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O n Labour Day weekend, 2011, my mother, Florence, my brothers, Daniel and Noah, my sisters, Emma and Martha, and I gathered at our old family cottage on Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships, near Montreal, for a bittersweet reunion. My father, Mordecai, had died ten years previous. Not long afterwards my mother lost her sight—and even before that sad day, she could not drive, and was far too scared of mice or the sound of twigs snapping in the woods at night to ever stay in that house alone. Meanwhile, it had been more than fifteen years since any of the rest of us had lived within six hundred kilometres of the place. The time had come to sell and pack up.

We had moved in on Canada Day weekend, 1974—the summer in which Duddy Kravitz made it to the silver screen, and his zeyda was spreading the word that “a man without land is nobody.” As it happened, my father’s new land was a very modest parcel of a couple of acres. It was the particular vantage that had so tidily manifested his boyhood dream of owning his own place on a lake in the Quebec countryside. In the peace and quiet of that private hilltop overlooking the length of Sergeant’s Bay, he would write his best books, and enjoy much treasured, uninterrupted reading time. And between those two habits he had accumulated many thousands of volumes that were scattered all over the house. My mother had a library, too. We had all done our share of accumulating, and then collectively used the place as a free storage depot for years after we had moved far away. Now it all had to go. My father’s vast library was to be packed up and dispatched to his new archives at Concordia University (his alma mater, if you still call it that when you drop out). Much of the rest of it had to be shipped to our various houses in Montreal, Toronto, Digby Neck (Nova Scotia), and London (U.K.). And a whole lot more would have to be given away or thrown out. The worst part of it all was that somehow—whether by draft or foolish volunteerism, I can no longer recall—I had ended up as principal liaison with the moving company that would be taking care of it all. So it was that a few months earlier, in an attempt to diminish the scale of the inevitable horror of that fateful weekend, I had tried to get started on the organizational front by asking all my siblings to send along lists of what they wanted to take away with them.

Reality has a nasty way of intruding on some otherwise excellent plans. There was, for example, much interest in my father’s regulation-size snooker table—until everyone remembered that they were unequipped with a spare, empty room of the required minimum dimensions (eighteen by twenty-four feet, seriously). And for my part I had long coveted our venerable four-oven AGA cooker, which my father had had installed as part of a kitchen renovation a quarter-century before, to help my mother miss England less and cook for him more.

The AGA is the quintessentially English stove. It is unapologetically old-fashioned, identical in appearance and principle both to the latest models available in your local showroom and to the earliest museum-piece editions from the 1920s. If it were a car, it would be a Morgan (lovely to look at, shockingly dated, but still a surprisingly good idea). They are manufactured more or less by hand in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, where the process begins at a three-hundred-year-old foundry that was once the cradle of the Industrial Revolution—the very place where iron had its seminal rendezvous with coke. Cast iron is the key to the AGA’s design. Each of its four ovens is encased in a sleeve of the stuff cast to a different thickness. The gauge of that sleeve helps define the level of heat within it. For the AGA has just one central heat source, which rages constantly. In other words, your four-oven AGA cooker packs a full set of permanently preheated ovens—one each for roasting, baking, simmering, and warming. This is not just convenient but a culinary virtue, for the heat radiates remarkably evenly from those iron walls, and it does so without any drying internal airflow. The AGA is an almost uniquely magnificent vehicle for executing the Sunday roast, just as its central surface heat plate is ideally suited to preparing risotto—and the list goes on.

Alas, so do the fuel costs, for that relentlessly firing heat source obviously consumes a lot of gas. While that gave me pause, there was something else, far worse. An AGA is designed to spill heat into the room and house around it. This is very handy in winter—especially in poorly insulated, damp English homes. But even there, it is a burden in summertime—which is why most English people turn theirs off for the season, and turn instead to their backup set of ovens and hobs. Even I had to admit that this made the AGA singularly ill suited for my own family’s summeronly, sunlight-flooded Ontario cottage—where, to come clean, it would hardly have fit anyway. And our city house was no better suited to the thing, for the old AGA was gas powered, and these models (unlike newer electric editions) can be installed against outside walls only—and not shared ones, like the one that runs behind my Toronto kitchen. So that was that. Just like the snooker table, the six-hundred-kilogram AGA would be staying put.

