Electrical appliances of every conceivable type flooded the market: mixers, blenders, freezers, and new and larger refrigerators, changing forever the Canadian kitchen. The term barbecue, from the Spanish and Haitian, meaning “framework of sticks,” was in use as early as 1709, but this method of cooking, particularly on backyard barbecues, became very popular in the 1950s and 1960s. The scent of steaks, roasts, fowl, hot dogs, hamburgers, and baked potatoes being roasted over charcoal or fruit woods was the outdoor status symbol in the new subdivisions being built on the edge of every village, town, and city.
Fast-food outlets began to appear along Canada’s highways or at busy intersections to serve people who had to eat on the run. Hockey player Tim Horton opened his initial doughnut-and-coffee shop in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964, starting a trend that appears to have no limits. It was soon followed by the first golden arches of McDonald’s outside the United States, which opened in Richmond, British Columbia, in 1967. McDonald’s and its competitors welcomed us all, from toddlers to seniors, and we soon learned that a Big Mac was not a high rigger from British Columbia’s forest industry but a type of hamburger. Elaborating on this idea of offering a standard menu at a standard price, restaurant chains developed with well-appointed dining rooms where families could have dinner, safe in the knowledge there would be no surprises when the bill came.
Another product that dramatically changed the way we eat had its origins in the mid-1940s. Percy Spencer, a scientist at the Raytheon Company in Massachusetts, had a candy bar in his pocket and found to his horror that it was melting as he tested very short electromagnetic waves. As the candy ran down his leg, he began to suspect that microwaves could be harnessed for cooking and baking food. Canadian housewives were reluctant at first to try this new method of cooking, but today most Canadian kitchens have a microwave oven. We even find them lurking in such unexpected places as bus depots, so that when you order your meal or snack, you receive it on a paper plate cold or even frozen and are waved towards the distant microwave to jiggle the buttons and heat your own selection.
Soon after hockey player Tim Horton opened his first doughnut-and-coffee shop in Hamilton in 1964, this advertisement appeared in Favourite Recipes, a fundraising cookbook published by the Ladies Loyal Star Lodge No. 134, Hamilton, Ontario.
Thanks to the research of many Canadian scientists, the twentieth century brought new plants to our gardens and fields and new products to our pantries and dinner tables. In addition to developing hardy Marquis wheat between 1902 and 1910, which he achieved by crossing Red Fife and Hard Red Calcutta, Sir Charles Saunders watched as it grew in popularity until it accounted for 90 percent of all wheat grown in western Canada by 1920.
Chemist and pharmacist John McLaughlin opened a soda-waterbottling business in Toronto in 1890, and while experimenting with various flavours, tried adding ginger root, a favourite of both First Nations and newcomers. Pale Dry Ginger Ale was introduced in 1904, with its distinctive label showing a beaver sitting on a map of Canada. The drink was an instant success, not only with Canadians but also across North America as new bottling plants opened in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and in Edmonton, Alberta. In 1907 the beverage was patented as “Canada Dry Ginger Ale,” the “Champagne of Ginger Ales,” and a century later the pop continues to be found everywhere — in homes, hospitals, soda fountains, grocery stores, and restaurants in Canada and ninety other countries on five continents.
Three pediatricians, Doctors Alan Brown, Theodore Drake, and team leader Frederick Tisdall, working at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, created a mixture of ground and precooked wheat meal, oatmeal, and cornmeal in 1930. Called Pablum, this new bland and mushy baby food revolutionized the feeding of infants, for it was affordable, nutritious, and easy to prepare. It was also regarded as much tastier than the previously used, rickets-preventing cod liver oil.[12]
Edward Asselbergs invented another bland and mushy food in the form of instant mashed potatoes when he worked for Canada’s Department of Agriculture in 1962. The instant spuds never became popular with the general public but are widely used in convenience foods and meals for the military.
Cookbooks proliferated in the twentieth century. This little one from Cow Brand Baking Soda was published in Montreal in 1933. The simple kitchen portrayed on its cover would soon be transformed by major inventions and developments.
Nearly two decades later, in 1980, the Yukon gold rush was honoured with the naming of the Yukon Gold potato by researchers at the University of Guelph. It has been hailed as a perfect multi-purpose potato, because its smooth, yellow, waxy skin does well when baked or boiled and mashed. The same team developed the Red Gold, another popular hybrid, while a research team in New Brunswick came up with Rochdale Gold, introduced to the world in the twenty-first century.
