Monthly Archives: April 2015

quaglie all’uva (quail with grapes)

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Recipe Notes (Alexia Moyer)

Welcome to Toronto. This week we’re cooking from Italian Canadians at Table: A Narrative Feast in Five Courses.

Editors Lorretta Gatto-White and Delia De Santis have gathered the food-related writings and recollections from Italian Canadians cross country. The result is a literary cookbook. You can cook from it, as it includes recipes and/or detailed descriptions of food preparation.

Pride of place belongs to narrative here. This book isn’t just about cooking, in other words. It’s about writing cooking.

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Many of its contributors live and work and eat in Toronto, including Elizabeth Cinello.

“Food Companion Wanted” is both title and premise of Cinello’s short story. Widower, Alberto Di Rota places an ad in the local Italian Canadian paper. He’s looking for a live-in cook and he wants traditional Italian meals. Widow, Nina Crocetti, weary of her daughter and granddaughter’s no-carbohydrate and vegetarian, gluten-free diets, agrees to meet Alberto at a park on Caledonia road.
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Prairie Chicken in Cream; Carrots in Orange Sauce

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At last, Northern Cookbook has arrived on my doorstep. Written by Eleanor Ellis in 1967, this cookbook – or at least my copy of it – is currently sunning it considerably south of 60 in Marseille, whose inhabitants keep lemon, fig, and palm trees on their balconies. There is something slightly boastful about owning a lemon tree that STAYS OUTSIDE in the “winter” but I will not belabour the subject. It smacks of sour grapes.

Suffice it to say that the many country food recipes in this book – Seal on a Bun, Jellied Moose Nose – cannot easily be made in my current kitchen. I do have ready access to citrus. I therefore chose two recipes more suited to a southern clime: Carrots with Orange Sauce and Prairie Chicken in Cream.

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It’s Not Me, It’s the Food: The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood


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Marian MacAlpin is a normal 26-year-old working woman who, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, begins to lose her appetite. Initially Marian believes that her distaste for food only encompassesEdible meat, but the aversion progresses so far that eventually she is unable to consume anything at all. Feeling a loss of control over herself and her life, Marian’s mind unconsciously controls the only thing it can: her diet. The novel focuses on the physical manifestations of psychological distress as Marian spirals into a state of personal disassociation made clear by the shift from first person to third person narration in the second part of the novel. The Edible Woman is an appetizing read, which portrays and evokes a sense of hunger for self-identity, self-control, and self-creation. The novel’s title refers to Marian herself, and to the novel’s surprising conclusion, which I won’t spoil for you.

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. 1969. Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 2010. Print.

Written By: Teia Giacomello

Teia Giacomello is in her final semester of her English degree at Kwantlen Polytechnic University; she plans to study Canadian literature at the Masters level.

Savoury, Spicy Goulash inspired by Winnipeg

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The food arrived, the hot steaming fragrance of it filling the room, savoury and varied and as spicy as an adventure, rich with the treasured cooking-lore of the whole of Europe . . . Soup came first. But this was merely to prepare the guests for the more serious business of eating. Immediately after, there appeared an enormous bowl of chicken goulash, steaming hot in its red sauce of paprika, with great fat globules floating on the surface. As a side dish for soaking up the gravy there was a mound of home-made noodles, accompanied by small green gherkins with flesh clear as glass from their long immersion in brine, with the pungent aroma of dill and garlic and the young tender leaves of horse-radish.

John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death, 99

Recipe Notes (by Alexia Moyer)

This passage from John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death – set in Winnipeg’s North End – is a favourite of mine.

Those moments in which protagonist Sandor Hunyadi takes pride in his community’s output are few. This is one of them. There is no embarrassment or dissimulation here. This table of delicacies the result of the skill, generousity and ingenuity of Frau Hunyadi and her neighbours – is not found wanting. There is only pleasure and satiety.

Admittedly, I also chose this passage because I wanted to make goulash. Or, more precisely, eat it.

I started with 3 peppers, chopped.

5 cloves of garlic, minced.

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