August 19, 2012 – IAN MOSBY, PhD

Joe Beef and the Invention of Culinary Tradition

[Originally published at ActiveHistory.ca, 14 June 2012]

Charles McKiernan, the original Joe Beef ca. 1875. McCord Museum, UAPT5014

As countless Canadian undergraduates have learned after reading Peter DeLottinville’s classic 1982 article, “Joe Beef of Montreal: Working-Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889,” Joe Beef’s Canteen was more than just your ordinary tavern. Described as the “Great House of Vulgar People” by its larger-than-life proprietor Charles McKiernan – or Joe Beef as he was popularly known – a nineteenth century visitor to this ramshackle Montreal institution would likely have seen a brown bear named Tom drinking ale in the corner, two human skeletons hanging behind the bar, and piece of beef that had caused the death-by-choking of an unfortunate customer on display for all to see. For middle class Montrealers, it was a source of drunkenness, criminality and moral hazard. But, as DeLottinville argues, McKiernan’s working class patrons saw Joe Beef’s Canteen as more than just a place to find food, alcohol and sociability. McKiernan’s support for the unemployed, hungry, and sick – as well as for striking workers – saw the tavern become a kind of makeshift safety net for Montreal’s workers during hard times and, partly as a result of this function, a “stronghold of working class values and culture.”[1]

Although the recently published The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts (2011) begins with selections from DeLottinville’s article – albeit with the discussions of working-class politics and culture noticeably absent – it quickly becomes clear that the form of living described within would be much more recognizable to the educated leisure class that makes up today’s ‘foodie’ universe than the original Joe Beef or his clientele of “sailors and longshoremen, unemployed men and petty thieves.”[2] Written by the founders of contemporary Montreal restaurant Joe Beef – which has been described by celebrity chef and tastemaker David Chang as his “favorite restaurant in the world” – the ‘cookbook’ establishes its distance from this world of unskilled labourers and thieves by presenting the reader with the decadent “Fois Gras Parfait with Madeira Jelly” as its first recipe and by including an entire chapter dedicated to fine French wines.

For me at least, this led to two connected questions: why are the restaurant and the cookbook alike named after this (in)famous character from the rough world of Montreal’s working-class history and, more importantly, what does this tell us about the current, and very strange, moment in food culture? As it turns out, this surprisingly lively, funny, beautiful and thought-provoking book provides a fascinating glimpse into the way that food traditions are invented and sustained and, in the process, reinvents Montreal as one of the world’s top culinary destinations.

The most immediately striking thing about The Art of Living According to Joe Beef is its almost manic eclecticism. In addition to the expected recipes, it also includes everything from a short essay on the history of food in Quebec, a PEI travelogue, instructions on how to build a restaurant scale smoker from scratch (with technical drawings), a list of (mostly crackpot) food theories (!), instructions for putting together a fake Scandinavian smorgasbord, detailed descriptions of the best train routes in Canada, instructions for “building a garden in a crack den” and I can’t even finish listing what else. Oh yeah, “winemaker questionnaires” and instructions for making your own absinthe are also included.

But perhaps more than most cookbooks, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef is self-consciously grounded in history. In addition to including an essay titled “The Builders, the Brewers, the Bankers, and the Gangsters: A Brief History of Eating in Montreal”, an essay on the nostalgic romance of rail travel in Canada, and Delottinville’s essay, the recipes themselves are interspersed amongst old maps, train schedules, historical photographs, old menus, archival documents, drawings, and postcards. From the beginning, restaurant co-founder David McMillan is introduced to the reader as a gregarious history buff who, from his position behind the bar, tells stories – “You know who else had a good Bordeaux list? Samuel de Champlain, on his boat, over 350 years ago…” – which are apparently lubricated often by more than one bottle of quality French wine. As he tells the reader at one point, with a wink and a nod and a bracketed aside: “Please forgive any embellishments. They seem quite natural when accompanied by dramatic hand waving and swearing: I’m a bar storyteller, remember?”[3]

