challenges as the French and English battled to control the area. The Acadians were farmers who had a deep love of the land, though they had no desire to spend time on the back-breaking efforts of clearing away the forests. Instead, they chose to settle along the banks of the tidal rivers, building dikes to hold back the tides. The rich, fertile soil that was reclaimed in this way was cultivated, and abundant supplies of wheat, rye, and vegetables were grown. On their farms they raised poultry, sheep, and pigs, and salted away mutton and pork for winter use. Their cattle were of a small breed and produced very little milk, so butter and cheese were not in plentiful supply.[4]
From the earliest days of settlement the French brought with them that touch of genius that transforms humble ingredients into masterpieces of culinary art. In the minds and hearts of French cooks, whether manor-house chef or habitant housewife, would have been some firm principles
— no waste in cooking and baking; everything used in meal preparation; a love of eggs, butter, cheese, and cream; and the knowledge that a little wine or spirit adds a lot of character to a dish.
The First Nations taught the newcomers how to tap maple trees and heat the sap until it thickened into syrup, or until it could be moulded into sugar.
The New World must have been filled with surprises for all of those first settlers, among them the food traditions of the First Nations, which were to have such an immediate and lasting effect on the new arrivals. The First Nations showed them how to tap the sugar maple trees so they would have a much-needed sweetener for cooking and baking. The Natives poured the maple sugar into birchbark moulds and stored it to be used later as a sweet, or to flavour foods such as cornmeal mush, cornmeal cake and Indian pudding. The French adapted the treat to many of their recipes for the cooking of vegetables, dumplings, puddings, and desserts. Not only did maple syrup become an important ingredient, but the making of maple syrup and sugar later became a traditional cottage industry in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Ontario. “Sugaring off” parties brought family, friends, and neighbours together at the end of the maple syrup season to play card games, dance, sing and, of course, feast on an assortment of traditional treats. Many of them were made with the sugar or syrup, such as cookies, cakes, omelettes, crepes, snow taffy, baked apples, maple butter, and maple cream.
The forest yielded other new foods. For example, the Jesuits observed the Natives picking blueberries (also called soft juniper) and adding them to pemmican and to the cornmeal they were using in pottages and puddings. The settlers added them to cake dough, and the result was a moist fruit cake. The French also introduced some new fruit to the country, for Champlain planted the first grapevine in Quebec in 1608, and New France’s first bishop, François de Laval, imported the first apple and plum trees.
Bread was the foundation of every meal, and in early days would have been baked in a stone, brick, or clay oven beside the kitchen fireplace, where all the cooking was done. Often a larger “out oven,” shaped like a beehive and located out of doors, would replace or supplement the smaller indoor oven. Hardwood was placed inside either oven and burned for several hours to heat the clay-and stone-structure. Then the coals and ashes were raked out, the oven floor was sprinkled with cornmeal, and the round loaves were placed inside using a long, flat wooden paddle called a “peel.” Some of these large outdoor ovens served the whole community, and then the womenfolk were able to bake only on a certain day of the week; sometimes bread would become stale before bread-baking day came around again. The cooks and bakers using these ovens, like bakers all over the world, were attempting to make bread without the superb leavening agents that began to appear by the middle of the nineteenth century. As a result, those early breads would have been coarse and heavy, but as the years went by and yeast made with potatoes, hops, and other agents was perfected, there emerged the beautifully plump and round loaves that can still be bought at the roadside in Quebec today. Wheat, rye, buckwheat, and oats were the grains favoured for baking. Buckwheat was often grown on lean, rocky soil where other grains could not have survived. Many methods were developed to use stale bread. It was fried, made into bread pudding or French toast, crumbled into toppings, used as croutons for the ever-popular soups, stuffed into fish and fowl, and employed to thicken gravies and sauces.
The vegetables basic to everyday cooking would have included cabbage, carrots, peas, onions, and turnips, augmented by those the First Nations had been using for centuries, such as corn, pumpkin, squash, and potatoes. Dried peas have been part of human diets since biblical times, and sometimes have been used in extraordinary ways. For example, in ancient Rome they were cooked and sold as a treat at the circus, and at times have been given away by politicians in an attempt to buy votes! Once the peas have been dried and the outer skins removed, they are easy to cook, and in French Canada they became the basis for another honoured recipe — pea soup, made originally from whole yellow peas, and later from split yellow and green peas.
The origin of the world-famous tourtière is hotly debated by culinary historians. Its ancestry may be traced to the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Greece, or Rome, or to the Middle Ages, or to the English pork pie. However, many believe the dish originated in Canada as a descendant of the “sea pie” of Atlantic communities, or its name may derive from the French word tourte, meaning “wild pigeon.” Early settlers have left us accounts of the waves of wild pigeons that would arrive at certain times of the year and could be caught in nets, clubbed, or simply grabbed by hand. Tourte also means a pottery casserole in which pigeon pie was originally baked, so either of these uses of the word may explain the savoury pie baked between two layers of crust and usually served cold. There are dozens of variations of the recipe from region to region, and through the years ingenious housewives worked with what was available, so any combinations of beef, pork, salt pork, veal, wild game, fowl, potatoes, onions, salt, pepper, mustard, cinnamon, cloves, or allspice may have been included.
Meanwhile, people were on the move, and settlements were springing up in many locations. English settlers were attracted to Nova Scotia by free passage, free land grants, a year’s provisions, farming tools, guns and ammunition, and the promise of a planned town (Halifax). Colonel Edward Cornwallis arrived in the Nova Scotia colony in June 1749 and was soon followed by twenty-five-hundred colonists.
The first winter was very difficult. There were not enough homes yet to shelter the settlers, and many had to stay on board the ships, huddled together to keep from freezing. Those on land were not much better off, for the rude shanties, formed of upright poles stuck in the ground and roofed over with the bark of trees, were not enough to keep out the cold. Their only food consisted of government rations of salt meat and hardtack, and thus, without fresh meat and vegetables to sustain their health, they developed typhus. It is tragic to note that almost one-third of the population died. But eventually Halifax became a town — a little piece of Old England nestled on a harbour in the wilds of North America.[5]
The proximity of the New England colonies in what was to become the new United States of America ensured a constant flow of settlers from the south, many bringing with them their African American slaves. When the Acadians were expelled by the British governor in 1755, thousands of these new arrivals took up their vacant, fertile farms to supply Halifax with food.
Historians believe the Highland Scots faced the greatest challenge in Nova Scotia, since they often arrived penniless. However, after cutting the timber and burning it on the land, they planted potatoes among the stumps and were rewarded with a plentiful return. In winter they would cut holes through the ice, which was often a foot thick, in order to obtain a supply of fish. They learned to hunt moose and other game, the meat of which they froze in the snow, thus providing a little variety to their meals. But they longed for the oatmeal that is so much a part of Scottish fare. The only bread to be had in the earliest days was made from grain ground on the quern, or hand mill, but this procedure was so laborious an operation that they resorted to it only when impelled by the direst necessity. The beverage served at mealtime was often a tea made by boiling the leaves of the partridgeberry.[6]
As the years passed and settlements developed, the new arrivals began to realize that they, too, could benefit not just from their farms but also from the extraordinary marine resource on their doorstep. One example of this is the community of Lunenburg in Nova