Over the past 2 months, I have had the pleasure of taking a food writing course at the Good Egg cookbook store in Kensington Market. I never went to University and had never taken a writing class before. I was scared and vulnerable, but I feel like it has been a great experience where I have learned so much. Having real writers read your work can be daunting, but it gives me great pleasure when I hear that something that came from me has been received well.
This is part of a piece I wrote in a personal essay about food. It came from the question I have had running in my mind of late...why did I become a chef?
I have some more work to do and maybe I'll scrap it and start again, but writing about my grandparent's house made me really happy and brought back a lot of loving memories.
I hope you enjoy the insight to my mind and how I learned to love food. Enjoy!
Dinner on Hardwick Court
I am fortunate enough that I grew up in a food family. There is not a large number of us, but what we lack in size, we make up for in personality. No one worked in the food business, but instead food was more of a passion and our love language. I have many great memories in my grandparent’s garden and gathered around tables to have conversation while enjoying something to eat. Food brought us together for many years while my grandparents were alive.
When I was young the central meeting place was always my grandparent’s kitchen. Mario and Vio’s modest three bedroom house had cupboards the colour of green mushy peas and a refrigerator which matched. A rigid bench sat in the corner of the room attached to a wooden table. Two small stools sat next to the table that were far too uncomfortable to sit on but had to be used because any traditional chair would have taken up too much space. The kitchen walls were painted a bright Dijon yellow and throughout the years the colour faded with age.
On their walls hung plates from every country they travelled to over the course of their marriage. Mementos from their travels were hung as a conversation piece to mull over while sitting down for family meals. The plates were all ornate and intricate, with different colours of the native land they come from. It always smelled like garlic in their kitchen. No matter what time of the day, but especially at dinner, always garlic.
Every holiday centered around food, eating and commotion in the kitchen. Whoever was hosting would make the call on the menu and no one was asked to bring anything, because whoever hosted loved the pain of doing it all themselves and the ownership of running the project. My parents were only ever required to bring wine and the children.
There were times when my uncle or my mother were given the opportunity to run Christmas or Easter dinner, but usually it was my grandparent’s meal cook. As they aged, their children were allowed to take over the duties of preparing holiday meals and getting the family together.
My grandparent’s dining room table was like an open forum. The table was a large, round, oak oval with wide seated rattan chairs to match. It was somewhere you could talk politics, feelings, share secrets and dreams. It was also a zone of judgement, as every family table is. If you were the only one talking you had the stage for about 30 seconds, until someone barged in to interrupt you or counterpoint the last statement you had made.
As a young person, I was always confused by the energy in the kitchen area of the house. My uncle, my mom and my grandfather were all in each other’s face while trying to cook a big meal at the same time. Why did they all seem to centralize in the hot, dirty kitchen? It could have been because my family members wanted to converse with one another and question their next moves in understanding how to make the dish. Now I understand this is how they were learning from one another.
My favourite holiday meal was Christmas Eve. We would have a feast of many types of seafood, prepared in different courses. After the classic spread of cured meats, ripe cheeses and marinated olives, the first course would be served. Baccala Alla Vicentina is salt cod simmered in a rich sauce of olive oil, milk, garlic, anchovies and cheese. The salted cod is soaked for 4 days in water to rehydrate and then simmered in a rich sauce over the course of many hours on low heat. The simmered fish was then placed on a piece of crusty bread, garnished with freshly grated parmesan cheese and cracked black pepper to top.
My eyes would become large when I gazed upon a giant ceramic pasta bowl that was presented for the second course. It was filled to the brim with long pasta, small pieces of fish, mussels and clams dotting the top. The sauce was a simple tomato sauce, seasoned with a little parsley and white wine. Once we began swirling the pasta around our forks, we would discover the little morsels of meaty white fish and miniature shrimp.
The last course was always a salad of spicy greens, radicchio and a simple dressing of Olive Oil and Balsamic vinegar. My grandfather used to tell me that the bitter lettuce was good for my stomach and would aid in our digestion. “This gives our full stomach a little break,” he would say, leaning over to serve me my little bitter salad.
My grandparent’s kitchen was where I started learning about food. My grandparents never made “kids food” and motivated us to eat the same food the adults were having. In that house, I tried foods like escargot cooked in garlic butter, roasted lamb leg with fresh rosemary, stuffed whole artichokes and linguini with tiny chicken livers and toasted bread crumbs. I took chances and was encouraged to try new things. My education in food began way before I decided to go to culinary school.
When my grandparents passed away, I chose to take their collection of colourful plates and hang them in my kitchen. I wanted the plates on my walls to feel their energy when I am cooking for others. When I look at these plates, I think about their green kitchen with fondness and love.
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