Although there was a great display of mourning until the deceased had been properly buried, things cheered up somewhat on the return from the cemetery. A generous table was laid with barley bread and cheese, loaf cake, and always a funeral cake, which was a plain cake flavoured with cinnamon.[15]
Bees and their habits are important parts of Canadian folklore. For example, if there is a death in the family, the hives should be draped in black, a mournful tune should be hummed, and the name of the departed should be announced so that these messengers will take the news to heaven.
Old Hemmingford Recipes, published in 1977, celebrated the centennial of the incorporation of Hemmingford Village,
Quebec, and includes the favourite recipes of some of the families that settled there as early as 1800. “An early settlers’ recipe” for Funeral Pie calls for sour cream, raisins, eggs, salt, spices, lemon juice, and cornstarch baked in an unbaked pie shell.[16]
Greek settlers coming to Manitoba brought with them the tradition of preparing Kolliva (also Kolyva) for the mourning service, held forty days after the passing of a loved one. This dish contains wheat, symbolizing everlasting life, and raisins for sweetness. Almonds, pecans, zwieback (crisp buns), and sugar are added to the recipe, which takes several hours to make. When it is ready to serve, a cardboard cross is pressed into the centre and then the depression is filled with silver candy or coloured sugar.[17]
Canadians of Chinese ancestry hold nine-course banquets to celebrate rites of passage such as weddings and funerals. When they pay their respects at a funeral home, they are handed a white envelope as they leave, containing money and candy. The candy represents sweetness after the bitterness of their loss and is always eaten before they return home.
In many communities in Canada, Quing Ming has been, and still is, celebrated in the spring by those of Chinese ancestry. On this day all Chinese restaurants close so that everyone can visit the cemetery to clean the graves, plant fresh flowers, set off firecrackers, pour liquor over the graves, and then enjoy a picnic right there beside their ancestors.[18]
Many cultural groups do not have a traditional mourning food or foods but simply embrace the fellowship of a light meal together after the service. In many Canadian communities that meal will include assorted sandwiches, relishes, cookies, squares, cakes, tea, coffee, and cold beverages during the summer months. This tradition gives everyone an opportunity to honour the deceased and remember his or her favourite foods, which are often featured on the laden table.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’d Rather Work for a Dollar Less in a Real Camp Where the Food Was Good”
FOR CENTURIES COUNTLESS CANADIANS HAVE LIVED, WORKED, studied, and eaten their meals, not at home but, as we have learned, in a variety of locations — fur-trading posts; military garrisons; lumbering, mining, and railway camps; schools; prisons; religious residences; and many others. Men, women, and children from all walks of life have had incredibly diverse experiences with food, often ranging from adequate to appalling, because they were at the mercy of faraway governments, superior officers, harvests, budgets, tides, weather, roads (or the lack of them), and neglect.
We know that many of the explorers and fur traders learned from the First Nations how to forage and hunt in the wild, and often depended on them for survival foods. The military and the surveyors who came later acquired their supplies in a variety of ways. Just two examples of the strict regulations that were often in force are found in military and surveyors’ records.
The garrisons were built at strategic locations to control and repel the enemy of the moment, without consideration of how they would be provisioned. Whether in the heat of battle or performing the monotonous round of drill and sentry duty, the logistics of supporting one individual soldier, let alone a whole regiment, were enormous. It required a massive bureaucratic organization to ensure that barracks and storehouses were built and maintained; sufficient supplies of food, medicines, tools, ammunition, and clothing were on hand; and that the myriad details relating to troop movements, pay and allowances, promotions, and discharges were all well organized. In the years immediately following the American Revolution, the provisioning of the army in Canada was handled primarily from Britain. Items such as salt meat and flour were contracted for in Britain, packed, and then shipped to Canada.
It was impossible to control the quality of the food, and eventually commissariat branches were established in Canada that employed a contract system with local merchants and individual producers. The actual process of feeding the men appears to have occurred as follows. The soldiers’ morning meal, served between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., usually consisted of tea and bread. The main meal of the day was served at 1:00 p.m. Each soldier, on a rotational basis, would take a turn collecting his squad’s share of meat, peas, and bread from the commissary, plus any vegetables that had been gathered from the garden or purchased locally, and he would cook the meat in large kettles in the regimental cookhouse. The food would then be carried to the men’s barracks where it would be served out. The “cook of the day” required no particular skills for preparing the daily serving of beef or pork stew. While the meal may have been a monotonous serving of stew day after day, at least the soldier could count on one regular meal per day.[1]
In addition to military rations, a soldier’s food supplies could be augmented by game shot by hunting parties and fish from local streams or by gathering wild rice, fruit, and nuts. If the troops had sufficient currency and access to civilian stores, they could also purchase supplies to add to their rations.
