TRUE PLATE RIOT LOVE
Dig in to Canada’s culinary revolution,
Chris Johns and derek dammann answer the question before I even get the whole thing out.
Johns offers a clipped “no way” as dammann leans back and repeats the word “no” five or six times. “It would be impossible to do,” Johns doubles down. “It just can’t be done.” The pair, in Toronto last week promoting their new cookbook, True North, have obviously been asked the question before, and it’s no wonder: with its collection of regionally inspired recipes, celebration of homegrown ingredients, evocative photography and emphasis on wild foods and seasonality, True North is a Canadian cookbook like no other before it.
So anyone who picks it up may end up wondering what I ended up asking: Are the pair trying to, for once and for all, define Canadian cuisine?
“I think that would involve going back into the historical aspect of it, which we didn’t want to do,” dammann says. “Another thing too about diving into the definition of it, there’s no way of doing it without coming off preachy, which we definitely didn’t want to do. We wanted to do a celebration of Canadian ingredients through our eyes.”
“A snapshot of the scene today,” Johns elaborates.
but still, there’s something about True North that seems groundbreaking. While Johns and dammann themselves deny that they set out to define Canadian cuisine with True North, the book’s thorough, provinceby-province celebration of ingredients and dishes particular to our country is an immediate key player — if not leader — in what Johns writes in True North’s introduction is Canada’s current “culinary revolution.”
“There is a stereotype,” dammann says of historical misconceptions regarding Canadian food. “back bacon, poutine, donuts, maple syrup. And they all play a role, but we’re obviously leaps and bounds beyond that.”
“People are taking an interest in what’s in their own backyard,” Johns says of Canada’s burgeoning gastronomical prowess, “in seasonal cooking. All those things we hear so much about, it’s becoming a big deal. In Canada, we have access to such beautiful ingredients all across the country, and as people get a taste for them, there’s no going back.”
dammann says he and Johns would have likely first crossed paths just shy of a decade ago, when they both lived in victoria, “but we weren’t kindred spirits. yet.” Not long after, dammann took up shop at dNA, the successful montreal restaurant that shuttered in early 2012. Johns reviewed dNA (he loved it), then visited again for dinner. “We met briefly — it was like, ‘Oh, thank you for the nice things you wrote,’ ” dammann recalls. When he was approached to write a cookbook and needed a co-author. “There was only one name that came up. (The publishers) sent me the link to the dNA piece and were like, ‘What about this guy?’ ”
The pair didn’t start travelling together for True North until 2013, hitting Newfoundland first: dammann was invited to cook at the roots, rants and roars Festival in elliston, NL. “Chris was like, ‘Well, let’s just make it the first leg of the trip,’ ” dammann says. “This is our jumping off point, let’s go.”
The book unfolds as a chronology of dammann and Johns’ travels across the country, beginning in elliston and moving throughout the rest of the Atlantic Provinces before crossing through Quebec and Ontario, venturing to the not-so-barren tundra (Johns points out in the book that, once you hit a certain northern latitude in Canada, everything that grows is edible), hitting the prairies and rocky mountains and finishing along Canada’s Pacific coast. The two men say they had a vision of what they wanted the book to comprise — “We had this idea about Canada,” damman says. “We’re both really patriotic and enthusiastic about the food scene in Canada, not just through restaurants but also through the farmers and ingredients and what’s available here” — but were consistently confronted with new people, places and plates as they travelled the country, which influenced the book’s final collection of recipes and anecdotes.
“everywhere we went, things happened that we couldn’t plan for,” Johns says. “And we just kind of went with it. It was constantly changing because of those encounters and experiences.”
