An Endless Banquet

fig. a: the now sound

1. Kim Jung Mi, Now

fig. b: the good, the great, and the ugly

2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, dir. Seth Gordon

3. potsticker potlucks (call a bunch of friends; have them each make a different potsticker filling; buy potsticker wrappers; assemble the potstickers posse to fill and seal the potstickers; steam and/or fry them to perfection; devour; repeat as needed)

fig. b: bang, bang

fig. c: a mickie most production

4. Terry Reid, Bang, Bang, You're Terry Reid + Donovan, "Wear Your Love Like Heaven"

5. Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, dir. Crowder & Dower

fig. d: get off

6. V/A, Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues, 1970-1976

7. Peanut-Butter Destroyers

8. My Winnipeg, dir. Guy Maddin

9. chicken gumbo and gombo zhèbes

fig. e: just one of those days

10. Destroyer, Trouble in Dreams

fig. a: Italians doing it better

There were all kinds of surprises waiting for me when I got home from work the other day.

fig. b: Atwater flowers

First off, no one could accuse Michelle of not bringing me flowers anymore because she'd visited the Atwater Market early that afternoon and picked up these beauts. Okay, they weren't exactly for me, but still...

Her real adventure, though, began not long after her trip to the market. That was when she made arrangements to visit Antonio Pettinicchi all the way out on Sauvé East. That was when she got the real treats.

fig. c: olive tree

Now if you're not familiar with Antonio Pettinicchi (we sure weren't until about a week ago), all you need to know is that on his farm in Molise he produces exceptional olive oil strictly according to traditional methods (hand-picked olives, cold pressed, stone millstones, etc.), all of it is absolutely organic, his only North American outlet is in Montreal, and the quality/price ratio is such that many of the city's finest kitchens have taken note. Every year he comes to town for about a month so that he can do a little wheeling and dealing, and every year he sells out swiftly.

Antonio was there to greet Michelle and he immediately took a shine to her--the fact that she'd arrived by bike didn't hurt. He let her sample both his extra-virgin olive oil and his extra-virgin wild olive oil and Michelle was suitably impressed. Both were outstanding--light, yet intricate--but the extra-virgin wild olive oil was the one that really blew her away--it had a wonderful pepperiness to it the likes of which she'd never encountered before.


fig. d: olive oil bottle composite

Then Michelle got introduced to the rest of the Pettinicchi line, including...



...beautiful, plump green olives...



...lovely canned pomodorini, artisanal cavatelli, heaven-sent balsamic vinegar and vin cotto, and a gorgeous array of confettura, including quince-apple, Barbary fig, and...



...this exotic white watermelon number. In other words: abbondanza!

It didn't take us long to begin enjoying our spoils. We uncorked a bottle of wine and opened up the green olives, and a little later we transformed one jar of pomodorini into a simple, delicious sauce for the cavatelli that highlighted the natural sweetness of the tomatoes. We were going to just wing it, but then we decided to see what Marcella Hazan had to say, and we found this comment introducing her Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter: "This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste." She adds that this sauce is "unsurpassed" for potato gnocchi, but that it's also excellent with certain factory-made pastas, such as spaghetti, penne, or rigatoni. We took liberties and had it with the cavatelli.

Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

1 cup canned imported Italian pomodorini, with their juice
2 1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 medium onion
salt to taste
1/2 - 3/4 lb pasta
freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Put the canned tomatoes in a saucepan, add the butter, the onion (don't chop it), and the salt, and cook uncovered at a very slow but steady simmer for 45 minutes, or until the fat floats free from the tomato. Stir from time to time. Taste and correct for salt. Discard the onion before tossing the sauce with the pasta. Serve immediately, sprinkling liberal amounts of parmigiano-reggiano overtop. (You'll find that the cheese marries particularly well with this sauce because it's one of Hazan's specialty butter-based pasta sauce recipes.)

Serves 2.

[based on a recipe from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking]

Marcella was right about that sauce, but then she's never led us wrong. And its butter base allowed us to keep Antonio's olive oil strictly for bread-dipping.

The next morning we trotted out the white watermelon preserve and discovered that it has these incredible caramel notes to it and that it's equally good on toast or on yogurt.

Antonio is only in town for another couple of weeks, he's rapidly running out of product, and he won't be back again until next year, but if you'd like to get in on the action you can contact him and arrange your own personal rendez-vous:

Les Importations Antonio Pettinicchi
1579 Sauvé East
Montreal
Ph: (514) 996-1900
email: info@pettinicchi.com
www.pettinicchi.com

aj

* Of course, there are exceptions to this rule:

Those of you with an interest in Patience Gray, edible weeds, Tuscany, Italian cuisine, and Italian culture more generally might want to check out Adam Federman's "Paradise Lost" at The Whetting Stone, which chronicles the melancholy story of Carrara, its fabled marble, and those who sought it (including Gray and her partner, the sculptor Norman Mommens) through the ages.

File under: "It's a strange and beautiful world"

An interactive map based on Gary Paul Nabhan's new book Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods appeared in The New York Times the other day. The map is essentially a fancier, interactive version of this map

fig. a: RAFT map of North America

and it highlights the plight of the 93 endangered foods discussed in Nabhan's book--93 out of his ever-expanding list of over 1,000 such foods. As you can see, in order to do so it divides North American into about a dozen food "nations"--geographic regions that share particularly strong food-based commonalities. Rolling over each region with your cursor allows you to see a list of some of the region-defining foods that are now endangered there. Thus, the Pacific Northwest gets the name Salmon Nation because of the Snake River Chinook salmon's threatened status, and the region's other endangered foods include everything from the Gillette Fig to the Olympia oyster. On the other hand, the Southwest's Chili Pepper Nation designation refers to the threatened El Guique New Mexican chili pepper (and not necessarily to the region's musical preferences), and its endangered foods range from Chapalote popcorn to the Wild Tomatillo of the Continental Divide. The Northeast consists of Clambake Nation and Maple Syrup Nation.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, or can't picture the interactive aspects of what I'm describing, or if you'd just like to take a look for yourself, you can find the fancy interactive map here and the accompanying article here.)

As The New York Times makes clear, the book's somewhat paradoxical advice is that, in most cases, consumption is the key to preservation--reintroducing many of these foods to your plate is not only a way of rediversifying one's diet while also eating more regionally, it can also be a way to ensure that these foods don't disappear entirely.

In the case of the Montreal region that would mean reintegrating three endangered items--"hand-harvested wild rice," the Chantecler chicken, and "American eels of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River"--into your diet. "But, wait," you say. "What about the 'Sugar Maple of the Allegheny Plateau'? I thought we lived in Maple Syrup Nation." Well, I haven't read Nabhan's book yet, so all I can do is go by the the maps (schematic though they may be), the article, and the online information provided by RAFT and Slow Food USA, but by the looks of it Maple Syrup Nation sweeps right around Montreal (forming a crescent to the south, east, and north) and we actually belong to Wild Rice Nation, which encompasses a long swath of land that cuts across Southern Quebec, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, slivers of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Saskatchewan, and a healthy chunk of Ontario.

Now, we're no Ontariophobes, but I'm not sure how attached Michelle and I feel to Wild Rice Nation. We like the idea of the famous Chantecler Chicken (the pride and joy of Oka, QC) being raised in a sustainable manner and we definitely wouldn't mind if the unagi at our neighborhood sushi bar was local, but neither of us have ever really associated this region with wild rice. We were pretty sure we were living in Maple Syrup Nation, or Fiddlehead Nation, or maybe even Ramps Nation. And from time to time we'd been known to decamp and show allegiance to Clambake Nation, Crabcake Nation, Corn Bread & BBQ Nation, Gumbo Nation, and Chili Pepper Nation too. But, seriously, if we're not a part of Maple Syrup Nation, why the hell do we have a bottle of fresh eau d'érable

fig. b: the elixir of life

in our refrigerator at the moment? (One that we bought not two blocks away from here, no less.)

Still, it makes you wonder. What are the foods that define us as a region? What are the foods that we can't afford to lose? And how does the RAFT map affect the notion of a distinct society?

aj

fig. a: Noma: Nordic Cuisine

There's something downright exhilarating about René Redzepi and Claus Meyer's Noma: Nordic Cuisine (2006). It begins with the photographs that grace the cover and continue throughout the text. Sometimes stark (like the photo above), oftentimes almost absurdly picturesque (like this photograph),

fig. b: landscape by Noma 1

and at times even sublime, much of the impetus behind Noma's photography has to do with situating the restaurant's cuisine within Denmark's formidable landscape, and the impression one gets is of a countryside that's equal measures forbidding and abundant. Thus, alongside pictures of Greenland's desolate glaciers (what remains of them),

fig. c: landscape by Noma 2

you get pictures of lovable old Danish hippies carefully collecting herbs

fig. d: lovable old Danish hippie

that may very well end up on Noma's artfully composed plates--in this case, Hay-baked Celery Root, Black Pudding and Yellow Archangel, the first of the book's winter recipes.

fig. e: Hay-baked Celery Root, Black Pudding and Yellow Archangel

The thing is, according to Noma's philosophical outlook, Greenland's glaciers and southern Denmark's countryside don't form the strict binary opposition one might think they do. Where others see mountains of ice creeping across the landscape, the folks at Noma see "a rich flora and fauna, with crowberries, reindeer, grouse and musk ox." Bounty is in the eye of the beholder.