Every decade of the twentieth century also brought a wealth of cookbooks, recipes, and ingredients to the Canadian table, a fact that has been elegantly documented and illustrated by Carol Ferguson and Margaret Fraser in A Century of Canadian Home Cooking.[13] Despite this rapid pace of change, it is amazing that some foods and beverages appear to have a constant place of honour on our tables. Just one example of this tendency appears in “Cooking Chat,” written by Margaret Carr in May 1954, in praise of tea:
Tea is something to take when you are cold and when you are hot; when you are worried; when your brain doesn’t seem to function and when you want to spend a pleasant half-hour talking to a friend in a corner of the garden or before a blazing fire. Did you know that 1954 marks the golden anniversary of the tea bag? In 1904 a New York tea merchant, Thomas Sullivan, ordered silk bags to hold samples of tea to be handed out to customers. The customers soon demanded tea bags as a product and several years later the silk was abandoned for gauze. To-day tea bags hold a blend of 20 to 50 different kinds of tea. Each bag is automatically weighed and filled to hold exactly enough tea to make one cup.[14]
As the twentieth century drew to a close, tea had not lost its allure. “Canada’s love affair with tea continues to blossom as 9 out of 10 adults enjoy tea. And while the majority of Canadians choose tea for its great taste and soothing properties, there is a growing awareness of its health benefits.”[15] In 1999 tea was named the “Beverage of the Year” by Eating Well magazine, and the popularity of hot, cold, black, green, or specially flavoured tea continues to soar.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Anything Baked by a Man
IN MANY COMMUNITIES ACROSS CANADA, THE WEEKLY farmer’s market and the annual agricultural fair are anticipated with pleasure, but often for quite different reasons. Actually, these two community events have much in common historically. Markets and fairs date back to the medieval period in Europe, with its walled cities and cathedrals or churches surrounded by stalls that provided a focus for both events. Occasionally, we find the term fair being used to describe a larger, special kind of market, where the citizens would assemble to buy, sell, barter, socialize, and (with luck) find good food.
We know that long before the arrival of newcomers to North America there was a well-established trade and barter system up and down the continent. The First Nations may not have called this network or their gatherings “markets,” but they served the same purpose of exchanging surplus goods and acquiring exotic items not available in their own home territories. With the arrival of fishermen and fur traders from Scotland, England, and other parts of Europe, the first temporary markets came into existence, with Native trappers and hunters bringing their precious furs to the ships or to the trading posts to barter for guns, powder, shot, ball, tobacco, blankets, beads, ribbons, rum, and high wine (a combination of alcohol and flavoured water).
It is believed that fairs predate the arrival of newcomers, as well. We learn that much from Jean de Brébeuf’s account in the Jesuit Relations of the First Nations at Ossossane when he compares “the laying down of the bundles of bones at the feast of the Dead to the laying down of earthen pots at the Village Fairs”!
The open, or “plaza,” area between longhouse clusters provided an adequate amount of village space for such fairs to take place. They appear to have been an economic event, for food was not served from the pots on the ground, so it was not a feast in the ceremonial sense. As well as the earthen or earthenware pots (a term commonly used in the Jesuit Relations to describe the pottery made by the Ontario Iroquoians and the Iroquois), other goods such as painted robes may have also been offered for sale.[1]
Fairs and markets were not only useful bartering opportunities for the First Nations, but for newcomers, as well. As settlers began to arrive and communities developed, the traditions of the markets they had known “at home” were important to them, and markets were established wherever they settled. A market opened in Quebec City in 1676 that was well stocked with livestock, wild game, fish, and fruit. Occasionally, French wines and coveted items such as pickled artichokes or truffles in oil arrived in the colony to tempt the more affluent customers.[2]
A traveller to Lower Canada in 1792–93 gives us a description of availability and prices:
The markets of Quebec are cheap and abundantly furnished. I never was in any place where there seemed to be such a great quantity of good things at moderate rates. A turkey might be purchased at 15d sterling, and other articles of provision in proportion. Game is brought in, in large quantities. The mutton is very small. I have seen a maidservant returning from market carry a whole one in a basket on her arm.[3]
Another traveller, John Lambert, listed the products available when he visited the Quebec City market in the summer of 1806: “seven types of meat, eight of poultry or game, thirteen of fish, sixteen of vegetables, and ten of fruit, not to mention a variety of grain, sugar, fat, and cheese. Butchers, bakers, caterers, and innkeepers sold food too, as did retail shops, which also dealt in imported seasonings and condiments.”[4]
The Halifax Farmers’ Market has a long, colourful, and controversial history, beginning in 1750, a year after the founding of the city. By 1799 those market facilities were deteriorating. The preamble to the Market House Act of 1799 stated “it would greatly tend to benefit both the town and the country if a separate Market House were erected in Halifax for the sole use of persons bringing from the country meat, poultry, butter and other victuals and in which they might expose such articles for sale.” A structure was built in 1800, but no convenient place for the sale of vegetables was maintained, so country producers were allowed to sell in the streets and square in front of the market until the middle of the century.
In 1848 the City of Halifax was incorporated, and the original City Charter conveyed the Country Market property to the city “for the public and common benefit and use of the City of Halifax according to the true interest and meaning of the original grant.” After much heated debate, and over the objections of local merchants, a new market was built in 1854. However, it never housed the country vendors, because they refused to attend. The Acadian Recorder of 1918 recalled the events of 1854:
All the best stalls being let to the Halifax butchers, the country people from the first refused to use the market as a place for the disposal of their produce and in spite of the fines and threats gathered their teams and wares around the Post Office Block and with coloured people and Mic Macs established the picturesque street market which became the feature of Halifax.