The early surveyors in Canada faced a formidable challenge as far as food was concerned. The surveyor general outlined the terms and
conditions under which surveyors and their crews were expected to run true lines through forests and swamps and over hills, mountains, and tangled underbrush. In a letter dated March 24, 1809, the terms and conditions of the road survey through Middleton, New Brunswick, were outlined:
For this survey your pay will be 7/6 per day, with an allowance in lieu of rations of 1/3 Prov’l curr’y per day…. The Chainbearers will be allowed 2/ per day, the axemen will be allowed 1/6 per man per day, all Provincial currency, and you will be allowed for each, ration furnished to your 1/3 provincial currency, per man per day. The ration to be of the following species 1 1/2 lbs. Flour, 3/4 lb of pork and 1/2 pint of peas. You are to understand that this allowance to you of 1/3 Prov’l curr’y per man per day for each ration, is to cover all expenses whatsoever, such as transport, Batteau hire, camp kettles, axes, Tommthawks, Tents, bags, Snoe shoes.[2]
Provincial currency in the above passage refers to Halifax currency: £1 was equal to $4, and 1 shilling was equal to 20 cents. Surveyors, too, would have lived off the land wherever and whenever possible to supplement the never-ending rations of salt pork, bread, and dried peas.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, lumbering vied with agriculture as the most important industry of the Canadas. Perhaps that is why the Canadians who took control of the quality and quantity of their meals were the lumbermen. If they didn’t like the food, they simply moved on. As a result, the camps with the best cooks got the best men.
The first commercial logging camps in Canada often had one building (or shanty) that served as both bunkhouse and cookhouse. The loggers may have taken turns cooking for themselves, or they may have lured an inexperienced lad to prepare “the great trinity” of bread, salt pork, and beans that they then ate standing up. On one of his CBC Radio broadcasts, host Miller Stewart quoted an elderly Bobcaygeon, Ontario, lumberman: “The eatin’ was the meanest part — nothin’ but beans, salt pork, potatoes, flapjacks and bannock. We never seen a pie, we never seen a cookie. Nothin’ sweet but blackstrap. But the tea they biled in the kittles — it was real good.”[3]
The challenge was, of course, the isolation of the camps and the difficulty in moving supplies to them by either land or water. These realities made salt pork a staple item on the table for a very long time right across Canada.
The lumbermen in the early camps were often a mixture of farmers in need of cash, young men in search of adventure, and professionals who moved from camp to camp in search of better food and better wages in that order. As the industry grew, and with it the demand for better meals, the lumber companies separated the function of the cookhouse from the bunkhouse. The cook, with the help of one or more cookees, and the bull cooks (men or boys who chopped wood and other chores), prepared from three to five meals a day. Working over a gigantic wood stove or two, or a huge fireplace stoked by wood, the cook was surrounded by great cast-iron pots, kettles, and Dutch ovens. The division of buildings also resulted in
In the bachelor camps needed to build roads and railways, log trees, and mine gold and silver, the skills and knowledge of the cook were the most important assets to keep the men on the job.
Museum of Northern History at Sir Henry Oakes Chateau, Kirkland Lake
the famous cookhouses where the men sat down to eat, served by “flunkeys,” each one of whom could serve up to forty men. There was a rule of silence at the table, and lumbermen insisted that they ate those meals in less than ten minutes. Some believe that silence was imposed from the earliest days when cooking, eating, and sleeping were all done in one room by the whole crew.
Joshua Fraser, writing in the Backwoods of Canada in 1883, waxes eloquently about the cooks and the fare:
And you would be amazed at the general excellence of the cooking that is done by these fellows. Where will you find such bread as is made in their immense pots, buried in and covered over by the hot ashes at the end of the camboose [an open fireplace]? Not a particle of the strength and fine flavour of the flour is lost by evaporation, as in the case of a stove or open oven: It is all condensed in the bread. Then it is strong and firm, and yet — and this is the mystery to me — it is light and porous as that of any first-class housewife’s.