Now, if you've noted a little Nordic Pride in my description of the Noma cookbook, you're definitely onto something. Already, when the restaurant first began to take shape, there was the idea that a restaurant housed in an old warehouse that had once been part of the Royal Greenland Trade Enterprise and that would soon be the new site of the Nordatlantens Brygge (North Atlantic House) should have a vision that was pan-Nordic in orientation. But over the next nine months, in the lead-up to the restaurant's launch, Noma's vision really took on form. For one thing, Claus Meyer, the owner, and René Redzepi and Mads Refslund, the restaurant's two chefs at the time, took an extensive trip across the north, including jaunts to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland, to search for ingredients and begin the process of making the contacts necessary to establish an alternative to the distribution networks available back in Copenhagen. The trip was a revelation, exceeding all expectations, and immediately the three "gastronomic explorers" knew they were onto a good thing, even if it might mean a lot of extra work.

By the time they returned to Copenhagen and began to work in earnest on what would become Noma's cuisine their vision had begun to develop into a full-fledged philosophy. Among its central tenets: take the Mediterranean notion of terroir, as well as the cultivation of biodiversity and the celebration of seasonality that goes along with it, and use it to utterly reject Southern European cuisine and its dominance of fine dining internationally. In other words, develop a cuisine "built on a basis of traditional and non-traditional Nordic ingredients," as Claus Meyer noted after one early planning meeting, one that would give "expression to the seasons' changes in a maximum way, taking things all the way to the limit." By March 2004, just four months into Noma's life, this sort of feistiness, this proudly anti-Mediterranean attitude, was already paving the way to the Nordic Cuisine Symposium, where in true Danish fashion--this is the same country, after all, that gave birth to Dogme 95--they banged together a 10-point manifesto that set the parameters for this New Nordic Cuisine. There were twelve signatories to this manifesto, representing Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Greenland, and René Redzepi's signature stands front and center.

fig. f: manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine

Anyway, there's a lot here that appeals to us here at "...an endless banquet": seasonality and a focus on indigenous ingredients, Nordic pride and the development of a cuisine that's both innovative and steeped in tradition and that truly represents the region, and, yes, even a manifesto. We've said it before and we're going to say it again: for all the talk about Montreal's "European" flavor, this city, this province, is often at its best when it readily acknowledges its peculiar Nordic character (let's not forget that Montreal is at roughly the same latitude as Milan). Noma: Nordic Cuisine offers a virtual blueprint for how to develop a region's cuisine, how to create a cuisine that truly reflects the terroir, and how to do this within the context of a northerly climate.*

That said, Noma: Nordic Cuisine did present us with a couple of problems. First of all, I would characterize it as being one of those cookbooks that's more interested in spreading the reputation of a particular restaurant and its chef and in communicating with other top chefs than it is in communicating with the amateur. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, of course, but it often results in vagueness when it comes to articulating recipes, and that's certainly the case with Noma. Take the Hay-Baked Celery Root recipe, for instance, which begins like this: "Light the hay with a match, some place away from the kitchen, and burn off the first bit of smoke." The ideas are there, and they're frequently brilliant, but you might have to be a chef (or a psychic) to figure out how to bring them to life. Secondly, Noma's tireless efforts when it came to tracking down indigenous Nordic ingredients means that quite a few of the recipes are impossible to replicate without access to their alternative distribution networks. It might be a little difficult to find local sources for musk ox, yellow archangel, and seakale, but Noma certainly leaves you with the desire to broaden your repertoire of regional and indigenous ingredients, and, overall, there's a surprising amount of overlap between the seasonal specialties there and here: fiddlehead ferns, lobster, hare, jerusalem artichokes, oysters, pears, ramps, and so on.

When it came to actually putting Noma: Nordic Cusine to use, however, we started off very tentatively. Michelle took elements from a couple different recipes and paired them, creating a new breakfast combo all her own. The first was a wonderful spice bread recipe, one that had that exact Northern European spice bread flavor that Michelle had been seeking but had otherwise failed to find. The second was a novel and, quite frankly, ingenious approach to the poaching of an egg, one that allowed for the egg to be aromatized as it cooks--in this case with white truffle oil.** She then added a caramelized scallion as a finishing touch.

fig. g: spice bread, truffled egg, caramelized scallion

Spice Bread (metric)

5 g cinnamon
5 g clove
2 g nutmeg
2 g green anise
150 g rye flour
150 g wheat flour
20 g baking powder
50 g wholewheat flour
100 g honey, preferably chestnut honey
150 g maple syrup
125 g whole milk
125 g eggs
fresh rosemary
butter and salt

Preheat the oven to 160º C. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Crush the spices and sift them over the dry ingredients. Stir in the honey and maple syrup, then the milk, and finally the eggs. Place in a buttered loaf pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 min. Let cool on a rack.

Spice Bread (imperial)

1 1/2 cups rye flour
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbsp baking powder
2 tbsp cinnamon
2 tbsp cloves
1 tbsp nutmeg
1 tbsp green anise
1/3 cup + 1 Tbsp honey
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup milk
2 whole eggs
1 egg yolk

Preheat the oven to 325° F. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Crush the spices and sift them over the dry ingredients. Stir in the honey and maple syrup, then the milk, and finally the eggs. Place in a buttered loaf pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 min. Let cool on a rack.

Truffled eggs

1 egg per person
truffle oil
microwaveable plastic wrap

The basic method is as follows. Line a coffee cup with a small piece of plastic wrap, making a bowl. Take a small amount of truffle oil and spread it on the bottom. Carefully break an egg into the cup, gather the edges of the plastic up around the egg and twist it tightly closed. Secure it with twine or a twist tie. Repeat with as many eggs as are needed. Bring a small saucepan of water to simmer and maintain its temperature. Drop the eggs into the water and let them poach about 4 minutes. Carefully remove them from the water and gently take off the plastic wrap.

[both recipes from Noma: Nordic Cuisine]

To serve:

Lightly toast the bread and spread it with butter. Top with an egg and a caramelized scallion, season with salt and pepper, and enjoy.

This initial experiment having turned out a smashing success (if a modest one), we decided to take bigger steps with Noma: Nordic Cuisine the next time around.

To be continued...

am/km

P.S. If you'd like to read an actual firsthand account of what it's like to dine at Noma (complete with a whole slew of beautiful photographs)--which just received two Michelin stars in their Main Cities of Europe 2008 guide--check out Very Good Food's in-depth report.

P.S. 2 May 4, 2008: Now The New York Times has published a review of Noma as part of a piece on New Danish Cuisine in Copenhagen. Check it out here.

* More thoughts on cuisine and le grand nord: Just two week ago I attended a conference where one of the presenters, a local poet, waxed poetic (what else, right?) about Quebec's essentially Northern spirit, about the Idea of North that lies at the heart of Québécois culture. Well, as much as I wish this were true on some level, I couldn't help but think that the same culture that declared "Mon pays c'est l'hiver" some forty years ago, has spent the last 50-60 winters focusing its collective energies and fantasies southwards, towards places like Florida and Las Vegas. And, frankly, cuisine here in la belle province oftentimes suffers from the same fixation, which is why Montreal's standout restaurants are the ones that are the most fiercely independent, the ones that recognize that not only does it pay to support local and regional producers, doing so can be a source of inspiration and a sure-fire way to put yourself on the map. Does this mean we're advocating some kind of entrenched provincialism when it comes to cuisine? Of course not, but if you're going to transpose the cuisine of northern Italy or of southwestern France on the Québécois milieu, why not transpose the strong sense of terroir that goes hand-in-hand with those traditions?

** "Whoa! White truffle oil?!? Isn't that as Mediterranean as it comes?" Not at all. Locally harvested truffles figure prominently on Noma's autumn menu. Of course, the truffle we used was Italian, but that's another matter. Those fabulous Tennessean truffles we've been hearing about haven't made their way north in the form of truffle oil yet, to our knowledge.

fig. a: what, no keyboardist?

I wanna destroy you
I wanna destroy you
I wanna destroy you
I wanna destroy you
--"I Wanna Destroy You," The Soft Boys

Skeedle Lee Doo
That's all I do
--"Skeedle Lee Doo," Blind Blake

Then listen now to what I say:

Our friend C. once threw the travelin'-band meal to end all travelin'-band meals. A certain band she was fond of was coming to town. She wrote to them and invited them to stop by pre-gig and enjoy a meal at her place. They accepted. She cooked for an entire week. The prep filled two refrigerators. I know because one of them was mine. Then something happened and things didn't quite work out. Some of us still managed to enjoy the meal. A year or two later the band returned. C. had moved into this very apartment by that time. She got back in contact with said band and reinvited them. They reaccepted. She cooked for another entire week. This time things came off without a hitch. You shoulda seen the looks on the faces of said band. Awestruck. I'd tell you more, but it's a great story and I'm hoping that C. posts it herself on her blog. I'm picturing the menus. Both of them.

