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Globe and Mail
03-08-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Growing up, I never realized that our food obsession was really about food insecurity
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at Food – the foraging, gathering, saving and consumption of – has always been a THING in my family. Growing up, I thought all normal people had a food bunker in their basement. After all, we certainly did. Our bunker was known as the 'Cold Room', and it had been constructed with the thoroughness and attention to detail that my dad applied to every project that he ever took on. The Cold Room was a kind of mini masterpiece. It housed one of those giant chest freezers and shelving precisely measured to fit pint- and quart-sized mason jars, with their sturdy glass lids and red rubber seals. The ginormous freezer was usually filled with a side of beef, a whole pig, occasional roasting chickens and well-priced turkeys. The Christmas baking, too, of course. But the pièce de résistance in the Cold Room was the bespoke vegetable bins used to store root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets, onions) for the long, long winter. In a less-than-enlightened moment, my dad chose to store his fall stash in bulk dry Zonolite, a toxic precursor to today's benign vermiculite. Although I'm still a citizen of this planet, I often wonder how much asbestos dust I inhaled when I was forced to dumpster-dive for the last veggie stragglers found at the bottom of the bins in the spring. August was typically the pinnacle of the year, when the garden produced its annual bounty. Seeds were maintained year to year for radishes, scallions, peas, carrots, beets, green beans, wax beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce (two crops). As the oldest child, I despised and hated August as it was predetermined that not one item from the garden would be left to compost. I was always dreaming up ways to escape from the endless picking and prepping. There was always something to blanch, scrub or shuck. It was totally relentless and didn't stop with the vegetables. Somebody was always going to the Okanagan on vacation and would be contracted to bring back cases of peaches, pears and plums to fill those vintage mason jars. Travelling 30 times a year, I've learned how to buy healthy groceries at home and abroad Then there were the endless savories. Another job to avoid – dill pickles. First you had to brush-scrub all those prickly pickling cucumbers and then stuff quart jars with fresh dill and as many cucumbers as possible. Fortunately, we were then a no-garlic family, or there would have been endless garlic to peel, too. Other pickles included mustard beans, sweet mixed as well as 'bread and butter' pickles. Lotta, lotta! As a child and teenager, I just assumed everybody lived like this. Didn't everyone take their children potato-picking after the first frost? Or into the prairie bush for Saskatoons? In hindsight, I have finally been able to realize that this whole 'food' obsession was really about food insecurity. My dad had known childhood hunger. He'd been raised in utter poverty. Children were sent to the butcher to beg for bones. Supper was too frequently pancakes. My dad was determined that his own family would never face the hunger he had experienced. It must have been his worst fear. A few summers ago, while I was preparing a prawn fry for prairie guests, a visitor asked me, 'Do you always have that much food in your fridge?' I was somewhat taken aback at the question. But there was no doubt about my answer – 'Yes, always!' It's August and (as usual) my fridge and freezer are full of fresh local produce. I'm collecting the first of my grape tomatoes. We were able to purchase early peaches-and-cream corn at a favourite farmstand. The Red Russian garlic is gorgeous and plump. There were sweet yellow plums for breakfast and the local raspberries and strawberries are mouthwatering. Blueberries are for sale at $2/lb. A big bag of gift apples was turned into two pies for the freezer and there's rhubarb for compote. The blackberries are almost ready for jam. I will be daydreaming about all these fruits and vegetables come the bleak days of January. In reflecting on the state of my fridge and pantry I have to conclude I've obviously absorbed a lot of life lessons – and that the acorn has indeed not fallen far from the family tree. In fact, it has probably sprouted a few roots. Anne Letain lives in Ladysmith, B.C.
New European
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Josh Barrie on food: The Hemingway's time has come
Years ago, I used to tutor English to Italian youngsters in Oxford for £20 an hour. After a three-hour stint on a Friday, I would take my £60 and walk over the road to Raoul's, an excellent cocktail bar overseen back then by a mixologist called Alex Proudfoot, who is now in Manchester. I have long been enamoured with the Hemingway daiquiri. There are various reasons why. The first is because it was an education. I've never liked sugar in cocktails, even as a teenager, and, after repeat visits wherein I would request something 'not sweet, strong, enlivening' – having long exhausted good options on the regular menu – Alex asked me one late afternoon: 'Have you ever had a Hemingway?' I hadn't. So he made me one. It was a transcending experience. Here was a drink without syrup, sweetened only by the cherry liqueur Maraschino, pumped hard and fast by rum and freshened by grapefruit, tempered by lime. I'll never forget the first time a Hemingway touched my lips. It brought me home. The optimum number is five. It is a strong drink, the Hemingway, and ever since that soft afternoon it has been my firm favourite any time before 11pm, after which I'm more attuned to the possibilities presented by a Manhattan – bourbon, perfect, on the rocks and with a cherry – or the hours between 6 and 8pm during which I quite often favour a Negroni because of its efficiency and ease. Another thing I like about the cocktail is its supposed origin story. So it goes that it came about in 1930s Cuba after the author Ernest Hemingway strolled into a bar called La Floridita to find regular daiquiris being made, one of which he tried, enjoyed, but proclaimed to be too sweet. 'That's good, but I prefer mine with twice the rum and no sugar,' he apparently said. And so came a drink named the Papa Doble – Hemingway was known as 'Papa' in the drinking dens of Havana – which contained four times the rum and twice the lime juice. I've never had one, nor do I want to, as it sounds imbalanced and reckless. The bartender was rightly not content with the author's request. Constantino Ribalaigua Vert moved things on and soon added the grapefruit and the maraschino and the Hemingway we know today came to be. What I find odd is how it remains a little niche. Even at trailblazing places like the Cold Room in Montreal or Mahaniyom in Bangkok, it isn't listed on menus. In classics sections there will always be martinis, Negronis, Old Fashioneds and margaritas but hardly ever Hemingways. Any bartender worth his salt will know how to make one – in Europe, top marks for those at Fidelity in Dublin, Clumsies in Athens, Dr Stravinsky in Barcelona and Bar Bukowski in Amsterdam. In London, Scarfes bar makes the best, at least when the Italian bartender with the curly moustache is in situ. There might be romance to its obscurity. The Hemingway brings about an instant rapport when ordered, maybe because it isn't boring; perhaps it would become boring were it to feature more readily. But then there are also countless occasions where I've asked for one – parched and yearning – and it hasn't been possible. 'No grapefruit juice, sorry'. There have been decent bartenders in proficient locations who didn't know the Hemingway. Some try to Google it, but that never works because making one requires guile even if it sounds simple. I'm writing about Hemingways now because I think the cocktail's time is coming, just as we march towards the 2030s and its centenary looms. But also because London's hottest new opening, One Club Row in Bethnal Green, has listed the drink on its menu. I was surprised and excited to see it. Until now, it's only been on permanently at the Green Bar at Hotel Cafe Royal in London, maybe a couple of others. Naturally, you can get it at Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Paris, so too Nonna Doria's in New York (not the best, but credible). I remember having one somewhere in Milan, but cannot remember where. Likewise, Berlin – but I can't remember anything in Berlin for obvious reasons. Do not think it arriving on one menu to be a stretch. One Club Row is a place where every food and drink fan is going to pitch up, believe me, and rum-soaked waves will swell.