One of the items the Mi’kmaqs were probably bringing to sell were their splint baskets and other containers. Many of the wares were, and are, linked to food, such as baskets for shopping, storage, apples, potatoes, picnics, eggs, and berries. Without doubt a market would have been a fine place to display and sell such merchandise.
Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton writes in Chapters in the History of Halifax, Nova Scotia, published around 1915, that
A highly picturesque feature of Halifax has always been the “Green Market” held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings on the sidewalks near the post office and marine slip. All summer through as regular as these mornings come a mixed company of “Chezzetcookers” and Negroes. The former, some of the dark-skinned descendants of the old Acadians, have been accustomed to troop into town across the Dartmouth Ferry, their rude wagons laden with farm produce, poultry, flowers, and small domestic wares of various sorts and ranging themselves along the sidewalks unobtrusively offering their goods for sale.
Phyllis R. Blakeley observes in Glimpses of Halifax from 1867 to 1900 that “Unlike the tourists, the City Fathers were untouched by the picturesque scene in the Market Square because they were besieged by complaints from the merchants of the street surrounding the post office. The crowds and carts on the sidewalk and roadways interrupted their business.” This controversy was a topic of public debate until a new market structure was built in 1916 on Market Street.[5]
Many communities held markets long before a building was constructed, as we learn from a New Brunswick diary entry for 1811: “As there is no market in the Province except St. Johns [sic], Fredericton is but precariously supplied, and those who did not farm in some degree for themselves must be content to eat but veal in the spring, lamb in the summer, and salt or frozen meat in the winter.”[6]
The Old City Market in Saint John, New Brunswick, erected in 1876, has the honour of being Canada’s oldest covered marketplace. The market building, with its extremely high dovetailed ceiling created to look like the upturned hull of a boat, is constructed on a downward slope between Charlotte and Germain streets. This market is truly about local food such as dulse, the native seaweed that is picked from rocks in Dark Harbour on Grand Manan Island and dried to a consistency between paper and leather. Dulse is a rich purple and is a plentiful, inexpensive delicacy.[7]
Although Saint John can claim the oldest market building, the residents of Windsor, Nova Scotia, may have hosted the first agricultural fair in Canada in 1765, encouraged and supported by the ladies and gentlemen of Halifax. Prizes were offered for the best cattle, horses, sheep, butter, and cheese exhibits.[8] The group behind this event was the forerunner of several agricultural organizations, including the King and Hants Society in Nova Scotia in 1789, a society in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1790, and the Agricultural Society of Upper Canada at Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario) in 1792. The last held an agricultural fair at Queenston the year before, believed to be the first in what is now Ontario. A British traveller to Upper Canada described a meeting of the Agricultural Society of Upper Canada:
They had monthly meetings at Newark at a house called “Freemason’s Hall,” where they dined together. It is not supposed that in such an infant settlement, many essays would be produced on the theory of farming or that much time would be taken up with deep deliberation. Every good purpose was answered by the opportunity it offered of chatting in parties after dinner on the state of crop, tillage etc. Two stewards were in rotation, for each meeting, who regulated for the day. The table was abundantly supplied with the produce of their farms and plantations. Many of the merchants and others, unconnected with country business, were also members of this society. All had permission to introduce a visitor. The Governor directed ten guineas to be presented to this body for the purchase of books — a countenance honourable to himself and to the Society.[9]
These agricultural societies usually met on a monthly basis and were preceded by a convivial dinner, hosted on a rotating basis by different society members. Alas, the Upper Canada Society faltered and finally dissolved as the War of 1812 loomed, despite the patronage and financial support in its early years from Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor, John Graves Simcoe.
Just as each Canadian community has developed in its own unique fashion, so has each of the country’s markets. Many have evolved to serve the cultural communities that surround them, while others have grown because of a local specialty or demand. Toronto, for example, has many markets. However, the two largest are quite different. The St. Lawrence Market had its beginning in 1803 when the Town of York established its first public market on five and a half acres o
f land now bordered by Front, King, Jarvis, and Church streets, where the present St. Lawrence Hall and Upper Market stand. Like markets in many other communities, the St. Lawrence Market was an open-air affair for almost twenty years until 1820 when a simple open shed was constructed on King Street. Three years later a public well and pump were set up there, as well, and a whipping post, stocks, and pillory were built in Market Square. In 1831 the small wooden market structure was torn down and a red brick Market and Town Hall (later used as the City Hall) was erected in a square bounded by King, Jarvis, Front, and West Market streets.
In 1834, when Mayor William Lyon Mackenzie proposed a new tax as the town of York became the City of Toronto, there was so much stamping and uproar in the crowded upper balcony where the townsfolk watched the council meeting that it collapsed, with many serious injuries sustained on the butchers’ hooks in the stalls below. In 1837 a free public feast was held at the market to celebrate Queen Victoria’s coronation. A whole roast ox, beer, a hundred-pound plum pudding, band music, and fireworks made it the best market day in history. On April 2, 1840, Queen Victoria’s recent marriage to Prince Albert was also celebrated there with another “ox roasted whole … brought into the centre of Market Square in procession.” Citizens were invited “if clean and if they brought their own eating utensils.”[10]
Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore Page 17