Anyway, inspired by our friend C. we devised a simplified three-point plan for entertaining a visiting rock 'n' roll band.

1. Drinks

Beer, wine, water, and peppermint tea. The first three are self-explanatory. You won't find any mention of that last substance in the pages of Hammer of the Gods (at least, I don't think you will--it's been a while), but it pays to have some on-hand (along with some honey) in case the lead singer shows up having lost his or her voice. Throat lozenges are a good idea too. Thayer's Slippery Elm, for instance. Although apparently Jonathan Richman uses Zand HerbaLozenges and, after 40 years in show business, he ought to know.

2. Home-cooked meal

Two words: comfort food. Two more words: spicy goodness. I've been all about the roux recently. I just can't wait to mix flour and fat and whip up some Cajun magic. So when I tried to imagine what kind of meal I might want to find if I was on the road, Chicken and Sausage Gumbo came to mind. It seemed like some pretty comforting comfort food for a hard-workin' band to arrive to.

Chicken and Sausage Gumbo

1 3-lb chicken, cut into pieces
salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper
1/4-lb smoky bacon
cooking oil
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
4 medium onions, chopped
1 cubanelle or Italian frying pepper, seeded and chopped
2 stalks celery (including the leaf), minced
1 pound Cajun andouille, kielbasa, or chorizo sausage, sliced thin (we used chorizo because that's the neighborhood specialty and Cajun cuisine is nothing if not pragmatic)
1 bunch scallions, minced
2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced
several sprigs fresh parsley
1/2 tbsp smoky chili powder
1 tbsp filé powder

steamed rice

Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper. In a large, heavy-duty cast-iron skillet, cook the bacon over medium to medium-high heat until the fat has been rendered and the bacon is crispy. Remove the bacon, set aside, mince when cool enough to handle, and reserve. Brown the chicken pieces in the fat for a few minutes on each side, until you've crisped the skin and given it a nice color. Remove the chicken and set it on paper towels to cool. Eyeball the amount of fat in the skillet, and the combined bacon fat and chicken fat doesn't appear to be about 1/2 cup's worth, add cooking oil to bring the amount of fat in the skillet to 1/2 cup and bring to temperature. Add the flour and make a true Cajun roux, taking the time so that it becomes mahogany (or darker) and taking the care to make sure it doesn't get scorched. When the roux is to your liking, add the chopped onion, cubanelle pepper, and celery, and simmer until the onion is translucent, stirring occasionally. After this stage, transfer the roux mixture to a large pot, bring to temperature, add the sausage and cook for a minute or two before adding the chicken pieces and the minced bacon. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile bring 4 cups of water to simmer in a pot or kettle.

When the chicken and sausage combo has simmered for 15 minutes, pour the simmering water into the pot and stir in the scallions, garlic, parsley, and chili powder. Turn up the heat and bring the mixture to a boil, then turn the heat down low and simmer the gumbo gently for about 1 1/2 hours, or until the chicken slips easily from the bone. Remove the chicken pieces, debone them, discard the skin, and shred coarsely, then return the meat to the pot. Just before serving sprinkle the filé powder in and stir in gently. Remove from the heat and let rest for 5 minutes. Serve in deep bowls with steamed rice.

Serves an entire band and then some generously.

[recipe inspired by John Thorne's Chicken-Andouille Gumbo from Serious Pig]

You're going to need rice to go along with the gumbo anyway, so it makes sense to cook up a rice-friendly vegetarian option that has a similar warmth to it, just in case. Take Mexican Lentil Soup, for instance, a keeper of a recipe that we first featured in 2005.

Throw in a batch of cole slaw, and you've got yourself a complete meal.

3. Cookies

Go behind the scenes in the high-end restaurant world and you'll find that there's this whole annihilation fantasy that's a big part of the biz. Basically, some VIP party shows up, the kitchen finds out, and, led by the chef, they set out to "destroy" them. When the VIP party includes other restaurant biz people the stakes go higher. Way higher. It's kind of a combination punch. You're trying to slay these VIPs with the quality of your gastronomy. You're also trying to slay them with sheer quantity. Again, if the VIPs are restaurant people, especially fellow chefs, we're talking an all-out potlatch of destruction. Or so Michelle tells me.

Michelle designed these cookies with this annihilation fantasy in mind. She wanted the cookies to "give [a rock band] energy," but, let's fact it, she also wanted them to be killer.

fig. b: peanut-butter destroyers just waiting to do what they do best

Peanut Butter Destroyers

3 sticks butter
2 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
100 g dark chocolate, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350º F.

Melt one stick of butter in a saucepan, add the oats, and toast them until golden and fragrant. Set aside to cool. Cream the remaining butter with the sugar and the brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and peanut butter and mix well. Add the flour, baking soda, and salt and mix. Finally, add the chocolate and the oats and mix until the dough comes together.

Drop the dough by tablespoons onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake 12-14 minutes until the bottoms are lightly golden. Cool on a rack.

Makes approximately four dozen cookies.

As it happens, some rock 'n' roll band friends of ours rocked and rolled through town just recently, so we tried out the menu on them.

Later, with bellies full, we headed down to a local rock 'n' roll club just in time to catch the last few songs by opening band #2, and not long before the headliners took the stage.

Having arrived late, we didn't exactly have the best view in the house,

fig. c: mirror-ball madness

but the meal seemed to have worked because the band sure sounded great. And every once in a while, with the help of a high-powered lens, we caught a glimpse of the theatrics on stage.

fig. d: rip this joint!

aj

1. James Villas, American Taste

fig. a: The Taste of Country Cooking

2. Edna Lewis, The Taste of Country Cooking

3. pan-fried chicken & cream gravy

4. Helen & Scott Nearing, The Maple Sugar Book

fig. b: the arrival of spring

5. Spring is here!

6. George Eliot, Middlemarch

7. Quebec grass-fed veal

8. George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary

9. Jeffrey Steingarten, It Must've Been Something I Ate & Jeffrey Steingarten's chocolate chip cookies

10. Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

aj

We were already pretty big fans of James Villas due in large part to his undeniably charming Town and Country Cookbook (1985). But then a couple of months ago, in the midst of a run of amazing secondhand bookstore finds, we found this.

fig. a: American Taste

Written at a time when the phrase "American taste" was considered by many to be an oxymoron, Villas' book was a direct challenge (a throwdown, if you will) to an establishment that was still blindly kowtowing to Continental cuisine--a provocation from the food and wine editor at Town and Country, no less. Aside from James Beard, Calvin Trillin, and a handful of others, there weren't a whole lot of people back in '82 with the guts to stick up for American cuisine in this manner:

For those of us who devote our lives to serious eating, it sometimes seems nothing less than absurd to refer to "gastronomic excellence" in a country where millions are nourished on junk food, frozen TV dinners, stale produce, and charred steak. Yet I am convinced there is no nation on earth that has a more exciting culinary potential than ours.

Villas was right on the money, of course, the unfortunate thing is that while America has realized this "exciting culinary potential" in the 25 years since wrote those words, it’s also even more of a fast food nation. In any case, we tore right into American Taste and devoured chapter after chapter of Villas' book, including "Cry, the Beloved Country Ham," "Creole, Cajun, Choctaw...," and "Star-Spangled Bourbon," but the chapter that resonated the most with us was one entitled "Understanding Fried Chicken."

You see, 2007 was the year we rediscovered fried chicken here at AEB--it was the year we decided it was time to stop moping around and take fried chicken seriously. If we lived in Nashville or even New York, we could rely on local expertise to provide us with "fried chicken for the soul," but here in Montreal, if you want fried chicken, real pan-fried chicken, you have to fend for yourself. So we started reading up, comparing philosophies, and testing recipes. We had a few minor fried chicken epiphanies along the way, but the very most important maxim we learned was a simple one: "Temperature is everything." By the end of the year we were pretty sure we’d gotten it down pat, but then we read Villas' polemic:

When it comes to fried chicken, let’s not beat around the bush for one second. To know about fried chicken you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period. The French know absolutely nothing about it, and Yankees very little. Craig Claiborne knows plenty. He’s from Mississippi. And to set the record straight before bringing on regional and possibly national rage over the correct preparation of this classic dish, let me emphasize the fact that I’m a Southerner, born, bred, and chicken-fried for all times. Now, I don’t know exactly why we Southerners love and eat at least ten times more fried chicken than anyone else, but we do and always have and always will… [We] take our fried chicken very seriously, having singled it out years ago as not only the most important staple worthy of heated and complex debate but also as the dish that non-Southerners have never really had any knack for. Others just plain don’t understand fried chicken, and, to tell the truth, there are lots of Southerners who don’t know as much as they think they know. Naturally everybody is convinced he or she can cook or identify great fried chicken as well as any ornery reb (including all the fancy cookbook writers), but the truth remains that once you’ve eaten real chicken fried by an expert chicken fryer in the South… there are simply no grounds for contest.