Fortunately my mother’s big country kitchen featured a number of other attractions that were far easier to pack. Near the top of my list was something of the same colour and country of origin as the AGA, but an older vintage, and an altogether more modest price bracket: her lovely old black porcelain pie bird, its up-stretched yellow beak a vent for steam. More precious still was a well-worn and seemingly indestructible plate from Schwartz’s delicatessen on the Main—just the right size for two medium-fatson-rye—which sometime in the late eighties, in a rare moment of teenage inspiration, I had given to my father for Christmas, with a gift certificate taped to it that was exchangeable for one whole smoked meat brisket (eight pounds, maximum). I strongly doubt that my father ever remembered to exchange the coupon—but he did treasure that plate. In fact for the rest of his days in that house, save for those rare occasions when we had company, he ate his solitary lunch from it every day. Same plate, same lunch. For the first course, one or two thickly sliced Quebec beefsteak tomatoes.Then—no need to rinse—a pair of saucisses de Strasbourg. The veal wieners were invariably burst open, their casing split and toughened from a stint in the AGA’s roasting oven (ill advised, yes, but faster than poaching), and plated, for balance, with a couple of hunks of schmaltz herring and a large dipping pool of Heinz Chili Sauce.

My mother preferred a loftier set of comfort foods, and her long quest to get them right was embodied in my principal treasure haul from the family cottage: her cookbook library. She had started buying them in 1947, shortly after quitting Montreal for London. Between the food books she acquired there, and the Canadian and American editions that followed our family’s return to Canada in 1972, there were now by my count some eight metres’ worth of volumes dispersed among our country kitchen’s rustic pine shelves. I had little time to sort through them and decide which to pack and which to discard. And while separating quirk and quality from undesirables is usually easy when you know the subject well, it quickly proved difficult to stay focused on the job at hand and not get distracted by some of the finds. There were so many treasures in the heap. Take, for example, her 1948 printing of the Larousse Gastronomique, which amongst innumerable other quirks, includes a most eccentric entry for rhubarb, containing this statement: “La feuille peut se manger cuite comme les épinards.” (“You may prepare and eat the leaves just as you would spinach.”) “Never,” my mother had written in pencil in the margin long ago, “poisonous.” And indeed, while by most estimates it would require an impractical five-pound serving to pack a fatal dose of the rhubarb leaf’s toxic oxalic acid, there remains a lot of unpleasant middle ground to be wary of between a nice dinner and untimely death.

Like so many of her volumes, the Larousse bears testimony to how much cooking has changed over the years—and no entry in that old culinary encyclopedia illustrates this more readily than that for “oeuf.” You may have heard the old story that a chef’s hat—or toque—traditionally contained one hundred starched pleats (forty-eight is now more typical) as a symbol of the one hundred different ways in which any self-respecting chef should be able to prepare an egg. If you have, but found the story implausible, or even impossible, then you need to spend a little time with an old Larousse. Specifically, an edition printed before the shameful 1970s, when the American Heart Association demonized the egg on the basis of its improperly analyzed cholesterol content, and caused the once unassailable pillar of French gastronomy to plummet in public favour. From Oeufs à l’africaine (couscous, eggplant, bell pepper, tomato sauce) through Oeufs Cardinal (pastry shell, lobster with béchamel, sauce cardinale, and shaved truffle!) through to the final entry of Omelette au sucre (sugar, zest of mandarin orange), the egg section of the old Larousse spans twenty pages and well over five hundred different recipes. The American egg-white omelette is not among them.

