Author Archives: Shelley Boyd

What Is CanLit’s Most Famous Turning Point Meal?

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Readers often refer to turning points in literature—those plot developments that alter a character’s situation or fortune. But how does food play a role or set the stage for these moments?

When we peruse some of the most famous works of literature, a number of “turning point meals” quickly come to mind. Think of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837) when the young orphan dares to ask the master of the workhouse for more gruel. Or consider Marcel Proust’s sudden rush memories when tasting a madeleine in In Search of Lost Time (1909-1922).

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist

Canadian Literary Fare has explored a number of “turning point meals” in a past series of posts by highlighting key scenes that mark a change in the plot and a character’s transformation.

Now we’d like to turn this question over to you…

What is the most famous turning point meal in Canadian literature?

Please post your answers on our blog!

 

Pumpkins, Playpens, Poetry, and Pies

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Pumpkins have countless uses: pies, muffins, soups, cheesecakes, and playpens. Yes, playpens! And eventually those playpens lead to poetry… or to pies.

Pumpkin Use #1: Playpen

When the corn crop is ready to harvest and no childcare is available, simply take your infant with you to the field and surround him or her with a circle of pumpkins. This orange fence will happily entertain your child for hours. At least that’s Catharine Parr Traill’s advice in The Female Emigrant’s Guide (121).

Catharine Parr Traill

Pumpkin Use #2: Story

Traill’s pumpkin plot, or story, highlights settler ingenuity and the need to re-write gender roles in the Canadian backwoods. Intense physical labour was entirely unfamiliar to refined 19th-century middle-class emigrants, yet Traill recommends that in a new place, one must adopt new perspectives and practices. The story she tells, then, is about a female emigrant who single-handedly harvests an entire crop while her husband, who is ill in bed, remains indoors. The story’s lesson is that backwoods femininity can include “a tone of energy and manly independence” that directly benefits one’s children  (Traill 121).

Pumpkin Use #3: Poem

Traill’s story is about crossing “physical and ideological boundaries” by reframing “the feminine sphere, pushing outward into the masculine domain” (Boyd 91). The unconventional nature of this female emigrant character eventually inspired Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch to write a tribute to Traill in his “Pumpkin: A Love Poem.”

Rather than writing from the female emigrant’s perspective, Kroetsch assumes the position of the pumpkin-encircled infant, and even takes the scenario one step further by placing the child “Inside the pumpkin” (1). Is the pumpkin now a cradle? Is it a womb? Is it a head? Perhaps it is all of those things and more.

From inside his orange globe, the young male speaker carves outward, forming a jack-o-lantern face with genitalia-like features. His sensual orange face is ambiguous in terms of sex and is clearly inspired by Traill’s own 19th-century re-imaginings of the feminine and the masculine (Boyd 92-93). While the carved pumpkin signals fertility and creativity, it is also a chance to create a new identity. The young poet-speaker attempts to “lift the old eye to its new vision” (13) and to “cut the new mouth” (25) while he “slice[s] out the old” (29).

Thus, just as the female emigrant’s pumpkins served as a playpen for her child, Kroetsch uses his single vegetable to create a new space for the next generation of Canadian writers who want to challenge their own boundaries and conventions.

Kroetsch once described Canada as “as relatively young country with few of its own literary models,” which meant “literal objects” had to become the sources of poetic inspiration (Brown 7). As a playpen, a story, and a poem, the pumpkin becomes the site of colonial and post-colonial Canadian literary traditions responding to each other across time. How fortunate for us that during October, this vegetable is capable of appealing to all our senses!

Pumpkin Use #4: Pies

In The Female Emigrant’s Guide, Parr Traill writes of pumpkin pie that there is “not a better dish eaten” and proceeds to give readers a number of tips on the making of this cross between “a custard and a cheese-cake” (133).

Her instructions are loose: soft pumpkin, new milk, two or three eggs, with grated ginger and “as much sugar as will make it sweet enough to be pleasant”(134).