Now, I might have spent a healthy chunk of my adolescence and young adulthood south of the Mason-Dixon line, but that was in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., so, in the eyes of any self-respecting/ornery reb I might as well have come from Boston. That means that neither of us are Southerners, born, bred, chicken-fried, or otherwise--not even close. Hell, we live in a French province to the north of Yankeedom, so, according to Villas, we’re doubly cursed. We wouldn’t pretend to be “expert chicken fryers” or “fried chicken experts” either. We do, however, have a profound appreciation for real fried chicken (we happen to be naturally attracted to pretty much all those staples “worthy of heated and complex debate:” barbecue, pizza, tacos, bagels—you name it). So when Villas went on to claim that he’d broken the code on fried chicken, we paid close attention:

As far as I’m concerned, all debate over how to prepare fried chicken has ended forever, for recently I fried up exactly 21 1/2 chickens (or 215 pieces) using every imaginable technique, piece of equipment, and type of oil for the sole purpose of establishing once and for all the right way to fix great fried chicken.

Being a man on a mission, Villas leaves little to chance. His list of "Equipment (no substitutes)" reads like this:

A sharp chef's or butcher's knife 12- to 13-inches long
A large wooden cutting board
A small stockpot half-filled with water (for chicken soup)
A large glass salad bowl
A heavy 12" cast-iron skillet with lid
Long-handled tweezer tongs
1 roll paper towels
2 brown paper bags [heavy-duty ones]
1 empty coffee can
A serving platter
A wire whisk
A home fire extinguisher

Like I said: no fooling around. He also discusses everything from the quality of the bird ("Without question, the most important secret to any great fried chicken is the quality of the chicken itself, and without question, most of the 3 billion pullets marketed annually in the United States have about as much flavor as tennis balls."), the right skillet (basically: heavy cast-iron, well seasoned and black as tar), the seasoning ("Real fried chicken should be seasoned with nothing more than salt, fresh pepper, a touch of lemon juice, and a few tablespoons of bacon grease added to the cooking fat."), the cooking oil ("The one and only thing to use is a bland, high-grade shortening (Crisco is best) that holds up well over intense heat."), frying strategy ("The first rule in frying chicken is never to allow more than 1/2 inch of grease in the skillet. If you add any more, you'll end up with deep-fried chicken, or something that resembles the atrocities served at greasy spoons."), and the importance of paper bags ("Nothing in heaven or on earth (not even a sponge or Kleenex) absorbs chicken grease like a brown paper bag.") at length.

Now, if you’re having a hard time figuring out what an empty coffee can or a wire whisk have to do with frying chicken, Villas’ recipe makes everything oh-so clear. If you’ve been put off by his prescriptive tone, hear the man out. After all, this is a man who feels absolutely passionately about his subject.

James Villas' "all debate is over" Fried Chicken

3 cups whole milk
1/2 fresh lemon
3 cups top-quality shortening (like Crisco)
4 tbsp rendered bacon grease
1 freshly killed 3 1/2-4 lb chicken cut into ten pieces
1 1/2 cups plus 2 tbsp flour
3 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the ten pieces of chicken thoroughly under running water, dry with paper towels, and salt and pepper lightly. Pour milk into bowl, squeeze lemon into milk, add chicken to soak, covered, and refrigerate for at least two hours and preferably overnight.

Remove the chicken from the refrigerator and allow to return to room temperature. While melting the shortening over high heat to measure 1/2 inch in skillet, pour flour, remaining salt, and pepper to taste and drop into paper bag. Remove dark pieces of chicken from milk, drain each momentarily over bowl, drop in paper bag, shake vigorously to coat. Add bacon grease to skillet. When small bubbles appear on surface, reduce heat slightly. Remove dark pieces of chicken from bag one by one, shake off excess flour, and, using tongs, lower gently into fat, skin-side down. Quickly repeat all procedures with white pieces; reserve milk, arrrange chicken in skillet so it cooks evenly, reduce heat to medium, and cover. Fry exactly 17 minutes. Lower heat, turn pieces with tongs, and fry 17 minutes longer uncovered. With paper towels wipe grease continuously from exposed surfaces as it spatters. The chicken should be almost mahogany brown. [emphasis mine]

Drain thoroughly on second paper bag, transfer to serving platter without reheating in oven, and serve hot or at room temperature with any of the following items: mashed potatoes and cream gravy, potato salad, green beans, turnip greens, sliced homegrown tomatoes, stewed okra, fresh corn bread, iced tea, beer, homemade peach ice cream, or watermelon.

Serves 4.

Cream Gravy

Use coffee can to discard all but one tablespoon of the fat from the skillet, making sure not to pour off brown drippings. Over high heat, add two remaining tablespoons flour to fat and stir constantly with wire whisk till the roux browns. Gradually pour 1 3/4 cups reserved milk from bowl and continue stirring till gravy comes to a boil, thickens slightly, and is smooth. Reduce heat, simmer two minutes, and check salt and pepper seasoning. Serve in a gravy boat.

Makes enough for 4 servings fried chicken and mashed potatoes.

[both recipes from James Villas' American Taste]

If you’re skeptical and you need further proof that Villas knows what he’s talking about, let me just add that no less an authority than Edna Lewis, author of The Taste of Country Cooking and In Pursuit of Flavor, writes about pan-fried chicken in very similar, if less quarrelsome, terms, although her family recipe didn’t use Crisco: “Our chicken was not only carefully tended, it was also fried in sweet, home-rendered lard, fresh-churned butter, and, in addition, we would put in a slice or two of smoked pork for flavor.”

Gourmet’s Edna Lewis-inspired Fried Chicken with Bacon and Pepper Cream Gravy from January of this year recommends a frying temperature (350º) that we feel is too high, but has some ideas pertaining to bacon fat and cream gravy that are worth noting. First, if you don’t have 4 tablespoons of “rendered bacon grease” on hand, cook half a pound of bacon in a heavy skillet until browned and crisp. Set the bacon aside and then scrape up the brown bits from the bottom of your skillet with a spatula and strain the bacon fat through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, reserving the bits caught in the sieve. Wipe the skillet clean and add the strained bacon fat. Then add your oil, shortening, or lard and proceed with frying your chicken. Later, after the chicken is done, strain the frying fat through the aforementioned sieve into a bowl, then return one tablespoon of the fat and all the brown bits in the sieve to your skillet. Whisk in 4 teaspoons all-purposed flour and cook your roux over medium heat, whisking all the while, for 1 minute. Whisk in two cups of milk (either fromthe reserved milk of Villas’ recipe or fresh milk), 1 teaspoon salt, and 3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper and bring to a boil, whisking, then simmer, still whisking, until nice and thick, about 3 to 5 minutes.

The long and short of it is we'd rarely encountered a piece of food writing (on fried chicken or otherwise) as encyclopedic or as entertaining as Villas’ “Understanding Fried Chicken.” Villas later wrote, “I don’t suppose any article in my career ever created such commotion as the three-thousand-word treatise I devoted to the art of Southern fried chicken,” as if surprised. Obviously we were left mightily impressed, but more than anything it was that one line--"Chicken should be almost mahogany brown"--that stayed with us. Mahogany brown? Pretty much the only thing we'd ever cooked until it was almost mahogany brown was Cajun roux, and then only rarely. Villas was going for something similar: a near-miraculous transformation of simple ingredients (chicken, flour, fat) that it takes patience to achieve.

Is this a crazy method? Yes. Does the resultant chicken transcend? Definitely. Just look at it.

fig. b: AEB blue plate special

Villas' chicken came out perfectly moist inside, while the crust was crisp but not at all tough, and, cooked to "almost mahogany brown," its flavors were deep and complex.

Is this recipe the alpha and omega of fried chicken? Well... The thing is, if you were making any more than just one chicken--for a big group, say--you'd be condemning yourself to hours of frying. The Lee Bros. Tuesday Fried Chicken recipe that we featured last May is a pretty fine method for producing some pretty fine fried chicken and it clocks in at 18 minutes, or roughly half the time that James Villas' "all debate is over" Fried Chicken takes. So you have options. If you've got the time and you've never had your friend chicken "almost mahogany brown," you really should. Either way, 325º F is the magic number. Like I sad at the outset, “Temperature is everything.”

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Wondering what that brightly hued side dish is in the photograph above?

Hot Slaw

1 3-lb red cabbage, cored and coarsely chopped
1/4 lb slab bacon, diced
1/2 cup white vinegar, cider vinegar, or white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp celery seeds
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
2 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Pepper Vinegar to taste

Bring 4 quarts of water to boil over high heat in an 8-quart stockpot. Blanch the cabbage by submerging it in the boiling water until it turns a dull grayish purple, about 5 minutes. Drain in a colander, shake the colander to remove excess water, and reserve.

Scatter the bacon in a 14-inch dry skillet over medium-high heat. With a wooden spoon, move the pieces around until the bacon is firm and barely crisp, about 4 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and reserve.

Pour the vinegar into the skillet. It will hiss and pop at first but will soon subside. Swirl the vinegar around with the spoon, stirring up any browned bits of bacon. Add the celery seeds and red pepper flakes and stir.