What we choose to cook—and the way we elect to cook it—changes all the time. Presentation and plating styles date as fast as last year’s hemlines. Culinary ideas that are revolutionary when launched tend to either fall by the wayside, justifiably forgotten, or get so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream that we soon stop thinking of them as something that had ever been new. Either way, years on and out of context, books of once significant recipes have a way of appearing irrelevant. It was impossible to avoid thinking about this as I pulled books from the shelves authored by the celebrity chefs of an earlier era. Like Cuisine Minceur by Michel Guérard, which spawned a movement but today just reads like a necessary and overdue step in the flour, butter, and cream–shedding evolution of French sauces (and a stage unnecessary to revisit). The Cuisine of Frédy Girardet contains many dishes with more enduring appeal. But the fuss generated by his cooking (the Gault-Millau guide proclaimed him “a genius”) is difficult to reconcile with the stark simplicity of his recipes—like Salade de ris de veau au pois gourmands, which is nothing but a sauté of sweetbreads and snow peas with a few drops of walnut oil and a squeeze of lime. Next I pulled from the shelf a 1978 edition of The Nouvelle Cuisine of Jean & Pierre Troisgros and came face to face with the back-cover photograph of their vegetable terrine “olympe,” a ham mousse set with artichokes and carrots served in a pool of cold tomato sauce and topped with a scattering of pallid green beans. It looks very horrible. But the book redeems itself slightly with its recipe for the 1966 dish that was said to have single-handedly earned the Maison Troisgros its third Michelin star: Saumon à l’oseille—escalope of salmon flash-seared in a dry pan and then served on top—rather than under—its sorrel cream sauce. Uneventful now, but revolutionary then: in fact every piece of succulent, lightly seared fish you have eaten since owes a little something to that dish. And the same thing goes for your next serving of fish or poultry that has delicious crispy skin—even though it came with sauce—because someone thought to put the liquid on the plate first and the protein second. When chefs do something new just right like that, it gets around to other good restaurants fast. And soon enough it enters mainstream cooking, and we forget all about the origins. It happens all the time—even with home cooking.

Picture, for example, the following scene taken from my mother’s same country kitchen several years earlier. In the years after my father died it was my custom to take my wife and family on vacation to Memphremagog each August, always pausing in Montreal en route from Toronto to collect my mother, who enjoyed being part of it. That is the cast, it is late afternoon, and as usual at this time I am to be found in the kitchen. The workspace is spacious, and equipped with plenty of windows and skylights to let the sunshine in. There is a central island and peripheral counters too, for those inclined to help, along with plenty of seating for those who are not. And on this particular occasion it was as usual something of a split, with a lot of drinks being poured and re-poured, and just about everyone ignoring my mother Florence’s No Smoking signs, even though she was there in the midst of it—just as my father had always done. Meanwhile (as we got by without a summeronly backup set of ovens and hobs), the AGA cooker was going strong, billowing unwanted heat around the room. All the same, it had a welcome way of somehow using the silent assertion of its six-hundred-kilogram heft to ground the chaos around it in the shared purpose of dinner.

A casual dinner for eight, this time. And on the menu was a dish of my mother’s that had been one of my father’s favourites: a lobster pasta with a tomato cream sauce, enriched with an extensive mirepoix of vegetables, and fragrant with paprika and thyme. It was also a dish that in his estimation his hard work more than hers put on the table. Not because he paid for the lobster, but rather because he boiled them and shelled them—and what a spectacle that was. He was not at ease in the kitchen—or at least, he shouldn’t have been—and for him processing three or four lobsters was a multi-cigar-and-whisky job. Cleavers, hammers, screwdrivers, and whatever other tools happened to be on hand somehow got involved. There was much huffing and puffing, and the bits of shell and muck and guts flew absolutely everywhere. The cleanup (not his thing) was arduous. Invariably all the same, many weeks and sometime months after this Jew vs. crustacean showdown, someone would reach up to a high shelf to retrieve an obscure cookbook or a seldom-used piece of cooking equipment and a dried-up lobster leg or hunk of shell would tumble down and bounce, rattling, across the quarry-tile floor, and everyone in the kitchen would stare at it silently where it came to rest, thinking, “How the hell did that get up there?”—and slowly, the horror would come back.

