Vancouver wins big at Taste awards
Celebration recognizes 2018’s cookbooks, blogs and culinary narratives
The annual Taste Canada Awards honouring the best Canadian cookbooks and blogs published in 2018 were presented Monday evening at the Fairmont Royal York.
Ninety-one cookbooks and 50 food blogs were entered into the competition and 26 first and second-place awards were given in seven categories.
Separate awards were given to English and French publications.
This year’s gold winner in the best food- or beverage-related narrative written by a Canadian author category is Vancouver chef Vikram Vij for his memoir
Vij ($32, Penguin Canada). This culinary narrative details his story of introducing Canadians to the Indian cooking. Rod Phillips’ 9000 Years of
Wine ($20, Fitzhenry and Whiteside) took the silver. The book details the role wine has played in major events throughout human history.
In the general cookbook category Lynn Crawford, Iron Chef and owner of restaurant Ruby Watchco, took gold for her seasonally driven cookbook Farm to Chef ($40, Penguin Canada). She showcased her braised Cornish Hens and Pears recipe from the book in the Star’s test kitchen last year. Aimeé Wimbush-Bourque’s The Simple Bites Kitchen ($32, Penguin Canada), took the silver.
Vancouver authors swept the regional/cultural cookbooks category with Lindsay Anderson and Dana VanVeller’s Feast: Recipes and Stories from a Canadian Road Trip ($35, Appetite by Random House) taking gold and Rod Butters’ The Okanagan Table: The Art of Everyday Home Cooking ($38, Figure 1) nabbing silver.
Angela Liddon’s Oh She Glows blog won gold in the health food blog category. (Last year, her Oh She Glows Every Day book won the health and special diet cookbook category.)
In the single-subject cookbook category Renée Kohlman took the gold for All the Sweet Things: Baked Goods and Stories from the Kitchen of Sweetsugarbean ($40, TouchWood Editions) and Kristy Gardner’s Cooking with Cocktails ($40, Countryman Press) got silver.
In the health and special diet cookbooks category Greta Podleski’s Yum and Yummer: Ridiculously Tasty Recipes That’ll Blow Your Mind, But Not Your Diet! ($35, Author/One Spoon Media Inc.) and recipe blogger Laura Wright’s debut plantbased book, The First Mess Cookbook ($35, Penguin Canada) got gold and silver awards, respectively.
Winners in the French-language books category included Stéphane Gadbois for Histoires de bouffe ($25, Les Éditions AdA); Simon Philippe Turcot and Sophie Gagnon-Bergeron for Le Festin de Mathilde ($40, La Peuplade); Kim Thúy for Le Secret des Vietnamiennes ($30, Trécarré-Groupe Librex); and Sébastien Lesage for Le Canard Goulu ($40, Flammarion Quebec).
For the full list of winners go to TasteCanada.org