Add the cabbage to the skillet and toss to coat it with the vinegar. Add the salt, pepper, and reserved bacon, and continue to sauté, stirring the cabbage around the pan until all its bright magenta glory has returned [seriously, it's like a science fair experiment], about 4 minutes.

Place the slaw in a bowl and shake pepper vinegar over it to taste.

[recipe from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook]

Happy frying!

aj

fig. a: Toronto SkyDome

...was this awesome postcard...

fig. b: farmhouse cheddar

...some lovely Ontario 3-year-old cheddar...

fig. c: one day in the life of Michelle Marek

...and some seriously hot tips:

Manic Coffee, 426 College St., (416) 966-3888--m: "The best coffee ever! The best! Ever!"

Golden Turtle, 125 Ossington St., (416) 531-1601--m: "Everything was huge, perfectly seasoned, and really fresh tasting, but for some reason they were out of pho [ed: which they're famous for, apparently] so I ordered a spicy, fragrant beef and lemongrass soup instead."

Gandhi, 554 Queen St. W., (416) 504-8155--m: "Huge East Indian rotis! Excellent dough, really soft..."

Jumbo Empanadas, 245 Augusta Ave., (416) 977-0056--m: "Oh, that was good... Great empanadas--I had one cheese and one vegetable--and the best salsa!"

and for more information about Toronto's best postcards click on this


aj

fig. a: finished product

Okay, maybe we're taking this a little far by calling these "Sojo-style," because our investigation into how your typical Sojo-ite prepares his or her chick peas has hardly been scientific. Alls we know is that south of St-Joseph, where we live, not only are chick peas cheap and plentiful, but there's also plenty of good Portuguese chorizo to be had, so we've taken to preparing them in unison.

If there's a better Iberian-style chick pea dish being served anywhere in town, we've yet to find it.
.
Spicy Sojo-Style Chick Peas

1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 small red bell pepper, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 tsp hot smoked paprika
3/4 lb - 1 lb extra-spicy Portuguese chorizo, chopped into 1/2" hunks
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup white wine
1 14-oz can chopped tomatoes
2 cups chicken or pork broth, preferably homemade
4 cups cooked chick peas or 2 19-oz cans chick peas, drained
salt and freshly ground black pepper


Heat the olive oil in a large cast-iron pan over medium heat. When the oil begins to shimmer, add the onions and sauté them for 5-10 minutes. Add the celery and red bell pepper and sauté for another 5 minutes. Add the paprika and the chorizo and stir for 4-5 minutes, then add the garlic and sauté for another minute. Pour in the wine, turn the heat up to medium-high and cook until the wine has evaporated. Then add the tomatoes, the broth, and the chick peas and stir. Bring the mixture to a boil, then simmer for 15-20 minutes, or until the broth has reduced by about half. Adjust the seasoning with salt and freshly ground black pepper and serve with lots of crusty bread and a salad.

SA & Fils (4701 St. Urbain, 842-3373) is a good source for Portuguese chorizo. They stock it in three varieties: mild, spicy, and extra-spicy.

aj

fig. a: finished product

Okay, maybe we're taking this a little far by calling these "Sojo-style," because our investigation into how your typical Sojo-ite prepares his or her chick peas has hardly been scientific. Alls we know is that south of St-Joseph, where we live, not only are chick peas cheap and plentiful, but there's also plenty of good Portuguese chorizo to be had, so we've taken to preparing them in unison.

If there's a better Iberian-style chick pea dish being served anywhere in town, we've yet to find it.
.
Spicy Sojo-Style Chick Peas

1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 small red bell pepper, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 tsp hot smoked paprika
3/4 lb - 1 lb extra-spicy Portuguese chorizo, chopped into 1/2" hunks
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup white wine
1 14-oz can chopped tomatoes
2 cups chicken or pork broth, preferably homemade
4 cups cooked chick peas or 2 19-oz cans chick peas, drained
salt and freshly ground black pepper


Heat the olive oil in a large cast-iron pan over medium heat. When the oil begins to shimmer, add the onions and sauté them for 5-10 minutes. Add the celery and red bell pepper and sauté for another 5 minutes. Add the paprika and the chorizo and stir for 4-5 minutes, then add the garlic and sauté for another minute. Pour in the wine, turn the heat up to medium-high and cook until the wine has evaporated. Then add the tomatoes, the broth, and the chick peas and stir. Bring the mixture to a boil, then simmer for 15-20 minutes, or until the broth has reduced by about half. Adjust the seasoning with salt and freshly ground black pepper and serve with lots of crusty bread and a salad.

SA & Fils (4701 St. Urbain, 842-3373) is a good source for Portuguese chorizo. They stock it in three varieties: mild, spicy, and extra-spicy.

aj

fig. a: maple sugaring in the northern woods again

Those of you who've been reading AEB over the last few years will know that we've long had an affection for scenes such as the one above: old prints of homesteaders practicing the alchemy of turning maple sap into maple syrup and maple sugar. You'll also know that we're big fans of the cuisine--yes, cuisine--of the traditional Québécois cabane à sucre: the beans, the ham, the cretons, and all the other assorted pork dishes, the ketchup aux fruits, the tire d'érable, and so on. You might also have noticed that Michelle's birthday is around this time of year, right in the thick of sugaring-off season. What you might not know, however--especially if you don't live in this region--is that if you wanted to take a sugar shack fanatic out to celebrate her birthday with a group of people at a traditional cabane à sucre, you'd have literally dozens upon dozens of establishments to choose from within a 100-150 km radius, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one of exceptional quality (top-notch ingredients + top-notch technique). Believe me, we've tried, and though we've found some good cabanes à sucre, ones worthy of a casual, slightly kitschy weekend outing, we've yet to find one that's worthy of a birthday party. Which means that as much as the idea of taking a group of people out to a traditional, rustic, intimate, backwoods sugar shack for Michelle's birthday appeals to us, it's never really been in the cards.

Now, rewind, if you will, for just a moment or two, to about three weeks ago. We were strolling down Ste-Catherine W. on our way to a movie when we looked in the window at Westcott Books and saw this handsome book:

fig. b: The Maple Sugar Book

The store was closed at the time, but the cover left such an impression on us that the very next day we made a special trip back to that part of town to take a closer look. And when we did, we liked what we saw, so we took that first edition of Helen & Scott Nearing's The Maple Sugar Book (1950) up to the front counter, chatted up the owner about his numerous bookstore cats, paid for the book, and took it home with us.

The Nearings' book is divided into three parts--roughly, the history of maple sugaring, the practice of maple sugaring, and the philosophy of life that goes along with maple sugaring--plus an appendix on maple recipes of all sorts (from candied sweet potatoes to maple divinity fudge), and it starts off with the kind of bang you might expect from the people who more or less pioneered the 20th century back-to-the-land movement:

FOREWORD

We had three things in mind when we set ourselves to write this book. The first was to describe in detail the process of maple sugaring. The second was to present some interesting aspects of maple history. The third was to relate our experiments in homesteading and making a living from maple to the larger problem faced by so many people nowadays: how should one live?

[...]

What we have been developing here in the Green Mountains is a source of livelihood that leaves us time and room to live life simply and surely and worthily. Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal on February 18, 1850: "There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. I cannot think of a single page which entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on this subject. How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get." Sugaring can bring one an honest living. And anyone who has ever sugared remembers the poesy of it to the end of his days...

We haven't exactly packed up our city-living ways, found ourselves a tract of hardscrabble land, and started homesteading (yet), but the Nearings' The Maple Sugar Book is definitely a great read for a book that devotes so much type to discussions of buckets, pipes, and evaporators, and we've been talking about it off and on for weeks.

In fact, it became such an important of our lives that when we started thinking about our annual sugar shack pilgrimage this year, perversely, the book actually inspired us to stay in the city and stage a full-blown cabane à sucre extravaganza ourselves. We'd be missing out on the fresh air and the woods, of course, but we'd be saving on car rental fees and gas, there'd be little risk of kitsch, we'd be able to guarantee that our food would be both tasty and of a high quality, we'd be able to control the stereo (i.e. we'd be able to play our La Bolduc records if we so desired, but we could just as easily play a Brigitte Fontaine & Areski record) and therefore the ambiance, and, who knows, maybe we'd be able to create some small-scale poesy right at home. We got so excited about the idea, that we decided to throw this sugar shack party for Michelle's birthday.