To this end, McMillan’s history of Montreal’s culinary traditions reads like a series of tall-tales and campfire stories. Instead of the biggest fish ever caught or the most harrowing escape from an angry bear, it’s built on exaggerations about what gives Montreal its unique culinary identity. Apparently, for instance, the restaurant’s namesake “ran the old port of Montreal like the fictionalized Bill the Butcher ran the Five Points in Gangs of New York” and the old port, itself, “was built by men who ate oysters by the barrel, a trait that was passed down through the old families of the builders, brewers, bankers, and gangsters.”[4]

It should come as no surprise, then, that the story told of Montreal’s culinary tradition is a controversial one grounded in a sweeping but highly selective vision of Montreal’s history. In particular, four major factors defining the development of Montreal’s contemporary culinary landscape are identified: the early seigneurial system, the casse-croûte (snack bar) tradition, the post-WWII immigration wave, and – somewhat bafflingly – Expo 67. The latter, for instance, is explained as the moment when European chefs began to arrive in large numbers. “Its restaurants and pavilions attracted many of the world’s chefs to Montreal, and lucky for us, many of them stayed. Of these chefs, the majority were French. They came for the food and stayed for the forest, rivers, lakes, and the women (hey, it was the summer of love!).”[5]

Somehow, however, the story being told is not the incoherent mess that this description indicates but, instead, is a somewhat fantastic bricolage of images, smells, tastes, and memories that manages to give a compelling account of our current culinary moment and something of a unique commentary on Montreal’s popular self-image in the post-Quiet Revolution era. Chip shacks and delis, for instance, are placed on as high a pedestal as groundbreaking Montreal restaurants like Toque! or Citrus. Recipes simultaneously look traditional and modern, high-end and low-class, French and English (and Jewish and Irish and Haitian and many of the other groups that make up contemporary Montreal) and therefore range from the fanciful tongue-in-cheek high/low hybrids like Pork Fish Sticks or a Fois Gras Breakfast Sandwich to the more traditional and straightforward Pate en Croute, Schnitzel of Pork, or Chicken Jalfrezi.

Like many of the best cookbooks, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef seems to invent, as much describe, the culture of eating in its particular time and place. While The Joy of Cooking, for its part, presented a novel vision of American food traditions that – in a particularly white, Midwestern way – worked to bridge the country’s diverse foodways through its encyclopedic format and sheer volume of recipes, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef tries to overcome Montreal’s fractured linguistic, ethnic, and class divisions through an appeal to a common history and a common love for delicious foods that extends beyond – but also necessarily includes – the usual gravy-covered and cheese-curded suspects. (You know who you are.)

Sure, the history is often of the not-quite-true variety and most of its recipes would be unfamiliar or inaccessible to the average Montrealer, but the book presents a fascinating and compelling argument for a truly unique Montreal culinary tradition that traces its lineage from habitant culinary traditions to the original Joe Beef’s Canteen, fine French restaurants, and roadside casse-croûtes. Perhaps tall tales and half-histories are essential to the act of imagining and inventing culinary traditions across time and space. Taste is, indeed, personal and the food at the original Joe Beef’s Canteen was probably awful. This imagined Montreal – made real at the contemporary Joe Beef and through this cookbook – looks to me like a vibrant, living cuisine – grounded in Montreal’s past – and looking confidently to the future.

[1] Peter DeLottinville, “Joe Beef of Montreal: Working-Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889” Labour/Le Travailleur8, 9 (Autumn/Spring 1981/82), 10.

[2]DeLottinville, Joe Beef, 10.

[3]Frédéric Morin, David McMillan & Meredith Erickson, The Art of Living according to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2011),47.

[4] Morin, McMillan and Erikson, Joe Beef, 47.

[5]Morin, McMillan and Erikson, Joe Beef, 52.

Published by ian.mosby on August 19, 2012 | Permalink

Eating Like Our Great-Grandmothers: Food Rules and the Uses of Food History

[Originally published at ActiveHistory.ca, 24 November 2011]

This month’s publication of a colourfully illustrated, revised edition of Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, once again has me thinking about the role of historians in contemporary debates about the health and environmental impacts of our current industrial food system. As a historian of food and nutrition, I often find myself getting a bit squeamish whenever I hear anyone invoking the past to either defend or critique contemporary dietary practices. And Pollan, like other critics of the food industry, makes extensive use of history to guide his analysis of our current food choices.