I (Alexia here) have used Anna Olsen’s recipe for pate sucree and a Williams Sonoma recipe for the pie. This because I require a little more precision in the way of ingredients and measurements, not being a terribly deft baker, (as anyone examining my crust will  quickly discover). Using a small, sweet pumpkin from our farm share gave this pie a lovely yellow colour. The taste, the result of this fresh pumpkin is light and subtle.

pastry2

pastry1

pie

Text Credits: Shelley Boyd and Alexia Moyer

Photo Credit (except where indicated): Alexia Moyer

Boyd, Shelley. Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Brown, Russell. “An Interview with Robert Kroetsch.” University of Windsor Review 7.2 (1972): 1-18.

Dodge, Abigail J, Chuck Williams, and Maren Maruso. Williams-Sonoma: Dessert. New York: Simon & Schuster Source, 2002. 58.

Kroetsch, Robert. “Pumpkin: A Love Poem.” The Stone Hammer Poems, 1960-1975. Lantzville: Oolichan Books, 1976. 26-27.

Traill, Catharine Parr. The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic. Ed. Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.

 

Children of My Heart

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“An apple for the teacher” is a timeworn cliché, so when the CHC Canada 150 Food Blog Challenge announced that “School Food” was September’s theme, we at Canadian Literary Fare agreed that it was time to go back to school and reconsider the significance of student-teacher food exchanges.

Apples

In particular, we wondered what it means when the direction of the food-gift is reversed, such as in the opening scene of Gabrielle Roy’s Children of My Heart. On the first day of school, the young teacher gives a terrified five-and-a-half-year-old boy a red apple, quieting his tears with the knowledge that school is “a treat” (10).

A Governor General’s award-winning novel and one-time nominee in the CBC Canada Reads Series, Children of My Heart is Gabrielle Roy’s fictionalized account of her own experiences working as a teacher in rural and urban Manitoba schools. Set in the 1930s, the novel is filled with gifts of food – edible tokens of affection that Roy’s character bestows upon her students. So why are Roy’s teacher-pupil relationships punctuated by these exchanges?

In her study of American cinema from 1909-1939, Heather Weaver sheds light on the fact that student-teacher relationships were often portrayed as romance narratives, many of which used food symbolism. This notion of teachers “winning students over was rather new to the twentieth century,” Weaver notes (9). Gone were the days of corporal punishment and harsh discipline. New educational theories suggested teachers should nourish “the emotional lives of children, or what pedagogist Jasper Bennett had in 1888 called the ‘heart culture’ of pupils” (Weaver 9).

Biographer François Ricard notes that as a young, modern teacher, Roy followed a similar practice of “light-handed discipline, affectionate relations with the children, a great deal of time for games, picnics, stories, and demonstration lessons” (113).

In keeping with her generous spirit as an educator, Roy-the-writer incorporates the romance genre with her storied memories. One sign of this literary re-construction is Roy’s modest self-presentation as the teacher-hero, a role that Weaver argues is especially prominent in North American film: “the teacher meets the student; the student is unsure what to think of the teacher; the student falls into peril or otherwise demonstrates a need; and the teacher saves the student, thereby winning the latter’s approval and affection” (10).

On her first day of work at a Saint-Boniface elementary school, Roy’s character gazes at 35 uneasy young faces and thinks, “We’re going to be friends” (11). As the novel unfolds, readers witness Roy’s character winning the affections of her students through gifts of food, such as wrapped Christmas cones filled with candies, walnuts, a Brazilian nut, an apple or orange, and a small toy (27-28).

As the teacher-hero, Roy’s character bolsters her students’ confidence and sense of belonging, a life lesson that is especially crucial since many are from immigrant families struggling financially and socially to build a new life in Canada. Her teacherly concern and its impact are communicated through the language of sweets. When Roy warmly greets the single mother of an impoverished student, the boy is “radiant . . . , the tip of his tongue emerging to taste – you could imagine – a touch of honey on his lip” (27). Later, when he appears on her doorstep with an unexpected gift of an old Irish handkerchief, Roy feeds him chocolate cake and milk. Her praise, gratitude, and food infuse the young student with the joy that comes from participating in meaningful relationships – a social and emotional experience that lies at the heart of learning.

Cake

Recipe Note: This week we opted for Anna Olson’s recipe for a French flourless chocolate torte. It’s rich yet surprisingly light, like a baked chocolate mousse. To be reserved for favourite students.

Cake_IV

 

Ricard, François. Gabrielle Roy: A Life. 1996. Trans. Patricia Claxton. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999

Roy, Gabrielle. Children of My Heart. 1977. Trans. Alan Brown. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000.