Now, before you get all hot and bothered because we left out the pea soup, the oreilles de crisse, and the pets de soeur, you should know that our menu was our own personal Dream Team: a few classics, like baked beans and ketchup aux fruits, alongside some dishes that you'd probably never find at a cabane à sucre but you'd be happier if you did (or, rather, we'd be happier if we did). The spread went as follows: two tourtières, two maple-braised pork shanks, two batches of baked beans (one with yellow eye beans, the other with soldier beans), a massive batch of cole slaw, ketchup aux fruits, cornichons, cheddar cheese with crackers and jerusalem artichoke relish, and a can of maple syrup for all those willing to add a little magic to the mix, plus apple crumble with maple frappé for dessert. The tablecloth was of the red & white checked variety, and Michelle had decorated the table with hay to give things a countrified feel (okay, so we threw in a little kitsch). The view from our specially designed AEB tablecam looked like this:

fig. c: tourtière de ville, ketchup aux fruits, sirop d'érable

Tourtière, of course, is the classic French-Canadian meat pie. It might even be the classic French-Canadian dish. Its roots stretch back to the days before the settlement of New France, but this is a dish which, in all of its varieties, became as French-Canadian as they come. The version we've been making since the fall of 2006 is a variation on the one found in Martin Picard & Co.'s Au Pied de Cochon: The Album, and it's the best tourtière recipe I've ever encountered. If you've ever had your typical modern, disappointing, bone-dry tourtière, this is not one of them. The PDC recipe is unorthodox but ingenious, using mushrooms, white wine, and a grated potato to keep the filling moist and flavorful. The PDC original calls for braised pork shank meat and 1 braised pig's knuckle because when they make them at the restaurant they've got a lot of braised pork shanks and braised pigs' knuckles on-hand and available. We've replaced the 200 g / 7 oz of braised pork shank meat with the same amount of ground veal for simplicity's sake, and it turns out famously every time. However, you could use some of the braised pork shank meat from the maple pigs' feet / maple pork shanks recipe you see below, if you so desired, and I'm sure your tourtière would turn out even more hallucinant. Note: when it comes to the ground pork, don't get it too lean--no need to go overboard, but you want a bit of extra fat content for tourtière. If that kind of thing concerns you, just go for a long walk or chop a little wood beforehand, but don't sell your tourtière short. Note #2: the added nutmeg is my touch. Again, this is very unorthodox, so go ahead and leave it out if you like, but I think it really makes a difference. Just remember to go easy on the spices. They should definitely be present, but you don't want to overpower the filling with either clove or cinnamon (or nutmeg, for that matter).

tourtière de ville

1 pie dough recipe
500 g / 1 lb ground pork
250 g / 1/2 lb ground veal
1 medium onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
100 g / 4 oz mushrooms, chopped
100 ml / 1/2 cup white wine
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp butter
1 small potato, grated
1 small pinch ground cloves
1 small pinch ground cinnamon
1 small pinch ground nutmeg
salt and freshly ground pepper

In a large pot, sweat the onions and the garlic in the butter over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms and continue cooking until the liquid released by the vegetables has evaporated. Add the white wine and continue cooking until the wine has evaporated as well. Add the ground pork, the ground veal, and the spices to the pot. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring to break up the chunks of meat. Add the grated potato and cook for another 10 minutes. Correct the seasoning, remove from the heat, and allow the mixture to cool.

Preheat your oven to 230º C / 450º F.

Roll out the pie dough and line a pie plate with half of it. Fill this with the ground meat mixture. Cover with the top half of the pie crust, brush it with the egg yolk, and poke or cut some holes in the top crust to allow the steam to escape during cooking.

Bake the pie in the oven for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 175º C / 350º F and bake for another 20-25 minutes.

Serve with ketchup aux fruits.

Two pork shanks from our friends at Porc Meilleur came in at under $5 and they looked and tasted great. This recipe is straight out of the PDC cookbook and it's typical of PDC's genius: take one of the lowliest cuts off one of the lowliest meats and redeem it with a cup of maple syrup and a lot of love.

maple pigs' feet / pork shanks

2 pigs' trotters or pork shanks
2 carrots, peeled
1 head of garlic, whole
1 sprig thyme
6 boiler onions
2 l / 8 cups pork stock
250 ml / 1 cup maple syrup
100 ml / 7 tbsp vinaigrette
15 g / 1/4 cup fresh Italian parsley
salt and freshly ground black pepper

brine: 2 cups of salt dissolved in 4.5 l / 1.2 gallons of water

Soak the pigs' feet or pork shanks in the brine for 4-6 hours.

Put the meat, the onions, the carrots, the garlic and the thyme in an ovenproof casserole. Pour the stock and the maple syrup over the meat (ideally, the liquid should come about halfway up the sides of the feet/shanks). Bake uncovered in the oven at 160º C / 325º F, basting the meat with the broth every 30 minutes until they are well-glazed and have developed a nice crust. Bake for a total of four hours; the meat should be extremely tender and come easilly off the bone. Remove the meat, the carrots, and the onions from the broth and set aside.

Strain the stock and drippings into a saucepan; you should have approximately 2 cups total. Dice the carrots finely and add them and the onions to the pan. Bring to a boil over high heat and reduce by half. Remove from the heat and whisk in the vinaigrette. Add the parsley and correct the seasoning as needed.

Serve the meat with a generous amount of the sauce poured overtop.

Vinaigrette:

1 cup vegetable oil
50 ml Dijon mustard
50 ml red wine vinegar

Whisk together the mustard, the vinegar, and a pinch of salt in a mixing bowl. Gradually whisk in the oil, stirring constantly to create a proper emulsion.

If you're all out of last summer's homemade canned ketchup aux fruits, here's a quick and easy off-season version.

ketchup aux fruits (winter version)

1 28-oz / 786 ml can of whole tomatoes & their liquid
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 stalks celery, diced
2 apples, peeled, cored, and diced
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 pinch of ground cloves
1 small pinch cayenne pepper
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

In a saucepan, bring the whole tomatoes, the onion, the garlic, and the celery to a boil and then simmer them gently for about 15-20 minutes, and gently break up the tomatoes with a wooden spoon. Remove the saucepan from the heat and using an immersion blender or a conventional blender, blend half the mixture, then return it to the saucepan. Add the apples, the maple syrup, the vinegar and the spices and simmer for another 30-45 minutes. Makes plenty enough for a DIY sugar shack bash, and you'll be happy to have the leftovers.

This last recipe is of the WWMD variety: "what would Maurice do." We considered a whole host of maple syrup-laden desserts--backwoods-style crêpes, pouding chômeur, etc.--before settling on something we'd never ever had before because a) we have a lot of faith in Maurice and b) how can you argue with a recipe that gets this kind of write-up?

Once in a while Hettie [the Brockways' Irish "hired girl"] would make what she called Maple Frappe. I was delighted to help chop the ice which Tommy, the handyman, would get out of the big icehouse located out beyond the vegetable garden under a huge maple tree. Every winter, when the river was frozen, Grandfather hired a local man and his son to cut the large blocks of ice and haul them on a sleigh up the long hill to the icehouse. They were packed in sawdust from the lumber mill, and there they lasted all through the long hot summer. Each morning a large piece was dug out of the sawdust--which served as perfect insulation--washed with the hose, then put into the icebox in the summer kitchen. We were extremely advanced as we had a drain from the ice chest instead of the large pan everyone else seemed to use to catch the drippings.

I was delighted also to turn the freezer crank for the privilege of "licking" the ladle. Try this, and soon: 6 eggs beaten until creamy, 1 cup of pure maple syrup, 1 can of condensed milk, 1 can of evaporated milk, 1 pint of heavy cream whipped, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Mix together and freeze in an old-fashioned ice-cream freezer--not in the refrigerator ice trays. This makes 3 pints of frappe which, by itself is pure nectar, but atop warm apple pie is a delicacy that must be tasted to be believed.

We made an apple crumble instead of the apple pie recommended by Maurice, but it still ranked as "a delicacy that must be tasted to be believed." I don't know if I'm ready to wax poetic about maple frappé the way Maurice does--of course, we don't have an icehouse or a "hired girl" name Hettie, so maybe we didn't get the full experience--but it's got a really lovely, mellow maple flavor to it and I definitely have never had anything like it.

All in all: A+

aj

How well do you understand the Eastern European psyche?

fig. a: Czech mystery pastry

Q: The pastry you see above is a traditional Czech Easter pastry. What does the pastry's shape represent and what is the symbolism behind this shape?

Send us a comment with your name and your answer via the 'comments' application or, if you prefer, via email. The first correct answer will receive an AEB Spring Prize Pack worth at least $5 (and maybe even more!), and we'll send it to you anywhere in the world.

aj

ps--If we've discussed this pastry with you over the last few days, you're ineligible. Sorry.

fig. a: maple sugaring in the northern woods again

Those of you who've been reading AEB over the last few years will know that we've long had an affection for scenes such as the one above: old prints of homesteaders practicing the alchemy of turning maple sap into maple syrup and maple sugar. You'll also know that we're big fans of the cuisine--yes, cuisine--of the traditional Québécois cabane à sucre: the beans, the ham, the cretons, and all the other assorted pork dishes, the ketchup aux fruits, the tire d'érable, and so on. You might also have noticed that Michelle's birthday is around this time of year, right in the thick of sugaring-off season. What you might not know, however--especially if you don't live in this region--is that if you wanted to take a sugar shack fanatic out to celebrate her birthday with a group of people at a traditional cabane à sucre, you'd have literally dozens upon dozens of establishments to choose from within a 100-150 km radius, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one of exceptional quality (top-notch ingredients + top-notch technique). Believe me, we've tried, and though we've found some good cabanes à sucre, ones worthy of a casual, slightly kitschy weekend outing, we've yet to find one that's worthy of a birthday party. Which means that as much as the idea of taking a group of people out to a traditional, rustic, intimate, backwoods sugar shack for Michelle's birthday appeals to us, it's never really been in the cards.