I was trying to do the job with a little less mess, and quite successfully. I was also preparing the dish my way. For in the years when my mother made the dish, the prevailing culinary wisdom had it that even when preparing lobster for the first phase of a dish where it would later be cooked again—say, for lobster Thermidor or soufflé—it should be cooked very nearly to completion. So it was with her lobster pasta. But my preference had long been to only lightly par-cook it, as one would in preparation for making butter-poached lobster, and then let the meat finish cooking in the sauce itself. The second change was a new one—one ingredient dropped and a fresh one inserted—and this was not of my doing but rather at the vociferous instruction of a real chef. And as it was my mother who had originally taught me the dish, and all who know her would describe her as, well, rather sensitive, it was to me obvious that it would be best all around if I kept news of both of these possible improvements to her dish to myself. So I did not mention it as I cooked, or when I toasted her at the table just before we all tucked in. But looking down the table at her as she took her first bite, I noticed a mildly perplexed expression on her face, and it remained there, gaining concentration, as she took another small taste, and then another.

“You’ve changed something,” she said.

“Well, yes,” I said, and fearing the worst, quickly added, “It wasn’t my idea—it was Marc Thuet’s!”

She has met the Alsatian chef with me many times in Toronto—first during his stint at Easy & The Fifth, on Richmond Street, and later at his own restaurant, on King Street West, then called Bistro and Bakery Thuet. Whether or not like me she considered him to share sensibilities with Fernand Point—or just a physique—we had never precisely discussed; but I knew her for a fact to be a great admirer of his cooking, as well as of his rather astonishingly unselfconscious nature. So I went ahead and told her the story.

The week before, I had been enjoying a reinvigorating post-lunch cognac at the bar at Bistro Thuet when Marc sat down alongside to join me. The customary topic of discussion—food—soon turned to what I would be eating at the cottage on vacation the following week. I told him about the local supermarket—Métro Plouffes—fifteen minutes up the road in Magog (population twenty-five thousand), which stocks an exceptional selection of items that you would have to special order at even the finest stores in Toronto (population six million): horsemeat, cold-smoked venison loin, whole lobes of foie gras, fresh local (Brome Lake) ducklings, dozens of different terrines and pâtés, you name it. I got started on the fish counter and its Matane shrimp and three kinds of sea bream—and that’s when he began questioning me rather forcefully about how exactly I made my lobster pasta.

“ … so you sweat the onions, garlic, carrot, celery, red and green bell peppers—”

“FUCKING BELL PEPPERS? YOU PUT FUCKING BELL PEPPERS IN YOUR FUCKING LOBSTER PASTA?! YOU FUCKING IDIOT!!!” He extinguished the horrible menthol cigarette he was smoking directly in his freshly emptied can of Diet Coke and glowered at me. Staff and customers alike who knew him and were accustomed to his vigorous language nonetheless stared at us, but he continued undeterred. “YOU DON’T PUT FUCKING BELL PEPPERS IN LOBSTER PASTA, YOU IDIOT! YOU PUT FUCKING FENNEL!!”

So that was that: out with mirepoix of red and green bell peppers and in with the half bulb of fennel. My mother enjoyed the story. But she did not say what she thought of the dish, not until many hours later, when, in the early hours of the morning, matters tableside were devolving some and she had announced that it was time to retire. I walked her to her room, shut her door and was heading back to the dining room when she opened it again and called after me.

“Oh, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“About the fennel.”

“Yes?”

“I think Marc’s fucking right!”

My mother was then seventy-eight. It was the first time I had ever heard her use the word.