Weaver, Heather. “Beyond Apples and Ice Cream: The Teacher-Student Relationship as Cinematic Romance, 1909–1939.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies. 39.1 (2009): 9-20. Project Muse. Web. 23 Sept. 2017.

 

Text Credit: Shelley Boyd

Photo Credit: Alexia Moyer (unless otherwise indicated).

“Tea Cosy Cafe”

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Here at Canadian Literary Fare, when someone mentions “the first fresh foods of spring,” we dream of asparagus.

dreaming of asparagus

At this time of year, grocery stores are stocked full of these green, purplish-tinged bundles, making this vegetable perfect for the Culinary Historians of Canada April edition of the Canada 150 Food Blog Challenge. Before this springtime bounty disappears and April comes to an end, collaboration is key. From Alexia’s Montreal kitchen and my Vancouver desk, we offer some impressions of the creative life of the asparagus – how it has inspired writers and artists at home and abroad.

Arguably the most famous literary asparagus appears in French author Marcel Proust’s multi-volume À la recherche du temps perdu, translated as In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). Proust cheekily describes these vegetables as celestial creatures —disguised goddesses who make their presence known long after one has eaten!

Literary critic James P. Gilroy tells us that Proust endeavoured “to discern the essence of things beyond their external covering,” as his “impressionistic description” was a tribute to Édouard Manet’s famous asparagus paintings Bunch of Asparagus, 1880 and Asparagus, 1880. (98)

Bunch of Asparagus

Asparagus

Numerous food writers have recounted Proust’s allusion to Manet (see The Rambling Epicure), curated creative recipes and interpretations of Manet’s still-lifes (see Megan Fizell’s Feasting on Art), and even explained the aromatic effects of this vegetable (see Sara David’s “Asparagus Pee Investigation” from First We Feast).

These connections between food and art, food and memory, and food and the body are certainly at the heart of Manitoban writer Sarah Klassen’s poem “Tea Cosy Cafe” from Dangerous Elements.*

Klassen’s asparagus poem is a Canadian reinvention of Proust’s magical description and Manet’s still-life paintings.

“Tea Cosy Cafe” opens with two adults ordering a health-conscious lunch: asparagus crepes, “without the béchamel,” and a side salad; a tuna sandwich, “no mayo,” and a peppermint tea.

The asparagus instantly summons memories of the speaker’s childhood. Suddenly there are images of her mother in a kitchen, working “quickly as if she’s running out of time.” It’s a spontaneous and transformative moment of recall where food becomes art, and the past becomes immediate and alive, related in the present tense.

eat your greens

snap off the woody bits

The mother stirs the cream and butter until it “bubbles in the pot.” Now, she “arranges buttered toast” and “piles it” with steamed asparagus tips taken from her garden. Next, she chops boiled eggs and “pours hot sauce / extravagantly over everything.”

roast in oven at 400 degrees for 15 minutes

Toast with bechamel and cheddar

The mother knows little of French culinary culture. She has never heard the words “béchamel,” “crepes,” or even “cholesterol.” Yet for her children-turned-adults, the meal remains a dark, sensuous magic served on mismatched plates. The remembered black coffee poured into “a chipped cup.”

serve on a mouse-shaped cutting board

As Canada’s spring of 2017 arrives and quickly passes, Klassen’s poem offers a verbal impression of asparagus memories from a decadent yet humble childhood, where “food is poetry and / dangerous” – and still shaping the now ascetic present.

Recipe Note from Alexia:

Try baking your asparagus at 400 degrees F for 15 minutes. Also, try putting the bechamel directly onto the bread and broiling it (with some added cheddar) for 5 minutes. Finally, Shelley suggested a lightly poached egg in place of the chopped egg. I think she’s absolutely right.

Or eat two of them

*If you’d like to read an earlier version of Klassen’s entire poem, see “Tea Cosy” in the open access journal Canadian Literature, volume 146, Autumn 1995, p. 85.

Gilroy, James P. “Food, Cooking, and Eating in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 98-109, Jstor.

Klassen, Sarah. “Tea Cosy Cafe.” Dangerous Elements, Quarry Press, 1998, p. 39.

 

Text by Shelley Boyd

Photographs (except where indicated) by Alexia Moyer