Now, rewind, if you will, for just a moment or two, to about three weeks ago. We were strolling down Ste-Catherine W. on our way to a movie when we looked in the window at Westcott Books and saw this handsome book:

fig. b: The Maple Sugar Book

The store was closed at the time, but the cover left such an impression on us that the very next day we made a special trip back to that part of town to take a closer look. And when we did, we liked what we saw, so we took that first edition of Helen & Scott Nearing's The Maple Sugar Book (1950) up to the front counter, chatted up the owner about his numerous bookstore cats, paid for the book, and took it home with us.

The Nearings' book is divided into three parts--roughly, the history of maple sugaring, the practice of maple sugaring, and the philosophy of life that goes along with maple sugaring--plus an appendix on maple recipes of all sorts (from candied sweet potatoes to maple divinity fudge), and it starts off with the kind of bang you might expect from the people who more or less pioneered the 20th century back-to-the-land movement:

FOREWORD

We had three things in mind when we set ourselves to write this book. The first was to describe in detail the process of maple sugaring. The second was to present some interesting aspects of maple history. The third was to relate our experiments in homesteading and making a living from maple to the larger problem faced by so many people nowadays: how should one live?

[...]

What we have been developing here in the Green Mountains is a source of livelihood that leaves us time and room to live life simply and surely and worthily. Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal on February 18, 1850: "There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. I cannot think of a single page which entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on this subject. How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get." Sugaring can bring one an honest living. And anyone who has ever sugared remembers the poesy of it to the end of his days...

We haven't exactly packed up our city-living ways, found ourselves a tract of hardscrabble land, and started homesteading (yet), but the Nearings' The Maple Sugar Book is definitely a great read for a book that devotes so much type to discussions of buckets, pipes, and evaporators, and we've been talking about it off and on for weeks.

In fact, it became such an important of our lives that when we started thinking about our annual sugar shack pilgrimage this year, perversely, the book actually inspired us to stay in the city and stage a full-blown cabane à sucre extravaganza ourselves. We'd be missing out on the fresh air and the woods, of course, but we'd be saving on car rental fees and gas, there'd be little risk of kitsch, we'd be able to guarantee that our food would be both tasty and of a high quality, we'd be able to control the stereo (i.e. we'd be able to play our La Bolduc records if we so desired, but we could just as easily play a Brigitte Fontaine & Areski record) and therefore the ambiance, and, who knows, maybe we'd be able to create some small-scale poesy right at home. We got so excited about the idea, that we decided to throw this sugar shack party for Michelle's birthday.

Now, before you get all hot and bothered because we left out the pea soup, the oreilles de crisse, and the pets de soeur, you should know that our menu was our own personal Dream Team: a few classics, like baked beans and ketchup aux fruits, alongside some dishes that you'd probably never find at a cabane à sucre but you'd be happier if you did (or, rather, we'd be happier if we did). The spread went as follows: two tourtières, two maple-braised pork shanks, two batches of baked beans (one with yellow eye beans, the other with soldier beans), a massive batch of cole slaw, ketchup aux fruits, cornichons, cheddar cheese with crackers and jerusalem artichoke relish, and a can of maple syrup for all those willing to add a little magic to the mix, plus apple crumble with maple frappé for dessert. The tablecloth was of the red & white checked variety, and Michelle had decorated the table with hay to give things a countrified feel (okay, so we threw in a little kitsch). The view from our specially designed AEB tablecam looked like this:

fig. c: tourtière de ville, ketchup aux fruits, sirop d'érable

Tourtière, of course, is the classic French-Canadian meat pie. It might even be the classic French-Canadian dish. Its roots stretch back to the days before the settlement of New France, but this is a dish which, in all of its varieties, became as French-Canadian as they come. The version we've been making since the fall of 2006 is a variation on the one found in Martin Picard & Co.'s Au Pied de Cochon: The Album, and it's the best tourtière recipe I've ever encountered. If you've ever had your typical modern, disappointing, bone-dry tourtière, this is not one of them. The PDC recipe is unorthodox but ingenious, using mushrooms, white wine, and a grated potato to keep the filling moist and flavorful. The PDC original calls for braised pork shank meat and 1 braised pig's knuckle because when they make them at the restaurant they've got a lot of braised pork shanks and braised pigs' knuckles on-hand and available. We've replaced the 200 g / 7 oz of braised pork shank meat with the same amount of ground veal for simplicity's sake, and it turns out famously every time. However, you could use some of the braised pork shank meat from the maple pigs' feet / maple pork shanks recipe you see below, if you so desired, and I'm sure your tourtière would turn out even more hallucinant. Note: when it comes to the ground pork, don't get it too lean--no need to go overboard, but you want a bit of extra fat content for tourtière. If that kind of thing concerns you, just go for a long walk or chop a little wood beforehand, but don't sell your tourtière short. Note #2: the added nutmeg is my touch. Again, this is very unorthodox, so go ahead and leave it out if you like, but I think it really makes a difference. Just remember to go easy on the spices. They should definitely be present, but you don't want to overpower the filling with either clove or cinnamon (or nutmeg, for that matter).

tourtière de ville

1 pie dough recipe
500 g / 1 lb ground pork
250 g / 1/2 lb ground veal
1 medium onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
100 g / 4 oz mushrooms, chopped
100 ml / 1/2 cup white wine
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp butter
1 small potato, grated
1 small pinch ground cloves
1 small pinch ground cinnamon
1 small pinch ground nutmeg
salt and freshly ground pepper

In a large pot, sweat the onions and the garlic in the butter over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms and continue cooking until the liquid released by the vegetables has evaporated. Add the white wine and continue cooking until the wine has evaporated as well. Add the ground pork, the ground veal, and the spices to the pot. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring to break up the chunks of meat. Add the grated potato and cook for another 10 minutes. Correct the seasoning, remove from the heat, and allow the mixture to cool.

Preheat your oven to 230º C / 450º F.

Roll out the pie dough and line a pie plate with half of it. Fill this with the ground meat mixture. Cover with the top half of the pie crust, brush it with the egg yolk, and poke or cut some holes in the top crust to allow the steam to escape during cooking.

Bake the pie in the oven for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 175º C / 350º F and bake for another 20-25 minutes.

Serve with ketchup aux fruits.

Two pork shanks from our friends at Porc Meilleur came in at under $5 and they looked and tasted great. This recipe is straight out of the PDC cookbook and it's typical of PDC's genius: take one of the lowliest cuts off one of the lowliest meats and redeem it with a cup of maple syrup and a lot of love.

maple pigs' feet / pork shanks

2 pigs' trotters or pork shanks
2 carrots, peeled
1 head of garlic, whole
1 sprig thyme
6 boiler onions
2 l / 8 cups pork stock
250 ml / 1 cup maple syrup
100 ml / 7 tbsp vinaigrette
15 g / 1/4 cup fresh Italian parsley
salt and freshly ground black pepper

brine: 2 cups of salt dissolved in 4.5 l / 1.2 gallons of water

Soak the pigs' feet or pork shanks in the brine for 4-6 hours.

Put the meat, the onions, the carrots, the garlic and the thyme in an ovenproof casserole. Pour the stock and the maple syrup over the meat (ideally, the liquid should come about halfway up the sides of the feet/shanks). Bake uncovered in the oven at 160º C / 325º F, basting the meat with the broth every 30 minutes until they are well-glazed and have developed a nice crust. Bake for a total of four hours; the meat should be extremely tender and come easilly off the bone. Remove the meat, the carrots, and the onions from the broth and set aside.

Strain the stock and drippings into a saucepan; you should have approximately 2 cups total. Dice the carrots finely and add them and the onions to the pan. Bring to a boil over high heat and reduce by half. Remove from the heat and whisk in the vinaigrette. Add the parsley and correct the seasoning as needed.

Serve the meat with a generous amount of the sauce poured overtop.

Vinaigrette:

1 cup vegetable oil
50 ml Dijon mustard
50 ml red wine vinegar

Whisk together the mustard, the vinegar, and a pinch of salt in a mixing bowl. Gradually whisk in the oil, stirring constantly to create a proper emulsion.

If you're all out of last summer's homemade canned ketchup aux fruits, here's a quick and easy off-season version.

ketchup aux fruits (winter version)

1 28-oz / 786 ml can of whole tomatoes & their liquid
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 stalks celery, diced
2 apples, peeled, cored, and diced
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 pinch of ground cloves
1 small pinch cayenne pepper
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

In a saucepan, bring the whole tomatoes, the onion, the garlic, and the celery to a boil and then simmer them gently for about 15-20 minutes, and gently break up the tomatoes with a wooden spoon. Remove the saucepan from the heat and using an immersion blender or a conventional blender, blend half the mixture, then return it to the saucepan. Add the apples, the maple syrup, the vinegar and the spices and simmer for another 30-45 minutes. Makes plenty enough for a DIY sugar shack bash, and you'll be happy to have the leftovers.