Back in my mother’s kitchen, I was still packing up books—and cheerfully, because I had finally located her 1973 first edition of The White Elephant Cookbook, an anthology of recipes culled from some of the many celebrities who in the 1960s and ’70s gathered at the celebrated White Elephant club on Curzon Street, in Mayfair. To come clean, it is the nature of that old clientele far more than their recipes that provides the value of the book. Their explanatory notes generally endure better than the recipes that follow. For example, the late John Mortimer (author of Rumpole of the Bailey) introduces his fish pie recipe by proclaiming British food the very best in the world. (When he made his case in 1972, the same might well have been said about British weather.) Mortimer’s recipe proceeds without a single measurement (“I have never bought a pair of scales so it’s no good asking me how much of anything”); the only precision he brings to the process is the insistence that you prepare the dish “to the accompaniment of a private bottle of Sancerre”—and then, when finished, open six (six!) more. Sean Connery provides a recipe for Spiced Beef with Parsley Dumplings, the great racing driver Stirling Moss does Veal Stroganoff, Roger Moore contributes his Potato Gnocchi, and Joan Collins adds a surprisingly fattening Pommes Paysanne. Then, in the “Puddings and Cakes” section, just after Tony Randall and Ronnie Barker, right before Nanette Newman, and Twiggy and Justin, you find the Mordecai Richler recipe for Noah’s Apple Cake.

Lobster Pasta with Fucking Fennel

Florence Richler

Serves 6

2 lobsters, about 1-3/4 lb (790 g) each

3 tbsp (45 mL) olive oil

1 small Spanish onion, minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 stalk celery, peeled and minced

1 carrot, minced

1/2 fennel bulb, minced

2 tsp (10 mL) thyme leaves, chopped

2 cans (28 oz/796 mL each) San Marzano tomatoes, milled

2 tsp (10 mL) sweet paprika

Salt and pepper

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) 35% cream

Fettuccine (or some other pasta) for 6

Minced chives for garnish

Plunge the lobsters into a pot of boiling salted water and cook for 2 minutes. Remove and twist off the claws. Cool lobster bodies under cold running water. Meanwhile, return claws to the pot for 4 more minutes. Cool under running water. Extract all the meat from the lobster, reserving coral if either one is female, and refrigerate.

Heat the oil in a heavy pot. Sweat the onions, garlic, celery, carrot, and fennel until wilted––about 10 minutes. Add the thyme and tomatoes; simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Add the paprika and simmer 5 minutes more. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and then stir in the cream.

Cook the pasta. Cut the lobster into bite-size chunks. When the pasta is 3 minutes shy of ready, add the lobster to the pot of sauce and stir to heat through. Fold in any coral. Drain pasta, reserving 1 cup of the cooking water. Toss the pasta with half the sauce and starchy cooking water to taste. Distribute among 6 warmed pasta bowls and top each with an extra ladle of sauce. Garnish and serve.

To the best of my knowledge this was his only published recipe. Even so, he wrote no introduction for it—which you can put down to modesty, if you like, or just to the fact that he had never watched carefully enough as my mother made it to have any insight into the process whatsoever (other than that he considered the finished product to be not just a great dessert but also—with a black coffee and cigar on the side—the healthy anchor of a complete breakfast). My mother’s recipe was for a simple cake, heavy on sliced apple, subtly enlivened with shredded coconut and sultanas. Her cake was nonetheless quite light, for aside from the crumbly, sugared topping, it featured only enough dough to bind everything together and not a tablespoon more. She called it Noah’s Apple Cake because she almost always made it for my older brother’s birthday. I frequently requested it for mine too, and occasionally she conceded—which was nifty, as our respective celebrations fall just four days apart.

