Stewing over Canadian cooking

My mother is renowned for her creative cooking. This year, during the dog days of summer, she served up a spectacular two-layer blueberry-raspberry shortcake.

I wondered how a British-born-and-bred woman came to make shortcake of any kind, let alone such a splendid variation on the classic North American strawberry dessert.

I asked her if it was a dessert she had made in England before she migrated to Canada in the 1960s.

“I didn’t make it in England because I’d never heard of it,” she explained. “The first time I had it was at a party in Toronto.”

PROFESSIONAL LIFE

My mother moved to London by herself from a small village at the age of 14 during the Second World War. She worked as a nanny and then became a cook.


She looked after a boy in Chepstow Villas in Notting Hill for several years, but one of her most memorable employers was Bill Linnet, a theatre producer who lived in Westminster behind the Abbey. He always ensured that she and her friends got tickets to see the plays he produced in the West End. His chauffeur taught her to drive.

She joined the Women's Royal Naval Service to become a Wren because she wanted to learn to drive a truck. She was trained in Reading and then--the same day the Queen was married on November 20, 1947--she was sent to Greenwich where she was stationed as an officer's steward.


She met my Canadian-born father in London in the mid-1950s when he was working as a journalist on the old Nordesk for Reuters on Fleet Street.

He had lived in a house in Bayswater where she lived and went to collect his mail. He invited her out.

She first moved to Canada some years after she married him. Before she moved to Toronto they socialized with his Canadian friends and colleagues in London.

"Canadians in London went on about the awful food in Britain," she said, which led her to expect excellent cuisine in Canada. She was sorely disappointed.

INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN FOOD

The first Canadian food she ate was a sandwich she bought on the train from Montreal to Toronto after disembarking from the Italian-owned ship, the Homeric, which had a Greek crew.

“It was revolting,” she said. “I had a roast beef sandwich because everyone had gone on about it, and it stuck to the roof of my mouth.”

She described the party she attended upon her arrival in Toronto where she first ate strawberry shortcake as typically “suburban Canadian.”

“It was the worst night of my life,” she said. “I walked in and there were about 50—all blond—women.”

The dessert was a frozen pound cake with frozen crushed strawberries and fake whipping cream on it.

FAMILY

My mother grew up in a village in the south of England during the Great Depression.


My grandmother worked as a cook in big houses. One of them was called Hillview. It was owned by Cecil Wray, the former governor of the Malay States. The Wrays had made their fortune from rubber in Malay and Kenya.

She worked also for the Ash family who made their money from the cotton industry in Manchester.


My grandfather served in the Royal Navy on HMS Barham and fought in the 1916 Battle of Jutland in the First World War.


He became a gardener after he was forced to retire from service in 1936 after 24-and-a-half years because of a serious knee injury. He had signed up for 25 years of service at 17.


My mother's brother, my uncle, who was 10 years older than her, served on a tank crew in the British eighth army and fought in the North African and Italian campaigns of the Second World War. After the war he worked for the post office and played accordion in a band.


LIVING WITH RATIONS

Food was rationed during and after the war. Meat, butter and eggs were rationed. Everyone grew his or her own vegetables.

“Our Sunday joint was just a few ounces,” my mother said.

My grandparents kept chickens and rabbits. People in the village registered with them to get rationed eisenglass eggs, which were a type of pickled egg. When the chickens got too old to lay eggs they were used for eating.

My grandfather had a goose named Pickles that was given to him by Commander Wrightson, a man for whom he worked at Dower House.

Wrightson helped him get a decent pension from the Navy.

"People shared food," my mother said. "If there were a lot of eggs, people got lots of eggs."

One of their neighbours in the village had throat cancer and everyone gave him bananas when they got them because he couldn’t eat much. They didn’t get much fruit.

My grandmother made dandelion wine and cheese.

Although the war ended in 1945, it wasn’t until the Queen’s coronation in 1953 that rations came off candy.

ADJUSTING TO CANADA

My mother hated Toronto the first time she lived there, but my paternal grandmother, with whom she and my father lived, was very empathetic.


My mother said it was because my grandmother, who was originally from Shediac, New Brunswick and married a Baptist minister, understood what it was like to relocate with children. She lived in several places in the Maritimes and Ontario with my grandfather who served at five different churches in five different cities during his lifetime.


“She came from the Maritimes to Ottawa and it was a big shock to the system,” my mother said. “She left her family behind.”

