Turkey, Lobster and Pie - Oh My!

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Well, here we are in 2010, if you’re reading this, then you’ve survived another year. Even more impressive, you’ve survived the annual Christmas/New Year’s eating marathon. You would think that the act of preparing and consuming food would by now have become extremely boring and mundane to us. After all, it’s a routine chore that most of us perform several times a day each and every day of our lives. Yet we can still get excited over food, and we use special meals as a way to mark those important milestones in our lives; the birthday or anniversary cake, the wedding reception meal, the big turkey feast at Thanksgiving all serve to make a special occasion more memorable. If we want to show someone we really appreciate them or that we just enjoy their company, we do it by inviting them into our kitchen and making them something to eat.

All food-related celebrations seem to be group events where we get to share meals with friends and family, or at the very least, that one very special someone; I can’t think of any holiday that celebrates by people sitting and eating alone. I suppose this all relates back to the dawn of time when we were all hunter-gatherers and the term “bringing home the bacon” was taken much more literally. If you didn’t manage to catch that big fish or spear that mastodon or beat your neighbour to that last bunch of berries before the snow fell, the consequences could be severe. Sharing food with one another at special times must have meant even more to people in those days than it does now.

Today, our most intensive celebrating is done over the Christmas Holidays. Christmas Eve usually involves the consumption of the traditional Egg Nog and other festive drinks as well as a wide variety of special snacks and treats. Christmas Day itself is the highlight of the Holidays, featuring the big meal with all the trimmings; turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy and a variety of vegetables. Family favourites like Aunt Rita’s potatoes or Grandma’s special Jell-o salad are brought out for this special meal, and then the whole thing is finished off with a nice big slice of mincemeat pie. Then, just a week later, we do it all over again to celebrate the arrival of the New Year. Many people go with the whole traditional menu again, pretty well duplicating what they had just got through digesting from the previous week, but some people like to mix it up a bit. For people on the Islands, substitutions or additions to the usual turkey main course might include lobster, a nice beef or pork roast, fish is a possibility of course, and maybe some wild duck or venison that was still in the freezer from hunting season. Last year the trendy alternative to the standard Butterball in some areas was “turducken”, a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey. I don’t know if this fad made it to the Islands or not; I personally don’t find it all that appealing, it just seems like it might be too much of a good thing.

Of course, on the Islands we have always had a bit of a different relationship with certain foods. As school kids in Westport, we were always able to go home for lunch (except for the lighthouse kids), but when we started going to Freeport, we had to bring packed lunches. Once lobster season rolled around, a lot of kids had lobster sandwiches in their lunchboxes. To someone from off the Island who might pay big bucks for this exotic food, school kids bringing lobster sandwiches for lunch might seem like some kind of unbelievable luxury; but generally after the first week or so, any kid with a peanut butter sandwich could usually trade it for two or three lobster sandwiches if he wanted to, it is possible to get sick of too much of anything, even lobster.

When I was still a little kid and people used to toss their garbage on the beach, you would occasionally find lobster shells wrapped up in newspaper or hidden in boxes among the trash, I asked my father why people tried to hide the fact they were eating lobster and he told me that it was a hang-over from the bad days of The Depression, when, if people didn’t have enough money to buy store- bought food like hamburger or bologna, they would have to eat whatever was available for free. They didn’t want their neighbours to know that they were so poor they had to eat lobster day after day, so they hid the evidence. This may well have been the reason that some people hid the lobster remnants, but I did notice that a lot of the shells looked kind of small and I suspect that it was just as likely that they didn’t want anyone to know they were eating jinks.

A really unique island food item is the egg tart. When you try to describe it to someone from away, they generally think you are talking about something like a quiche. After explaining that, no, this is a dessert tart made mainly of eggs, sugar and vinegar, you usually get some weird looks and comments to the effect that this particular combination of ingredients doesn’t sound like it would be very good. But if you happen to have an egg tart in your possession and can get them to try it, you will most likely make another convert to the delicious local delicacy that is the Island egg tart.

I have never seen the Island-style egg tarts in any other place. While walking through Chinatown in Toronto last summer, I saw egg tarts displayed in a bakery window, they looked sort of like the egg tarts I was familiar with, so I bought one. I was sorely disappointed. It tasted slightly like an Island egg tart, but had more of a spongy, custard type filling, without the sugary crunch and familiar vinegary bite of the Island tart. It turns out that there are Asian, Portuguese and English style egg tarts, but they all are the custard style of tart. The Island egg tart, as far as I can tell, is the only one made with vinegar and appears to be unique to our corner of the world.

Of course I can’t very well talk about Island food without mentioning fish! Sadly, the days when there were nearly a dozen fishplants on the two islands and you could just walk into any one of them and get yourself a mess of fillets, cod tongues or cheeks from fish that were still flipping, is long gone. There was a time when no Islander worth his salt would even consider eating a frozen fish. Between the fishplants and the dozens of fishing boats moored in the harbour, you could have your choice of pollock, halibut, hake, haddock, or cod any day of the week, at certain times of the year there was also mackerel and sometimes even tuna or wild Atlantic salmon to be had. Then there was also the smoked fish, like Digby Chicks and Finnan Haddie. A visit to one of the driers could supply the basic ingredient for a salt fish dinner, add some boiled potatoes, mashed turnip and a little diced, fried salt pork to your boiled salt fish and you’ve got yourself a true Maritime meal. Some old-timers even used to carry a bit of dried salt fish in their pocket so they could bite off a piece any time they felt like a snack.

Sometimes the best meals are the most basic ones. When it is available, nothing beats a simple piece of fresh, pan-fried fish. For years, my Uncle Brian came to Westport on vacation from Ontario, he enjoyed visiting the Island, but would refuse to eat any fish, saying that he had tried it as a child in England and again as an adult in Toronto, and he didn’t like it. My mother always replied that the problem was that he hadn’t tasted HER fish, and one summer she was determined to get him to try it. On the last day of his visit, after a week and a half of pestering from my mother, Brian agreed to taste one piece of her fried fish. After the first piece, he ate another, then another and another until it was all gone. Properly cooked fish, fresh from the ocean, was such a revelation to him that he extended his vacation for several more days and kept my mother busy making more fried fish, baked fish, fish chowder, fish cakes; basically anything involving fish. He couldn’t believe what he had been missing all those years!