I am often asked when I became so interested in food. This usually happens when people see that my interest and affinity is seemingly more spiritual and all consuming than anything else in my life. Many times have I searched back to try to identify the moment where my passion was solidified – was it an epiphany? Or an evolutionary succession of experiences? I am not yet certain, though I hope to uncover the answer as I build up my testimony in this blog.
There certainly were some early experiences that were formative – even if they were not exactly inspiring from a culinary point of view. One of the earliest involved my late father.
My father was a farm boy. He grew up in the 1930s and 40s in a fairly poor family of too many children. He eventually moved to the city that was growing up the road from the family farm. I grew up in that small city West of Toronto. It was surrounded by farming and was rather famous for its Veterinary and Agriculture Colleges. So needless to say the community was compromised of a good proportion of grown up farm kids who moved to the city when the farms started to decline. It seemed to be an average working class town and the main entertainment for the working class appeared to me to be drinking in the numerous local watering holes – though I recall hearing that there were lots of community dances through the 50s.
When I was around 5 or 6 years old, my father would come home from the local after a few drinks on a Friday night and he would sometimes bring me home some of the bar snacks to try. We are not talking about peanuts or spiced rice snacks. This was the late 1960s or early 70s – so the snacks were fairly unsophisticated and appealed to the local tastes. Pickled eggs and pickled sausages. They apparently would sit on the bar in gallon jars and the patrons could buy them as they wished. Well, I loved them. The eggs were pretty easy to like; I mean who doesn’t like an egg? And the pickle juice was fairly mild and I found it refreshing. Now the sausage must have been a kielbasa and was a bit more challenging. I learned that the fat in sausages is quite solid when chilled and when chewed it leaves a tremendous coating of lard across the roof of your mouth. The sausage was tasty, but I recall trying to work off the fat coating from my mouth with some difficulty. Why on earth would anyone eat that? And it has occurred to me over the years while quaffing my own ales at a pub that I could not really pinpoint a moment over the course of the evening when I would have an insatiable need for something fatty, pickley and spicy! A shag, yes! Pickled sausage? The need has never struck me. But I clearly recall seeing how gleefully interested my father was in his son trying these barfoods. He seemed to get a kick out it.
Well, when my father found that pickled pork hocks were sold at the local convenience store we moved on from bar snacks. These were cross section slices of hock (the shank), picked and packed in jars. They were a marked improvement from the sausage. But most importantly they solidified a course of exploration of the “tips and lips” of many animals with my father. Next it was pan fried chicken hearts from the local A&P store. Then chicken livers. Then canned octopus from the Knob Hill Farms store in nearby Galt (it was truly awful). Our exploration reached its perverse Zenith when he convinced me to try canned whole chicken – packed in gelatine in a can the size of an apple juice tin. This was nothing short of revolting. The gelatine made the poor chicken look completely humiliated. It was like that scene from Ghostbusters when Bill Murray got “slimed.” The chicken itself fell apart on impact as it plopped onto a plate. I remember realizing that there is in fact a thin line between dog food and human food as I caught a whiff reminiscent of road kill.
I believe it was around this point that I realized that I would need to take things into my own hands if I was to be saved from the trials and tribulations of 1955 food technology under the leadership of dear ol’ Dad. He meant well, but he didn’t have the most discerning taste. But to him I owe my fondness for Corned Beef Hash, liver of all sorts, Ossobucco, pate, foie gras, oysters, oysters with ice cold beer, oysters with fresh horseradish (oh baby). Basically he taught me that food doesn’t need to be pretty to be tasty. It doesn’t need to be ultra rare and tender. Like people, its more tasty when it works for a living and is prepared with love.