Johns catalogues and retells the stories of his and dammann’s travels in an introduction to each section in the book, evoking the people and places that inspired and influenced the recipes to follow. Spot prawns pulled straight from the Pacific Ocean on a fishing trip with the founders of Organic Ocean, Canada’s leading supplier
‘We’re Leaps And bounds beyond Back Bacon, poutine, donuts’
in sustainably harvested seafood, inspire a recipe for devilled prawns 10 pages later; fresh cod (the freshest dammann had ever worked with, he says) in Newfoundland becomes Cod à la Nage, True North’s third recipe. each section in the book — Atlantic, Forest, Field, Farm, Orchard & vineyard and Pacific — tours a region in Canada by cooking its ingredients.
“Cooking regionally, like they do in Italy, France and Spain — and drinking regionally — we have all the resources to do what they do,” dammann says, “Look at Quebec for example, which is, out of all of the provinces, probably the most regional: being able to go to Lac St-Jean and having tourtière and fish pie, and then going to Gaspesie and it’s all fish, where if you go up north, it’s more game. Across Canada, the provinces are all different; whoever settled each area sort of dictates what the food style is.”
Placing Canada’s culinary abilities in the same league as those culinary heavy-hitters — Italy, France and Spain — may seem bold, but it’s this type of confidence that the country has long lacked in, well, all areas, but particularly cuisine. It’s partly to do with that stereotype of Canadians as a nation of poutine-eating, donut-dunking, back bacon-frying culinary luddites, but also with the fact that our newness as a country simply prohibits us from having a canon of historic, sophisticated
‘people Are Taking an interest in Whats in their OWN Backyard
dishes exclusive to us.
“Those kind of cookbooks that talk about, you know, ‘This is a Canadian dish. It’s a Nanaimo bar; it comes from Nanaimo, b.C.’ Those have been done,” Johns says. “The people who are looking for that kind of book, they can find them. I don’t think that a book that is more about the places and the people that make our food and grow it — I don’t think that book has been done.”
“I don’t think anybody eats that way,” Johns continues. “I mean, I’m sure people eat Nanaimo bars —”
“Who eats Nanaimo bars?” dammann interjects. “When was the last time you had one? I hadn’t had one since I was a kid, and then I had one a couple years ago; one bite and my whole head hurt. you have to make a whole tray, and then you have to give them to people, and they’re pissed off because they don’t like them, either.”
dammann explains that he thinks that Canada is “more than being defined by an identity, is defined by its traditions.” So if he and Johns aren’t explicitly suggesting a definition for “Canadian cuisine,” they are rather pointedly demanding that Canadians (and gastronomes paying attention to the culinary revolution afoot here), essentially redraw the boundaries of a conventional definition of a national cuisine, specifically for Canada.
because here, our collective culinary identity is nothing to do with a handful of specific recipes — and never will be. but we’ve always been a country of hunters, farmers and foragers, drawing as much from the influence of the land as we have drawn from the practises and traditions of those who live here: Canadian cuisine is anchored by the very things that make it impossible to pin down.
And if Canadian food has much less to do with the individual things we cook than with the bounty of ingredients we produce, True North makes that clear. So when Johns says that defining “Canadian cuisine” is impossible, he’s halfright: our culinary identity just happens to be about the parts, rather than the sum.
True North culminates with a trip to dammann’s home, in Campbell river, b.C. The recipes in this section are unlike the ones that precede it: there’s dammann’s take on the Old el Paso taco kit, his Nona’s sausage and peppers, and fish and chips (made with line-caught halibut from vancouver Island, of course). Johns and dammann snack on Stoned Wheat Thins (“that greatest of Canadian crackers”) with No Name cream cheese while sampling dammann’s father’s smoked oysters.
“I think neither of us are particularly interested in what is the next food trend, or food that’s been manipulated very heavily,” Johns says. “I think there’s a kind of appreciation for a sort of natural style of cooking that really celebrates the ingredients and is rooted in some tradition of technique rather than whiz-bang showmanship.”
“you can be having the worst food of your life but sitting with the best people, but it would still be an enjoyable experience,” dammann says. “For me, having a good experience at the dinner table is the most important thing.” He chuckles. “So the Old el Paso taco kit ... I think that’s a true Canadian dish.”