One of the few Inuit chefs in the South heads North
Trudy Metcalfe-Coe to work for a year at a community food centre in Iqaluit
When Trudy Metcalfe-Coe cooks on Tuesday at Das Lokal’s sold-out fundraiser for Carefor, the Ottawa-based non-profit home health care organization, it will be the last chance for Ottawa food lovers to taste her cooking for at least a year.
In mid-September, the longtime mainstay of Ottawa’s Inuit community will head to Iqaluit, where she will be a peer advocate at the Qajuqturvik Community Food Centre, working on a one-year contract.
A family support worker as well as one of just a few Inuit chefs in Southern Canada, Metcalfe-Coe admits: “It’s definitely a go-go-go life. Some days, I feel the brick wall coming closer and closer. But then I take a day to rest. There’s always a lot on the go, always a lot.”
Metcalfe-Coe was born 55 years ago in northern Newfoundland and Labrador, but has lived in Ottawa since she was a 22-year-old single mom raising the first of her two daughters.
She always has worn many hats here and is currently a family support worker at Inuuqatigiit Centre for Inuit Children, Youth and Families on McArthur Avenue. But whatever her activities, they have been connected to Ottawa’s Inuit community.
Metcalfe-Coe has taken a variety of programs at Algonquin College, from restaurant and hotel management to social studies to museum technology and cultural industries training. But she never went to culinary school despite achievements such as cooking caribou stew for 500 on Parliament Hill in the late 1990s.
“I always thought about it, but I never had time,” Metcalfe-Coe says about her lack of formal culinary training.
That said, she has been immersed in cooking since she was a child growing up in Nain, the northernmost permanent settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador, now within the Nunatsiavut region of Inuit Nunangat, homeland of Canada’s Inuit.
She recalls that the first dish she cooked was chili, while the second was liver with caramelized onions. As a teenager, she baked bread, made cakes on Sundays and did grocery shopping for seniors.
After her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to a small community in northern Newfoundland, she spent summers at the wharf, cutting tongues and britches (sacks of roe) from cod.
“I’ve always enjoyed being in the kitchen. It’s a place to go and get into my own head and be able to put out things that other people can enjoy. It never causes any stress, it relieves stress. If I’m not cooking, people know something ’s not right,” Metcalfe-Coe says.
She left home at 18 as a participant in the Katimavik volunteer work program for youth. It took her eventually to Mont-Tremblant, where she went on to work in restaurants and pick up kitchen skills. She moved to Ottawa, where her father and sister had relocated, after she had her first child.
It was in Ottawa that MetcalfeCoe reconnected with her Inuit roots on her father’s side. “I didn’t know what I was missing,” she says. “I realized there’s this whole other part of me and there was a community here to become a part of.”
In 1997, when Inuit Senator Willie Adams marked his 20th anniversary as a senator, Metcalfe-Coe was asked to make caribou stew for his celebrations at the Canadian Museum of Nature. “Somebody called me up, asked, ‘Can you do this ... cater a party for 500 people?’ It’s like, ‘No ... I don’t know how to cater.’ ‘We’ve had your caribou stew, and, if you can make caribou stew that good, you can make anything.’ They pestered me for a couple of days and finally I said, ‘Fine, I’ll try.’
“I just did my very best, and it was quite a success,” Metcalfe-Coe says.
She has since been a chef and caterer on the side because “I was the only one in Ottawa, and pretty much still am one of the only Inuit individuals who can cook for the masses.”
Last year, she took part in the Indigenous Summer Solstice celebrations, competing in an event that paired her with Harriet Clunie, executive chef at the Lowertown restaurant Das Lokal.
Metcalfe-Coe “has this joie de vivre ... (and) a very good sense of her palate and a good sense of herself,” Clunie says, recalling that, at last year’s event, Metcalfe-Coe was “really keen to learn things she didn’t know and do things that she didn’t know to be able to experience them.”
That’s Clunie’s explanation for inviting Metcalfe-Coe to cook at Tuesday’s event, which will focus on female chefs, female farmers and a female winemaker to “help break down some of the gender stereotypes,” Clunie says.
For Tuesday’s multi-course meal, Metcalfe-Coe will stretch outside of her Inuit-food comfort zone for the first time and make borscht, using ingredients from participating farmers. “I want everything to be from scratch,” she says, from the dish’s beef stock to its sour cream.
Not long after the event, Metcalfe-Coe will put herself in isolation for two weeks before she travels to Iqaluit.
Her upcoming trip will be her longest stint of quite a few vacations and work trips in Canada’s North, where she has fished for Arctic char, hunted seal and even narwhal and helped butcher a bowhead whale.
“This is the food that I cook,” she says, adding it helps her to know what hunters and fishermen must do to provide her with what she needs. The one-year contract will take Metcalfe-Coe away from not just catering in Ottawa, which has dried up anyway because of COVID-19, but also from her husband and other relatives.
She hopes she will be able to return to Ottawa every four months to visit them, but she and her family know the opportunity to live again in Nunavut for an extended period is too good for her to pass up.
“Every time I think of it, my chest swells inside,” Metcalfe-Coe says.