When is a Cuisine a Canadian Cuisine?

[MGLloyd]

I note the press release was dated June 7th, Merlin. Does that mean they've been starving you with dignity all summer?

Jamie

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They are still trying to get food service on some of the cross-Sound routes, but I think that no route actually has it yet. The major sticking points were if the galley personnel had to be members of the Inland Boatmen's union, and thus paid union wages, and the question of whom would provide and pay for workers' compensation insurance.

In a nutshell, the potential operators felt they could not make a profit or even cover their costs without some compromise on these issues. I think the Vashon ferry route came closest to establishing food service; Sound Food on the island was trying to put something together but was not able to do so during the summer high season.

[Chef Fowke]

.... and what could be more Canadian than Saskatoon berries?

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Very interesting thread, but I do not see an end that is satisfactory!

Looking for a Canadian cuisine and especially a western cuisine is fruitless without an understanding of why we live where we do. History is blind to the modern populous and its understanding of what is current, what has happened and its nature to replicate itself.

Western Canada was opened for two reasons;

1. To develop a land bridge to the Orient

2. To develop a Wheat Program.

Developing Western Canada (1850)

Opening the West

Western Canada was not built and settled by 'average Canadians', it was developed off of the lives and struggles of an immigrant class.

Quebec’s blood is pure, Acadian and the Maritimes are pure to their culture. They were settled and have lived in relative isolation (no emails; that was not a slander!). They have had time, and a bloodline, to develop a regional cuisine. Western Canada is too young, raw, to have had time to find its 'personality'.

With so much cultural flux in this country we cannot expect to have a Canadian Cuisine until the culture has had time to mature (...lets see; Italy has had 10 000 years to develop?)

Best we live with being a young country with a developing culture that is a safe haven for all the world’s cultures, religions and beliefs! Enjoy the diversity of food in Canada rather then trying to find an identity in it!

[Jensen]

Today's Toronto Star has an interesting article on Canadian cuisine at Rideau Hall.

[Daddy-A]

Today's Toronto Star has an interesting article on Canadian cuisine at Rideau Hall.

Great article Jen!

Finally, Canadian cuisine makes the most of this nation's unique cultural diversity. Perogies can be stuffed with smoked sturgeon. Stroganoff can be made with bison and wild Canadian mushrooms. Pot stickers can be filled with Haida Gwai crab

Crab pot stickers???? Sign me up!!

There's been a quiet culinary revolution at Rideau Hall, led by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband, John Ralston Saul.

Is it too political to say that I'm glad Queen Adrienne was able to do something worthwhile with her budget?

A.

[stovetop]

Western Canada was not built and settled by 'average Canadians', it was developed off of the lives and struggles of an immigrant class.

Quebec’s blood is pure, Acadian and the Maritimes are pure to their culture. They were settled and have lived in relative isolation (no emails; that was not a slander!). They have had time, and a bloodline, to develop a regional cuisine. Western Canada is too young, raw, to have had time to find its 'personality'.

With so much cultural flux in this country we cannot expect to have a Canadian Cuisine until the culture has had time to mature (...lets see; Italy has had 10 000 years to develop?)

Best we live with being a young country with a developing culture that is a safe haven for all the world’s cultures, religions and beliefs! Enjoy the diversity of food in Canada rather then trying to find an identity in it!

British Columbia to me has a few missing years of it’s history; the region that is our namesake for this Province; the great Columbia basin was once more then a concept, it was part of France’s great domain, the Mississippi Delta also was in the land reserve that New France great Adventures trapped and explored and mapped all the lands within her great borders. There is about a hundred years that this great Province of BC sharpened its personality with characters, Hardy, brave, courageous, friendly and incredable adaptable. This ability to blend with ones environment is what made the early settlers and Natives people that lived on the land at the time.

Early New Caledonia; before Douglas; Métis, Voyageurs and Cour de Bois roamed the water ways, trading with the peoples of the land. This great land had many long and great rivers, the rivers where the highways; moving furs and people all over France’s huge domain. The Travelers were the beginning of cuisine on the road; the French, Scottish and Métis where all over the Pacific Northwest living working and trading. It was home for almost a hundred years.

From the sea and now land the face of the Pacific Northwest was forever changed, the battle for control of the resources; the food, the land and the waterways. Canada once spanned the whole Mississippi delta down to New Orleans. When the French lost control of this huge resourced based waterway, they lost a huge part of history in the process, more then we realize, but somehow the character of all the early peoples somehow seeped into the nation’s psyche.

After the war of Eighteen twelve, Hudson’s bay lost grip on the Columbia basin which was part of its business empire. The new border changed the land forever, many of early BC characters where left behind in our history and become part of early Pacific Northwest American culture and history.

In Canada if we look south to our neighbors and read snippets of their past we begin to see that it is so much part of our past, that is why I call them the missing years. There is so much French culture that is beyond Quebec’s boundaries, Minnesota, North Dakota, all along the Mississippi River, back up to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and back down to the Columbia basin, this was a huge trading area and all part of a once huge trading region.

I see this as part of my Canadian History and being part Acadian, Newfie, English, and French Canadian this brings me some amazing food cultures and I have been lucky to experience this cooking first hand.

Edited January 20, 2005 by stovetop (log)

[Jensen]

Finally, Canadian cuisine makes the most of this nation's unique cultural diversity. Perogies can be stuffed with smoked sturgeon. Stroganoff can be made with bison and wild Canadian mushrooms. Pot stickers can be filled with Haida Gwai crab

Crab pot stickers???? Sign me up!!

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Yeah, that was my thought too...

Maybe "Canadian cuisine" is made up of other cultures' dishes made with distinctly Canadian ingredients. I like that idea...the culinary mosaic!