As to why she started making strawberry shortcake, my mother said: “I don’t know why I made it, it was something all Canadians had. “ ~

OTHER CREATIONS

Blue budgie found in back garden

When I spotted three dead animals on my way to work yesterday it felt like an omen.

I rode my bike along the usual route, but I saw a dead mouse in the gutter on the corner. Next I passed a flattened pigeon. Then I found a mauled and bloodied sparrow.

It's not unusual to pass a dead squirrel on the road in the fall or a dead bird throughout the summer months, but never have I seen three dead animals in a row.

Tonight I was eating supper with my parents in the back garden when a blue budgie landed on the birdbath alongside some sparrows.


At first I thought it was fantastic that the budgie was free, but then realized there are many threats out of doors for a tame bird.

I telephoned the Toronto Humane Society and was told to call animal control. The Humane Society also suggested I post a "found" ad on their Website, which I did.

Animal control said to call back in the morning if the budgie were still there, which of course it was not.

My father found a cage I had turned into a prop for a Fringe Festival play and suspended it from a hook near the cedar tree where the bird was roosting. He left its door open so the budgie could fly inside for safety.

My mother remembered that when she was a girl she and her brother John had two budgies that lived by the grandfather clock in her cottage in the English village where she grew up. One day she came home and the budgies were gone.

She thinks her mother gave them away because they were so messy.

My parents reported no further sightings of the blue budgie the following day, but left the cage out just in case it returns ~

AIDS rally champions rights of women

About 600 people, many of them wearing canary-yellow T-shirts with the slogan “Time to Deliver” printed on the front, rallied outside Toronto’s Metro Hall on Monday to protest the plight of women infected with HIV/AIDS.

Organizers held the rally in conjunction with the 16th International AIDS Conference to demand action against the spread of the disease among women and girls. The focus of the conference is on unfulfilled promises made by governments that would help make AIDS treatments available worldwide.

The rally echoed the theme of the conference, but with a feminist twist.

More than 20 million people have died from the disease in the 25 years since the U.S. Centers for disease Control and Prevention reported the first cases in 1981.

“This pandemic is being driven by gender inequality, and the only thing more intractable than the virus itself is gender inequality,” said speaker Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.


There are 17.5 million women and 19 million men over the age of 15 infected with the disease worldwide, according to UNAIDS.

More than three quarters, or just over 13 million, of those infected worldwide are women living in sub-Saharan Africa. Women are disproportionately infected, making up almost 60 percent of all HIV-positive adults in the region.

“Many things have changed over the last four to five years in the response to the pandemic,” Lewis said. “But the one thing that has not changed is the heartbreaking and grotesque vulnerability of the women of Africa to the virus.

“It remains an unconscionable indictment of the way in which international society responds to the needs and rights of women.”

The worst hit region is sub-Saharan Africa where in 2005 there were 24.5 million, or 64 percent, of HIV-positive people living.

Almost 90 percent of the 2.3 million HIV-positive children worldwide live in sub-Saharan Africa. Of those children, fewer than one in 10 receive basic support services, according to UNAIDS. Almost 12 million, or about 10 percent, of children in the region have lost at least one parent to AIDS.

At least 4.7 million people, or 72 percent, of all people who need antiretroviral treatment live in sub-Saharan Africa and only 17 percent were receiving it in 2005, according to UNAIDS.

The situation in southern Africa, where one third of AIDS deaths worldwide occurred in 2005, is also grim. A third of people with HIV worldwide live in the region, as do 52 percent of all HIV-positive women and about 43 percent of HIV-positive children under the age of 15.

The rally, like the conference, attracted people involved in the fight against the disease from all over the world.

Trade unionists Maria de Conceica and Regina Fernando from Maputo, Mozambique were there with Jessie Wanyeki Forsyth, a CUSO union campaign advisor in Mozambique.


In Mozambique, national adult HIV prevalence is estimated at just over 16 percent and almost two million people were living with the disease in 2005, according to UNAIDS.

Conceica and Fernando run a campaign for HIV/AIDS and gender rights in Maputo.

"There must be equality between men and women," Conceica said. "Men must no longer feel that they are the only bosses of the family, women must be able to feel free to negotiate safe sex."

They want to ensure that agreements over medications to treat the virus made between governments and pharmaceutical companies are upheld.

