When life gives you zucchini, make ketchup
The commercial kitchen tucked away in Ulverton, Martine Bergeron will tell you, is much the same, even if some of the utensils have changed.
“Its vocation, however, is a little different,” says Martine. “I hardly use chocolate at all.”
At one time, Martine would use a ton of chocolate per year in her Ulverton kitchen to make her chocolate and maple confections. Townshippers who have a sweet tooth and fondness for dark chocolate and maple sugar almost certainly are familiar L’arbre à sucre.
“I started L’arbre à sucre and I was very happy with it,” Martine Bergeron explains. “It was doing well as a business, but I’d been doing it for 15 years and I felt that I had done as much as I could do with chocolate. The passion that I had once had was no longer there. I knew it was time to try something else.”
L’arbre à sucre chocolates are still available through a few dozen outlets in the Townships and in Montreal. The recipes are still Martine’s and the chocolates are still made by hand, but the brand name and the company now belong to a young entrepreneur, a woman, in an almost equally small town, St. Valérien de Milton.
While the Ulverton-based entrepreneur knew what she didn’t want to do, she didn’t at all know what she wanted to do.
“Things just happened,” she says, “and I was lucky because it all started in the summer. The chocolate business is quite seasonal. Lots of it sold at Christmas and St. Valentines, but very little in the summer. Heat and humidity complicate making chocolates but also shipping them. I found it made sense to simply stop production during the summer months. In the summer I always gave myself over to my garden.”
One morning in the summer of 2016, she woke up with a phrase in her mind.
“Martine à la campagne. Just that. I had this name in my head but no idea what I was going to do with it.”
The name fit very well. Martine Bergeron grew up on a farm in St. Cyrille de Wendover and remains a “country girl” at heart.
Shortly after the revelation of the name, a friend called with news that a local man had planted far too much zucchini. Martine got in touch with him, negotiated a mutually satisfactory sale price, and dug out a recipe for zucchini based ketchup.
“In the end, I made about 150 jars,” she says.
In no time, things fell into place. She made a few quick sketches and brought them to a graphic designer who produced her logo and her labels. She contacted the three dozen specialty shops that carried L’arbre à sucre to see if they would be interested in carrying her new Martine à la campagne products as well.
Chocolate and ketchup might be at opposite ends of the taste spectrum, but with both Martine was offering a locallymade quality product, the kind of foodstuff that specialty shops are happy to carry. As well, within a very short period of time, she was making much more than zucchini ketchup.
Less than two years after starting up her second business venture, Martine has more than three dozen different products on sale in over 40 stores in Sherbrooke, Drummondville, Threerivers, and Montreal. Her product line includes a dozen jams and spreads, and of these three include some chocolate: strawberry and chocolate jam, raspberry and chocolate jam, and apple, cranberry and chocolate spread.
“I get almost all of my raw products locally,” she says, “and often that means I go out and pick things myself. One of my jams, for example, is made with apples that come from trees that have grown wild. The sugar I use in my jams is not local but I only buy organic cane sugar.”
“I follow the natural progression of the seasons so that when strawberries are in season, I make strawberry jam. When strawberry season ends, I move on to blueberries and so on.”
“I start quite early,” she continues. “In May, when herbs are at their best, I go into my garden and pick thyme, oregano, lovage, and several other herbs that I have growing, and I hang them up to dry. I don’t sell any of these, but I will use them during the course of the year for my recipes.”
“It’s often impossible to keep up with a harvest so I cook what I can and put the rest into a freezer. This permits me to continue making my various products just about year round, according to demand.”
She acknowledges that working with local produce adds to her costs and reduces her profit margin. “I want to buy from local market gardeners for a couple of reasons. One is that a freshly picked fruit or vegetable is always tastier, more flavourful, and more nutritious than something that has been shipped 4000 km across the continent. As well, I believe it’s important locally, provincially, and nationally that we maintain alimentary independence. I believe it’s important for us both individually and as a community that we produce as much of our own food as possible.”
“I find it ironic,” she continues, “that food is just about the only thing that we buy based on how cheap it is. We’re feeding ourselves and our children, and yet so many people base their grocery shopping on price, without taking into consideration where that product came from or how it was produced.”
It’s quite understandable that Martine Bergeron should be passionate about food. “My mother and my paternal grandmother were both very good cooks. I was introduced to cooking very early on and by the time I was in my early teens, I was often cooking meals for our family of five.”
“All of the recipes that I’m now using commercially are recipes that I’ve had for years,” she continues. “In fact, one of my products is called Concombres de ma grand-mère, and it is a recipe of my grandmother’s.”
“My kitchen,” says Martine, “is commercial but not industrial. My products are artisanal, made by me in quantities that are greater than you’d make for a family meal but in batches that don’t exceed the 25-litre pots that I use. There are no preservatives or artificial flavours in any of my products. I like to think that everything I make is a reflection of my values.”
Like all modern businesses, Martine à la campagne has a website. Perhaps more unusual, in addition to listing her products and the outlets where they can be bought, Martine also shares a great number of her recipes.
She also shares her definition of good food. “Good food respects the environment, both in terms of production and shipping. Good food is noticeably fresh and flavourful. Finally, food is good if it permits the producer the dignity of earning a decent living.”