My mother’s apple cake was conceived in her culinary heyday. But everyone must start somewhere. In my mother’s case, it was not at home, where she mostly ate salad (“I can thank my mum for making me extremely healthy,” she said to me, cryptically, of the lack of cooked meals in her youth). Moving on to war-ravaged London in 1947, where ration books were still in play, my mother made her initial foray into the role of dinnerparty hostess in a one-room apartment near Marylebone Library, presenting a one-dish repertoire of scrambled eggs. Scrambled goose eggs, usually, as her butcher had passed along the hot tip that, because the egg coupon in her weekly ration book applied only to chicken eggs, she could by contrast purchase as many goose eggs as she could afford. In time, her first boyfriend passed along an even better tip to cook by—or more precisely, his father did. “Never cook with plonk,” he told her. “Always use what you’re drinking.” What he was drinking was usually something from his family château in Bordeaux, and this cultural exposure helped my mother along some. Soon enough, she was making a decent boeuf bourguignon. This would mean nothing to her first husband (“Food was of little if any interest to him,” she recalled of writer Stanley Mann. “If I gave him a boiled egg, he’d eat half.”). But soon my father came along, and made it quickly clear that he was very much of the opposite persuasion. “Mordecai loved his meat and two veg, and I learned quickly that he was very appreciative of my efforts,” she told me of their early days together. The novelist Ted Allan had introduced them; as it happened, his wife, Kate, was the first person my mother met who cooked both very well and seemingly effortlessly.

“I’ll never cook that way,” my mother recalls saying to Kate one day, after eating a lunch she had just prepared.

“It’s easy,” Kate replied. “Buy that book by Irma Rombauer.”

I found that seminal edition of The Joy of Cooking on one of the upper shelves adjacent to the AGA. Published in the U.K. by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1952, it was printed with the lovely and long since abandoned subtitle A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with an Occasional Culinary Chat. Perhaps the subtitle was later dropped because so many of the “chats” were, too. Like, say, in the recipe for Chantilly Potatoes, which begins, “The following recipe is reminiscent of the old coloured man who said all he could find that college had done for his children was to put ma on ’lasses and pa on ’taters.” The book was a treasure trove, the cover held together just barely with yellowed Scotch tape, with browning old scraps of paper protruding from its pages like the plates staggered along the back of a stegosaurus. The first crumbling newspaper clipping I extracted featured a recipe for spare ribs by the late Jehane Benoît, Canada’s original celebrity chef, who recommended a special trip to an Asian market to procure the required pre-made hoisin and MSG. (Trust me, she was a lot more deft with French country cooking.) A recipe in the poultry section was bookmarked with an ancient shopping list, which began with two highly promising ingredients: “ducks, oranges.” The next one I pulled out had my mother’s handwritten recipe for her memorable cheese pie. Next the volume surrendered an old telephone message for someone to please call George Axelrod (the author of The Seven Year Itch, who died in 2003). At the back of the book an appendix extols the virtues of the newly invented electric blender (“it is so much better than its reputation, that of making an A1 alcoholic drink”). Tucked between that and the dangling back cover I found a typewritten sheet containing some ingenious instructions for determining the temperature of an oven in that trying era that preceded the invention of the non-contact infrared oven thermometer:

1—Heat oven

2—Place a piece of white kitchen paper in the oven for three minutes.

3—If paper is:

Black—the oven is too hot

Deep brown—the oven is very hot

Golden brown—the oven is hot

Light brown—the oven is moderately hot

Light biscuit—the oven is slow

This struck me as indispensable wisdom for pinning to the cottage’s kitchen wall. If instead you find it uselessly vague, be advised that subjective oven temperatures from “slow” to “very hot” were standard terms for cookbooks of the day. “Very hot” was defined as 450 to 500°F, “hot” meant 400 to 450°F, “moderately hot” was 300 to 350°F, and “slow” indicated a temperature of 250 to 300°F. Temperature ranges of fifty degrees were considered more than adequately specific. Cookbook writers had yet to embrace the pretense that cooking was a precise, paintby-numbers activity, in which everything should always turn out tip-top regardless of a home cook’s level of experience—as long as one followed the instructions. Recipes were a lot shorter then, too, and seldom lingered pedantically over process. You just had to try them, and learn.

