Category Archives: The Tableaux Blog

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

Prairie Chicken in Cream; Carrots in Orange Sauce

Posted on by

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Continue reading →

Savoury, Spicy Goulash inspired by Winnipeg

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Kale Apple Soup

Posted on by

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Recipe Notes (by Alexia Moyer)

Those of you who know your kale will instantly spot the imposter. “Why, this is savoy cabbage,” you will exclaim, and quite rightly too.

I have yet to see kale in the six grocery stores plus market that make up my local foodscape. But there is plenty of savoy cabbage to be had this season.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It pairs well with bacon and a myriad of other pork products and the leaves make an excellent receptacle for stuffing: because they’re both sturdy and pretty.

Enfin, bref. It’s a workable substitute.
Continue reading →

Kanadian Eggs, Fried Sunny Side Up

Posted on by

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This is Gwendolyn MacEwen’s recipe for eggs. And she is adamant that these eggs be Kanadian “not Zeus or Easter Bunny” (31). Why Kanadian eggs? Margaret Atwood, who collected MacEwen’s recipe for The CanLit Foodbook: A Collection of Tasty Literary Fare, provides a helpful editorial note.

This is an “anti-mythological variety of egg, which, however, can cross the line and become a REAL or mythic egg if you can manage to achieve the right frame of mind”(31).

This is a lot to take in before breakfast. I say, eat the egg while it’s hot and then we’ll talk about it.
Continue reading →