And what shall we say about the beans? They are simply par excellence. They are baked in the same kind of pot as the bread, the lid being hermetically sealed to the rim by the dough, and then buried in the hot ashes. The beans are first thoroughly sifted, washed and boiled, and then large slices of fat pork mixed in with them. The pot is then placed in its deep bed of hot ashes, and as in the case of the bread, not a breath of steam or of the essence of the beans is allowed to escape. The fat pork, becoming dissolved by the heat, and of course, neither fried not boiled as in other processes, becomes amalgamated with the beans, and when the whole is considered sufficiently cooked, a mess is ready, which, for succulency of flavour, and savoury richness of nutrition, will completely throw in the shade the famous pottage for which Esau bartered his birthright.[4]
The cook was almost always a man in the early days. However, by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, women were often working in the camps. Sometimes they were the wives or family of the camp owners or managers, to ensure there was no “hanky panky.”
Elinor Thomas, writing in A Loving Legacy, describes the enormous stove her mother, Lurena (age fourteen), her Aunt Greta (age twelve), and her grandmother, Annie Wilson, had cooked on in the Crow Bridge Camp of forty men on the Crow River in Quebec in 1916: “The stove did not have the usual four burners; this monster had eight. Two huge ovens, two hot water reservoirs, one on each side, and a warming oven big enough to lie down in.”[5]
On this monster, Lurena baked all the bread and biscuits, while Greta baked the pies — 1,036 pies in twenty-four days! Their day began at three in the morning in preparation for a five-o’clock breakfast of boiled beans and salt pork, which had simmered on the back of the stove all night, lots of freshly baked bread, butter, molasses to spread on the bread, pies, and strong lashings of tea.
The men who were going into the bush to cut logs were given a lunch to take with them. This was meat sandwiches; more salt pork until freeze up, when they could keep beef frozen. Lots of pie, again, and tea. The lunch, carried in cloth bags, had frozen solid by lunch time, and had to be thawed out over a campfire until it was soft enough to eat. The tea was brought expertly to a “first roll-over boil” in a honey pail, and drunk from “shanty dishes” — enamel bowls without handles, which warmed the hands cupped around them.[6]
The place selected for the fire to thaw out the lunches and boil the tea was called “the dinner hole,” and for many men good memories remain of this place in the forest. The dinner hole was a restoring oasis of warmth, nourishment, relaxation, and comradeship in the middle of the grinding toil and cold of the old-time lumberjack’s day. Food was quickly sacrificed to appetites generated by four or five hours of chopping, sawing, and logrolling. The blazing fire thawed numbed toes in cold weather and dried wet mitts in mild. There was time for conversation and an after-dinner smoke, pleasures that were forbidden in the camp cookery. When the men returned to their axes, saws, and cant hooks, a new group took over. Chickadees, whiskey-jacks, and squirrels seized the ground to search out and carry off fallen crumbs and discarded rinds. Long before nightfall the fire died and winter’s silence descended over the dinner hole.[7]
Good and varied food became a condition of labour, because competition for workers proved at an early date that food quality was something an employer could control. The name of the lumberman who first lured timberbeasts from his competitor’s camp with the aroma of better pies is long lost in the woods. But food is what counted. “The camp that served the best meals got the best men. It was as simple as that.”[8]
As a figure in logging folklore, the cook is bigger than Paul Bunyan, who never put in an appearance in New England, while the fabled cook certainly did. Paul’s own cook was his cousin, Big Joe, who was from three
weeks below Quebec and made Hot Cakes on a griddle so large you could not see across it when the steam was thick. It was greased by boys who skated over it with hams on their feet.[9]
Three times a day “good food and plenty of it” was imperative to a well-organized, happy camp.
Lorne Fleece Collection
By the middle of the twentieth century, variety and quality in food supplies was growing, and in May 1943 a camp near Longlac, Ontario, received foodstuffs that included hip beef, pork butts, wieners, beef sausage, cheese, shortening, butter, eggs, bacon, smoked ham, potatoes, carrots, fresh beef, and spaghetti, so the cook and cookees had a varied larder to work with. In addition, the men received empty syrup barrels, so they could make “Finnish Beer,” a thirst-quencher concocted from raisins and molasses.[10]
Folklorist Edith Fowke, in Lumbering Songs, captures the importance of good food to the men in the camps. The following song is from “Anstruther Camp,” Buckhorn, Ontario, about 1900:
Then at length the cook calls, “Supper boys!” We crowd
into our seats —
It is a sight for all sore eyes to see those brave boys eat.
Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore Page 14