Category Archives: The Tableaux Blog

These visual studies of food literature tell a story through pictures, and often have an accompanying recipe.

Rabbit Braised in Beer and Onions

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As for the food, I vowed never to mention it to my father, who managed once or twice a month to snare a few rabbits in the woods behind the house so we could have our meal of meals, rabbit stew, our only fresh-meat meal. My mother sometimes cobbled together “shipwreck” dinner or jig’s dinner, boiled cabbage and potatoes and salt beef, along with pease pudding made from peas boiled in a cloth bag. Mostly we ate salt cod and potatoes.

Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, 24

 

For Joey Smallwood (first Premier of Newfoundland, narrator of Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams), rabbit stew is the meal of meals – the occasional hint of fresh meat in a diet of sald cod, salt beef and more than a fare share of hunger.


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Croissants, Fruits Rouges, and Café au Lait in Québec

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Recipe Notes (by Alexia Moyer)

I bring you two “meals” this week – neither of which I cooked. There is much satisfaction to be had in artfully arranging croissants on a plate and then calling it a day.

The meals in question hail from Mylène Gilbert-Dumas’ Les Deux Saisons de Faubourg, set in the Faubourg St. Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood of Québec city. Adélaïde lives with her daughter, Marjolaine, on the second floor of a triplex. Accounting clerk turned chocolatière, Adelaïde is very careful with her money. Once a week she allows herself a treat: one café au lait on the way home from work. Here, in this café, she cuts out her coupons and writes out her weekly shopping list in accordance with said coupons.


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Cowcumber Boats

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Recipes Notes (by Alexia Moyer)

Next week you will read all about Charlottetown’s literary fare on our sister blog. To pique your appetite, behold . . . a recipe featuring a certain slate-breaking, mouse-saucing, kindred spirit-searching redhead.

Cucumber . . . concummer . . . cowcummer . . . cowcumber. All are variants of cucumber. Or so says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). What the OED does not discuss are cucumbers in relation to boats. Is this vegetable sufficiently seaworthy? I – who have read at least four of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Steven Maturin series and can therefore tell a luff from a lubber’s hole – would not venture to sail in one. The cucumber is, however, an excellent vessel for tuna salad. Or so says The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook from which this recipe is drawn.

Montgomery’s Anne books are chock-full of fare. At least two people have noticed this. The person who borrowed the Anne of Green Gables omnibus before me – from the Bibliotheque et Archives Nationales du Quebec – had discreetly (in pencil) underlined any and all mentions of food. I couldn’t help but feel a certain kinship with this unknown reader, vandal though s/he may be.

The second person is Kate McDonald, granddaughter of Montgomery and author of this literary cookbook. Within, you will find recipes for raspberry cordial (sans alcohol), plum pudding (sans mouse) and the cowcumber boats tested below.

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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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