This last recipe is of the WWMD variety: "what would Maurice do." We considered a whole host of maple syrup-laden desserts--backwoods-style crêpes, pouding chômeur, etc.--before settling on something we'd never ever had before because a) we have a lot of faith in Maurice and b) how can you argue with a recipe that gets this kind of write-up?

Once in a while Hettie [the Brockways' Irish "hired girl"] would make what she called Maple Frappe. I was delighted to help chop the ice which Tommy, the handyman, would get out of the big icehouse located out beyond the vegetable garden under a huge maple tree. Every winter, when the river was frozen, Grandfather hired a local man and his son to cut the large blocks of ice and haul them on a sleigh up the long hill to the icehouse. They were packed in sawdust from the lumber mill, and there they lasted all through the long hot summer. Each morning a large piece was dug out of the sawdust--which served as perfect insulation--washed with the hose, then put into the icebox in the summer kitchen. We were extremely advanced as we had a drain from the ice chest instead of the large pan everyone else seemed to use to catch the drippings.

I was delighted also to turn the freezer crank for the privilege of "licking" the ladle. Try this, and soon: 6 eggs beaten until creamy, 1 cup of pure maple syrup, 1 can of condensed milk, 1 can of evaporated milk, 1 pint of heavy cream whipped, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Mix together and freeze in an old-fashioned ice-cream freezer--not in the refrigerator ice trays. This makes 3 pints of frappe which, by itself is pure nectar, but atop warm apple pie is a delicacy that must be tasted to be believed.

We made an apple crumble instead of the apple pie recommended by Maurice, but it still ranked as "a delicacy that must be tasted to be believed." I don't know if I'm ready to wax poetic about maple frappé the way Maurice does--of course, we don't have an icehouse or a "hired girl" name Hettie, so maybe we didn't get the full experience--but it's got a really lovely, mellow maple flavor to it and I definitely have never had anything like it.

All in all: A+

aj

...that Michelle balanced out the macabre side of Czech Easter tradition by using her 1970s lamb mold

fig. a: Kaiser lammform

to carry out an experiment in the manufacture of Paschal lambs.

fig. b: positive & negative

She was so pleased with the result that she gave her latest creation that she iced it, decorated it, and gave it to our friend S. for his birthday last week. And, wouldn't you know it, a day or two later Lammikins showed up on Facebook:

fig. c: Lammikins

aj

...that Michelle balanced out the macabre side of Czech Easter tradition by using her 1970s lamb mold

fig. a: Kaiser lammform

to carry out an experiment in the manufacture of Paschal lambs.

fig. b: positive & negative

She was so pleased with the result that she gave her latest creation that she iced it, decorated it, and gave it to our friend S. for his birthday last week. And, wouldn't you know it, a day or two later Lammikins showed up on Facebook:

fig. c: Lammikins

aj

Wow, who knew Czech mystery pastries could generate so much enthusiasm?!

Thanks to all of you who participated and we're happy to report that we have a winner: Fred Wilson. Yep, that's right: these pastries are called jídaše and the term quite literally means "Judases." The shape is based on that of a noose and it's meant to symbolize Judas Iscariot's fate. Grim, huh?

Michelle was just innocently researching Czech Easter pastries a few weeks ago when she came upon a recipe for jídaše and the lore behind them. She grew up in a seriously Czech family with a typically bleak Eastern European outlook on life and even she was shocked. Not exactly the kind of bunnies and eggs vibe that people over here have come to associate with Easter.

They're obviously supposed to impart an important lesson, but, for the life of me, I'm not sure how because they taste so good--perfect texture, subtle flavors: an ideal Easter sweet bread. Apparently you're supposed to have them with honey, but when I tasted my first Easter Noose I immediately thought of a boiled egg. So we had both.

fig. a: with egg

jídaše

500 g flour
salt
80 g icing sugar
1 tbsp vanilla sugar
lemon zest
100 g butter
20 g fresh yeast
2 egg yolks
250 ml milk
egg wash

In a large mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients together. Add the butter and yeast and rub them into the flour until the butter is almost totally blended in. Add the yolks and milk and stir into a dough. Place on a lightly floured surface and begin picking the dough up, slamming it down on the counter and pulling the sides up on top of the dough. Seriously. Try it, it's fun! Repeat until it forms a nice smooth dough. Place in a bowl, cover with plastic and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Take pieces of the dough and roll them into ropes about 12" long. Braid into noose shapes. Let rise, covered with plastic until doubled, about 45 min. Brush with egg wash and bake at 375°F until well-browned, about 20-25 min. Let cool and serve with a boiled egg, or honey, or both.

Makes about 18 jídaše.

fig. b: with honey

Oh, and as for our winner: please send us an email (ajkinik AT gmail DOT com) with your address and we'll send you your prize. And if your name is Lauren and you were blessed with a stereotypically dour Slavic grandmother, send us an email too and we'll send you a runner-up prize.

aj

Wow, who knew Czech mystery pastries could generate so much enthusiasm?!

Thanks to all of you who participated and we're happy to report that we have a winner: Fred Wilson. Yep, that's right: these pastries are called jídaše and the term quite literally means "Judases." The shape is based on that of a noose and it's meant to symbolize Judas Iscariot's fate. Grim, huh?

Michelle was just innocently researching Czech Easter pastries a few weeks ago when she came upon a recipe for jídaše and the lore behind them. She grew up in a seriously Czech family with a typically bleak Eastern European outlook on life and even she was shocked. Not exactly the kind of bunnies and eggs vibe that people over here have come to associate with Easter.

They're obviously supposed to impart an important lesson, but, for the life of me, I'm not sure how because they taste so good--perfect texture, subtle flavors: an ideal Easter sweet bread. Apparently you're supposed to have them with honey, but when I tasted my first Easter Noose I immediately thought of a boiled egg. So we had both.

fig. a: with egg

jídaše

500 g flour
salt
80 g icing sugar
1 tbsp vanilla sugar
lemon zest
100 g butter
20 g fresh yeast
2 egg yolks
250 ml milk
egg wash

In a large mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients together. Add the butter and yeast and rub them into the flour until the butter is almost totally blended in. Add the yolks and milk and stir into a dough. Place on a lightly floured surface and begin picking the dough up, slamming it down on the counter and pulling the sides up on top of the dough. Seriously. Try it, it's fun! Repeat until it forms a nice smooth dough. Place in a bowl, cover with plastic and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Take pieces of the dough and roll them into ropes about 12" long. Braid into noose shapes. Let rise, covered with plastic until doubled, about 45 min. Brush with egg wash and bake at 375°F until well-browned, about 20-25 min. Let cool and serve with a boiled egg, or honey, or both.

Makes about 18 jídaše.

fig. b: with honey

Oh, and as for our winner: please send us an email (ajkinik AT gmail DOT com) with your address and we'll send you your prize. And if your name is Lauren and you were blessed with a stereotypically dour Slavic grandmother, send us an email too and we'll send you a runner-up prize.

aj

How well do you understand the Eastern European psyche?

fig. a: Czech mystery pastry

Q: The pastry you see above is a traditional Czech Easter pastry. What does the pastry's shape represent and what is the symbolism behind this shape?

Send us a comment with your name and your answer via the 'comments' application or, if you prefer, via email. The first correct answer will receive an AEB Spring Prize Pack worth at least $5 (and maybe even more!), and we'll send it to you anywhere in the world.

aj

ps--If we've discussed this pastry with you over the last few days, you're ineligible. Sorry.

How well do you understand the Eastern European psyche?

fig. a: Czech mystery pastry

Q: The pastry you see above is a traditional Czech Easter pastry. What does the pastry's shape represent and what is the symbolism behind this shape?

Send us a comment with your name and your answer via the 'comments' application or, if you prefer, via email. The first correct answer will receive an AEB Spring Prize Pack worth at least $5 (and maybe even more!), and we'll send it to you anywhere in the world.

aj

ps--If we've discussed this pastry with you over the last few days, you're ineligible. Sorry.

fig. a: zeppole with and without cherries from La Cornetteria

March 19th being less than a week away, and March 19th being la Festa di San Giuseppe, you've gotta act fast if you intend to indulge in that most un-Lenten of Lenten* pastries, the zeppola di San Giuseppe.

We're more or less equal opportunity zeppole consumers, but the ones that have been really flipping our lids this year are La Cornetteria's in Little Italy. Michelle even went so far as to declare that they, "may be [her] favorite deep-fried dessert of all time." High praise, indeed. If you decide to pay them a visit, not only will you have to act fast, but you'll have to be strategic: apparently they're only going to have them on offer on two more occasions, Saturday the 15th and Wednesday the 19th.

La Cornetteria, 6528 St-Laurent, (514) 277-8030

aj

* Technically, they're not strictly tied to Lent, but they've become something of a Lent tradition and some bakeries continue to make them until Easter because of their popularity.