My first reaction when I read Pollan’s second rule – “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” – was therefore immediately defensive. In part, this was based on my own reading of the often strange and wonderful recipes from the dozens of early- and mid-twentieth century cookbooks that were part of the research for my dissertation on the politics and culture of food and nutrition in Canada during the Second World War.

Arguably, for instance, most of us would have trouble recognizing mid-century Canadian food celebrity Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for “Green Salad” as something edible. With an ingredient list that includes gelatine, green food coloring, lemon rind, mayonnaise, chopped green pickles, and horseradish, this quivering green mass from Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book would be, to say the least, hard for most contemporary eaters to stomach. (I know from experience: I was recently left with a pretty much untouched salad after my 1940s food themed post-dissertation defense party.)

Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for Green salad from her Canadian Cook Book (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2004), 224.

Kate Aitken’s green salad (photo by author)

“Green Salad,” of course, is just the tip of the culinary iceberg. I could list dozens of other recipes that my great-grandmother might have read in cookbooks and magazines from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that would seem alien to most of us in the early 2010s. I’m personally still not brave enough to try Mrs. Elmer Scott of Newington Ontario’s recipe for “Pork Fruit Cake” – which includes 1 lb of “salted fat pork, chopped fine” – from the 1941 Cornwall Standard Freeholder Cookbook.

In Pollan’s defense, he readily concedes that the rule doesn’t always work perfectly and he stresses that it’s main purpose is that avoid eating many of the industrial preservatives, flavour enhancers, stabilizers, and other food additives that have become the basis our modern food system since the 1940s. Pollan even adds an addendum that you could substitute your own great-grandmother if she was a “terrible cook or eater” for someone else’s great-grandmother – particularly if that person is Sicilian or French.

While it’s easy to quibble with the details of Pollan’s great-grandmother rule – pointing out, for instance, that something like Jell-O, one of the quintessentially modern, mass-produced convenience foods, was introduced in 1897 – the rule itself nonetheless acts as a useful shorthand for Pollan’s broader point. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, by and large, ate far less processed and heavily refined industrial foods than most of us currently do. The great-grandmother rule therefore provides a good place to start thinking about how our diets have changed over time. And, despite its faults, it’s probably much easier to wrap your head around than the confusing “servings” that form the basis of the contemporary Canada’s Food Guide or the recently abandoned USDA Food Pyramid.

Pollan, of course, is not alone in pointing to the past for solutions to our contemporary problems. Whether it’s the current movements promoting the 100- mile diet, slow food, or the legalization of raw milk sales, food reformers often invoke the past as both a model and justification for changing contemporary practices. The same is also often true of the proponents of genetically modified foods, who point to the post-World War II green revolution and the history of famines and food shortages in the developing world to justify current drives to increase yields through the patenting of novel plants and animals. Even fad diets like the popular “paleo diet” often claim a certain level of legitimacy for their recommendations by invoking the supposed foodways of our ancestors.

In many ways, Pollan’s great-grandmother food rule and all of these broader attempts to use our knowledge of the past to deal with some of the most pressing contemporary issues is an extremely hopeful sign – despite the cringe inducing use of history by some, such as the “paleo diet” promoters. The general public and policy makers alike are, perhaps more than ever, looking to the past to explain our present predicament and to come up with viable solutions. This means that, not only can historians provide some important nuance and detail to these contemporary debates, but they can also help to encourage Canadians to engage more broadly with their past.

Ultimately, my own hope is that these kinds of calls to examine the diet of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers is accompanied by a growing interest, not just in how they ate, but in the role that food played in defining their lives and work, more broadly. While it is often easier to draw a direct line between the work of environmental and economic historians and problems with our contemporary food system, these kinds of invocations of our shared social and culinary history offer new outlets for other groups of historians to similarly engage with the general public.

In Canada, academic social and cultural historians, in particular, have been slow to meet this growing interest in food and culinary history. But the recent publication of an edited collection on Canadian food history from McGill-Queen’s University Press and a forthcoming collection from the University of Toronto Press – combined with a growing interest at a number of libraries and archives in cookbooks and other forms of culinary literature – are encouraging signs. Hopefully, by adding our voices to these contemporary debates over the future of food in Canada, professional social and cultural historians can find new audiences for our work and a more active (and activist) role in our communities.

Published by ian.mosby on August 19, 2012 | Permalink