Shelling out the treats
‘Cook with Confidence’ by Moncton-based chef and TV host Dennis Prescott offers many favourites from the sea
Dennis Prescott has been shucking oysters since he was a child. The Moncton-based chef, TV host and cookbook author grew up in Riverview, a town on the south shore of New Brunswick’s Petitcodiac River.
There are over 150 million oysters growing in his home province — a number that’s expected to increase.
Though he’s travelled the world for his TV and volunteer work, “I’ll forever be biased toward the briny and sweet oysters grown up and down the New Brunswick Acadian Shores,” Prescott writes in his second book, Cook with Confidence (Penguin Canada, 2024).
Despite his early start opening shellfish, Prescott didn’t plan to become a chef. As a kid, obsessed with Led Zeppelin and his bedroom walls plastered with Pearl Jam posters, he dreamt of becoming a full-time musician.
For nearly 20 years, he pursued his dream, ultimately moving to Nashville with his band: “A last kick at the can to see if we had what it takes to make it in the music industry.” It was there, with a lack of funds and a library card, that he learned how to cook.
The first dish Prescott made for his band and studio mates — gathered on camping chairs around three small tables pushed together — was chicken korma from a Jamie Oliver book. He was hooked.
Prescott spent the next several years in kitchens. First, honing his skills at home, and later, working at restaurants, catering, and running a coffee and doughnut market pop-up. He became an ambassador with World Vision Canada and the SDG2 Advocacy Hub’s Chefs’ Manifesto and published his first book, Eat Delicious (Harpercollins, 2017).
He has also appeared on the History Channel’s The Food That Built America and co-hosted the Netflix series Restaurants on the Edge.
“I started cooking because I loved feeding people, and then I loved the act of cooking, and then I loved sharing those stories. I never thought that I would have Netflix reach out and want me to host a show or host a show on History. They weren’t moonshot goals for me because I didn’t know that even existed.”
Whether cookbooks or TV shows (he has projects in progress that will be announced in the near future), Prescott’s work centres on a core belief.
“Food matters. And our time that we spend together centred around food really, really matters,” he says. “I’m a firm believer that with things like this cookbook and anything I do, I want to inspire community to spend more time at the table. I want to inspire fun and joy around food in the kitchen.”
From cooking in Hawaii’s Valley of the Kings to Hong Kong, Finland and Malta, Prescott’s experiences in kitchens worldwide influenced Cook with Confidence.
The book features a recipe for Kenyan-style coconut chicken curry with his friend Beatrice’s chapati, inspired by a day cooking with her family in the rural village of Dzikunze, and grilled peel-and-eat shrimp with Caribbean-style hot pepper sauce, a nod to another friend, Alvin Franklin, “the King of Hot Sauce,” who he cooked with in St. Croix.
Chapters include snacks and starters, salads and sides, pasta, mains (meaty and vegetable-forward) and seafood. True to the title, the book’s more than 100 recipes are accompanied by tips for more confident home cooking, with essays on how to open an oyster, season, select and prepare shrimp, choose sustainable salmon and grill lobster.
“I would love to empower home cooks through this book. That was the goal, and I feel like we accomplished that, where we were able to enlighten folks at home with, ‘It doesn’t need to be as complicated as we’re making it out to be,’” says Prescott.
“The guiding light for me has always been that I want to make food that’s accessible and attainable while also being beautiful and delicious. We all want to serve something that we’re proud of.
“We all want to have that ‘ah’ moment when we serve people at the table. Obviously, it needs to taste delicious, but I think that the reality is it also needs to be accessible and attainable. We don’t all have access to higher-end ingredients, higher-end grocery stores, specialty markets, and things like that, so it has to be inclusive regardless.”
As much as Prescott draws on his experiences cooking around the world in his recipes, Cook with Confidence is firmly rooted in the Maritimes (as you may have guessed from the essay topics). In this sense, the book belongs to a new wave of Canadian cookbooks published in recent years that focus on regionality, from Vancouver Island and the Prairies to Nunavut .
Whether you live in Saskatchewan or the Northwest Territories, we all have different types of food that we love, says Prescott. Often, it’s not that people don’t want to try those dishes; it’s that they don’t even know they exist.
Take chicken fricot, an Acadian dish of chicken and dumplings. Though Prescott isn’t Acadian, he lives close to the Acadian Peninsula and grew up eating it.
His family made the hearty stew whenever a nor’easter blew in, or they were under the weather and in need of some comfort. As much as the classic dish is a staple in his house, he knows people who live on the other side of the province who have never heard of it. “I really wanted to tell these stories — not just because it’s a story of home. Because it’s a story of me.”
Living in New Brunswick has influenced his “undying passion for seafood,” and Prescott is grateful to represent his home region in his work. He’s noticed a shift in mindset — especially since 2020.
People seem to be more thoughtful about where their ingredients come from and are reconsidering foods they may have taken for granted, himself included. Unable to travel as he had in 2018 and 2019, Prescott shifted his focus to home.
“I got hit between the eyes with this idea that we have access to all of these beautiful ingredients, delicious recipes, but also these stories — and these incredible stories of people that deserve to be told. I spent time on snow crab boats, on lobster boats, on oyster farms. I’ve done the whole A to Z in the last two to three years.
“It definitely changed not just how I cook and how I view food but who I am. You are seeing that across the board, and I love it. Because I feel like we all have that opportunity to be an ambassador for the food in our own backyard.”