Old family recipes, traditions and innovations over time
I am 80 years old, and I was raised on a small mixed farm on Chelsea Road in western Québec. We had sugar maples, butternuts, wild black raspberries, and wild plums in hedgerows, besides our market gardens, chickens, eggs, goats and goat milk, and pigs. We also had an Irish horse named Paddy. He discovered how to unknot and slip his tether, come to the big brick farmhouse, get up on the verandah, grab the doorknob, open the door, saunter nonchalantly into the kitchen, nudge open the bread bin, and help himself to a few mouthfuls of fresh bread. It took my mother’s gently guiding hand to get Paddy turned around and persuade him to walk out the kitchen door. The neighbours reported this astounding sight next day, “We have never seen such a sight, a horse coming out of the Roys’ house!”
The old brick farmhouse had two stoves, one electric, one wood, and my mother cooked on both. She made wonderful omelets with free range eggs with dark golden yolks, so flavourful, with garden onions, mushrooms, cheddar cheese. We had wonderful Sunday dinners year-round, often one our own free-range chickens, fresh garden herbs, fresh garden vegetables. My mother and father would discuss who would get to eat the tasty chicken’s tail, known variously as The Parson’s Nose or The Pope’s Nose — we were an ecumenical family in that regard! (NOTE: In the fall, my father would round up the young roosters, tie them by their feet to the clothesline, cut their throats, let them bleed out, and then he and my mother would pluck and dress these roosters for the freezer for our winter Sunday dinners.) At other times, there were days when the main dish was simply a heaping plate of fresh asparagus — our urine stank for days afterwards! — or fresh corn on the cob, with lemon butter, coarsely cracked black pepper, and a pinch of coarse salt, so delicious.
My parents supplied two French restaurants in town with the very best quality organic foods, and also supplied a couple of general retail produce stores in the Byward Market and on Bank Street. There were also numerous customers who would drop by to purchase fresh free-run eggs with golden yolks, fresh rhubarb, asparagus, fresh strawberries, etc. We made homemade ice cream in a hand cranked freezer from spring to fall in the flavours of the season, from a base of crème anglaise, thick whipped cream, maple syrup, butternuts, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc., and my brother and I would take turns to see who got to lick the paddle, always a treat.
Photo: An icecream maker
My mother was trained at the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in Europe, and was farm-raised in Wales, where she learned all the old traditional farm cooking recipes, including prime rib roast with Yorkshire pudding, and stuffed baked potatoes with butter, cream, and green onions, topped with cheddar cheese and paprika. My mother cooked traditional Québec tourtière in the old wood stove in the farm kitchen, with sixteen herbs and spices. The filling was left to marinate, chilled for two days (aka laisser mijoter), then slow-cooked in thick homemade lard-rich pastry, and top- glazed with golden free range chicken egg yolks to a rich golden brown! My wife now makes a hot tomato pickle to go with tourtière.
[photo: raised planter for growing herbs: French tarragon, basil, thyme, chives, garlic chives, and more]
My father was Canadian born, raised in Paris and Normandy, where his father was the Canadian First Minister to France. He learned all about French cooking there, and taught us some famous simple French dishes, such as Moules Marinières, melted cheese over home cooked apple pie, and thick sirloin steak frites, when we would dip our thick buttered chunks of French baguette in the hot blood of the steak serving dish — totally delicious!
My father also taught us how to make another famous French dish, Pommes de Terre Lyonnaise, which is a hearty French peasant dish composed of les lardons, slices of onion, slices of day-old cooked potatoes, pan fried slowly, dressed with a slight amount of chopped parsley and lemon juice, a wonderful breakfast or lunch!
Sometimes we would have a prime rib roast of beef with Yorkshire pudding and stuffed baked potatoes, and sometimes a leg of fresh lamb, loaded with garlic and rosemary. And in the month of June when the Gaspé salmon run was on, a whole Gaspé salmon, cooked French style, Saumon au Court Bouillon with French tarragon from our garden, and with hard-boiled egg sauce infused with court bouillon, a rare once a year treat! My dear wife Mary now makes half a dozen French salmon dishes, including Saumon en Papillotte, also an Italian salmon dish, fettucine with a creamed multi-herb smoked salmon sauce on top, also a Russian salmon dish, Coulibiac. Each of these dishes is made more flavourful with fresh-grown herbs from our garden.
[photo: Tomates Provençales]
At Christmas time, we make an old traditional, historical, Canadian recipe for Oyster Stew, with a mirepoix in butter, clams, clam juice, a quart of fresh oysters, generous oyster liqueur, thick cream, Tio Pepe, chilled Pouilly Fuissé, and a few raw oysters in each soup plate. This soup was served on the first crossing of Canada by the CPR and has remained in our family for generations. My grandfather, Dr. Philippe Roy, was a physician with the CPR on the Kicking Horse Pass tunnel route, and we keep this recipe and make it in his memory annually.
Back on the family farm, we foraged for wild black raspberries adjacent to our woodlot, and for wild plums in hedgerows. I taught my mother how to make Canadian Chambord liqueur from the wild black raspberries, and to add some French brandy to her wild plum jam – both recipes were delicious. My mother made a strawberry jam with Lamb’s Navy Rum every year, an old recipe that was a favourite of the late Queen Mother Elizabeth; she liked her tipple! And I still make a batch of twelve pots every summer.
We also foraged for wild garlic in the Chelsea Creek Valley. I recently found some, and will make my spring potage de printemps, a thick soup composed of asparagus, wild garlic, baby spinach leaves, and organic chicken stock, which is then chilled, and served with une quenelle de crème fraîche, salted pistachios, cracked black pepper, chopped garden chives, and a gentle squeeze of lemon juice — utterly delicious, and with a strong flavour of wild garlic!
We are blessed to have a very large lot in the City, and I have a simple potager at the rear of our 70 by 215-foot lot, where I have built up the soil over forty years with truckloads of mushroom compost, and well-rotted manure, and plant a variety of tomato plants every year, which grow to six and seven feet tall, and produce abundantly. My wife makes wonderful BLTs, hot tomato pickle, Andalusian Gazpacho with tons of garlic and croutons, Italian baked herbed tomatoes, Salade Niçoise, etc. We feed wild birds year-round and have such a wonderful variety of birds that return in each season, God’s beautiful creation.
My mother used to make a mixed fruit pie, ten berries, an old family recipe from England, which had won first prize at the Paris World Fair in 1900, and I still make it every summer; red gooseberries and black currants are essential for flavour, and they come from our own potager!
I have remembered a valley up the Gatineau where butternut trees grow, and I will go there to harvest in late summer. I have also remembered where I got my last twelve pints of wild black raspberries, at a farmers’ market, and will go there again in early July. My secret hedgerow stash of wild plums, Prunis nigris, has been destroyed, so I am looking for some more wild plum trees to plant at the edge of my potager.
Now that it’s strawberry season, I will make another twelve pots of strawberry jam with generous Lamb’s Navy Rum to eat on hot buttered French croissants during winter months. And I hope to be able to make another batch of Canadian Chambord from some wild black raspberries in mid July. I’m still looking for a hedgerow of wild plums, and I want to get some to plant at home in my potager. And my wife makes wonderful Strawberry Shortcake, and Strawberries Romanov with Cointreau! Makes me salivate to think of all this good food, and how a good potager contributes so much.
You also should treasure old family recipes, food practices, traditions, and stories.
Philippe Roy