“We came so that our own voices join with the voices of people from all around the world to ensure that we must end AIDS, and to ensure there is genuine solidarity between all different people to end the pandemic,” said Fernando ~



TWO SPEAKERS OF NOTE

U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, D-CA, spoke of the legislation she introduced in June to reduce the vulnerability of women and girls to the disease. The Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth Act, would require President George W. Bush to address 12 key issues that contribute to gender disparities in the rate of HIV infection.


AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 to 34 years in the U.S., according to UNAIDS statistics.

The act would address social and cultural factors contributing to women’s vulnerability, such as lack of access to prevention methods, the stigma attached to HIV, as well as discrimination against women and lack of education, according to a press handout on Lee's Website.

The bill would amend an act from 2003, which focuses on "abstinence-until-marriage" programs. Proposals include increasing access to female condoms, reducing violence against women, coordinating HIV prevention services with existing health care services, promoting gender equality and encouraging the creation and enforcement of equal rights for women.

Mary Robinson, president of Realizing Rights, spoke about the need to unite women fighting against AIDS with women involved in the feminist movement to create powerful leadership that could generate effective change.


Robinson served as UN high commissioner for human rights from 1997 to 2002 and as president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997.

"What I have learned is that women are giving leadership, they're fighting back, they're doing it in very difficult circumstances, in poverty, with many barriers, and their courage and their resilience is truly remarkable," Robinson said. "The problem is that they are not the decision makers on the legislation, on the policies, on the programs." ~

Popularity of Poutini cocktail surges

A Poutini cocktail craze seems to be taking off amid buzz over the projected launch of a chain of poutine and chicken restaurants in the United States this fall.

Poutine Queen, a reader of this blog, submitted the photo of the Poutini shown above.

"I took Bob the Bartender’s advice and here is my latest version of the classic Poutini," she said, referring to an online chat with the bartender about the challenges she faced while mixing the drink, which is made of beef-flavoured vodka, gravy schnapps and Irish-potato liqueur.

"I garnished mine with crispy fries instead of a cheese curd. You can see that I did NOT overblend," Poutine Queen said.

Their conversation is documented in comments below the blog entry titled "Recipe reveals secrets of the Poutini."

Poutine Queen did not stop with the Classic Poutini, but also created a more tropical variation of the cocktail.

"We were finding that the poutini was a bit heavy in this hot weather so we developed a summer version," she said.


"We replaced the beef-flavoured vodka with a more refreshing Stolichnaya potato-lemon vodka, the gravy schnapps with Crème Hollandaise and the potato liqueur with the D’Abruzzo Bocconcini liqueur.

"We’ve garnished the drink with small bocconcini, a variety of summer berries and floated the traditional cheese curds on top."

CURDS 'N' BIRDS

A friend in Washington, D.C. says the first Curds 'n' Birds restaurant is set to open at the intersection of Wisconsin and M Streets in the upscale neighbourhood of Georgetown.

"We’re trying to get Celine Dion and William Shatner to come for the grand opening," he said in an instant message this week. "We’re after people who can eat a bite of poutine."

Rumour has it that former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien may cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony.



POUTINE PITFALLS

In 2000, George W. Bush, at the time a U.S. presidential candidate, was duped into answering questions on camera about Prime Minister "Jean Poutine" by Rick Mercer, a Canadian comedian.

Mercer used the footage for the weekly "Talking to Americans" segment of his program "This Hour Has 22 Minutes." The segment mocked Americans by making them look ignorant about Canada.

Bush was asked by Mercer to comment on an endorsement by Canadian Prime Minister "Jean Poutine," as well as the "traditional visit to the U.S." of the "King of Canada," Lucien Bonhomme (a.k.a Lucien Bouchard, former premier of Quebec), according to Wikipedia.

Bush told Mercer that he looked forward to working with Chrétien and to the king's visit, the online encyclopedia says.

On his first official visit to Canada in 2004, Bush quipped: "There's a prominent citizen who endorsed me in the 2000 election, and I wanted a chance to finally thank him for that endorsement. I was hoping to meet Jean Poutine."


As he plans the opening festivities, my friend is also mulling over the feasibility of opening a small offshoot Birds 'n' Curds poutine stand where Avon Place and Cambridge Place meet near the intersection of 30th and R Streets in leafy Georgetown.

"You could get carry-out and take it over to eat at the Oak Hill Cemetery on a nice afternoon," he said ~