END TIMES À LA JOE BEEF
Montreal chefs have a deep love of traditional Quebec cooking
Preparing for the end of the world is no longer purely an outlier’s pastime.
And while Costco’s $6,000 doomsday food kits may have come first, Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse: Another Cookbook of Sorts (Appetite by Random House, 2018) by Frédéric Morin, David McMillan and Meredith Erickson, is infinitely more enticing, stylish and fun.
“Before you need $6,000 (worth) of food, maybe you need to learn how to cook.
“Maybe you need to be skilled at living in tight quarters with people without fighting. Maybe you need to be skilled at cleanliness, kindness, all of those things,” says Morin, co-owner of the Joe Beef family of restaurants.
Like the authors’ first cookbook devoted to the Montreal institution — The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts (2011) — Surviving the Apocalypse is focused on French cooking. But from recipes for spruce cough drops to homemade soap, and interludes extolling the virtues of odd cuts of meat, mixed martial arts and PBS, it encompasses its authors’ many other passions, as well.
“I’m interested in art, music, antiques, literature, gardening, farming, winemaking, plumbing, all kinds of different things,” says McMillan, who co-owns and is a chef at Joe Beef, Liverpool House, Vin Papillon, Mon Lapin and McKiernan. “We had to learn business the hard way. We went kicking and screaming into finance and real estate ... this book is about everything that we’re up to.”
The 150 recipes express both tongue-in-cheek survivalism and a deep love for the traditional cooking of Quebec.
And while the idea of stocking the shelves in your cellar with hardtack (a.k.a. prison bread) and pickled pig tongues may be partially in jest, there’s an underlying desire to live thoughtfully.
“I have zero regrets about my past,” McMillan says. “I don’t think Fred has any either. But it was a very difficult apprenticeship. “It was very long, and it was a lot of hard work and it was very destructive. I’m an addict, alcoholic. Fred’s an alcoholic. But high-functioning. We worked super hard, we made everything happen. “There are no bodies along the way, but I wasn’t happy with all the success that we’ve had. I didn’t know better; that was how I was shown the restaurant business. “We cleaned up a year ago, arguably.
“And by us becoming better people, by us becoming sober, the company’s gotten sober.
“By us learning language, spiritual language, gentle language, language of kindness, self-love and love of others, that’s trickled down … The company overall has sobered up ...”
Morin adds: “There’s no longer an enemy.”
Excerpted from Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse: Another Cookbook of Sorts by Frédéric Morin, David McMillan and Meredith Erickson. Published by Appetite by Random House.