And judging by the books on the shelves, my mother’s learning curve had been steep. The more weathered volumes included Traditional Recipes of the Provinces of France, Selected by Curnonsky (nom de plume of Maurice Edmond Sailland, aka the Prince of Gastronomes, and co-author with Marcel Rouff of the twenty-eight-volume work La France Gastronomique). Curiosities like The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook shared shelf space with wellthumbed, stained, and once definitive tomes by Fernande Garvin, Robert Carrier, Simone Beck, and Elizabeth David. There was even a 1954 edition of Tante Marie’s French Kitchen—an early translation of La Véritable Cuisine de Famille par Tante Marie, which to generations of French was a seminal cookbook, akin to Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Then there was a first edition (1968) of Jane Grigson’s fantastic The Art of Charcuterie, which remains far more thorough than any trendily contemporary volume that I can think of. It also contains the following viscerally evocative scene from a small European village before the advent of refrigeration, when the annual slaughtering of pigs was of necessity and by design an autumnal ritual: “The pigs had fattened on acorns, Christmas was coming, the weather was cool and dry. The men sharpened their knives, and excited children soon ran—as they had done since Neolithic times and as they did in country villages until quite recently—to the terrible dying squeal of the pigs. It wasn’t horrified sympathy that drew them, but the thought of bladder balloons.”

What a waste; if those kids had only known that in 2012, at Epicure, in Hôtel Le Bristol in Paris, chef Éric Frechon would be peddling his take on the old Fernand Point classic of chicken baked in a pig’s bladder—poularde de Bresse en vessie—for €260 a pop. My mother never tried that one. But my father did once relate to me with great delight the occasion of her presenting a whole roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth to some gathered luncheon guests, some of whom promptly ran from the room, their hands clenched tightly over their mouths to prevent any accidents (a scene that he drew on, I always suspected, in Solomon Gursky Was Here, when Hyman Kaplansky scatters his gentile Seder guests by serving them matzo filled with fake baby’s blood). Still, most of the food that we grew up with was less rarefied stuff. By the time that I was old enough to notice, she had largely settled into a groove of refined but robust European staples that kept my father sated and happy and not too, too fat: spaghetti Bolognese, osso buco Milanese, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, roast leg of lamb with flageolets, her excellent roast chicken, fish pie, and whatever other fish she could slip by without mashed potatoes that would not provoke too much complaint (wild Atlantic salmon and Dover sole were tolerated, but not much else). And that was how my mother got me started on the importance of cooking: with an education of the palate.

Next she imbued a sense of comfort about being in the kitchen. Because I was the youngest, when my older brothers and sisters were still at school or just didn’t want me around, and my father was still at work, the kitchen was where I found her company. Of course, she gave me jobs to help make me feel useful. At age three or four, in England, I remember toddling off to the backyard of our house in Kingston upon Thames to fetch leaves from the bay laurel tree for her soups and stocks. By the time we moved to Montreal, I had graduated to far more complicated assignments, like sifting flour, a trick she had doubtlessly honed on my older siblings, guaranteed to keep me quiet in concentration for close to an hour. Next, in summertime, I picked up the concept of planning long term, when I was put on duty stirring macerated dried fruits for our Christmas cakes. But the actual need to cook anything more complicated than a fried egg, grilled steak, or broiled salmon steak did not arrive until I was a teenager, when suddenly my parents looked around, noted that all my siblings had left home, decided that they had enough with child-rearing, and upped stakes. They bought an apartment in Chelsea, London, a couple of blocks from Pierre Koffmann’s La Tante Claire (now Restaurant Gordon Ramsay), and started wintering there, and summering in Memphremagog while abandoning me to fend for myself in a luxurious downtown Montreal apartment across the street from the Ritz-Carlton.

As a student with a part-time job, I quickly learned that the fine restaurants that my parents had so considerately introduced me to were very much out of my price bracket. Then I learned that cheap fast food was revolting no matter how much dope one smoked first (and I really tried). The same went for all that processed frozen food my mother had banned from the house to my considerable resentment when I was growing up. So whenever she was around, I tried to capitalize on it, pressing her hard for cooking lessons. I still have a folder of the recipes with which she got me started, and looking them over, I can easily recall my desperation for greater precision in her measurements and instructions.

“Mince some carrots—”

“How many carrots?”

“Oh, one or two.”

Well, which is it for fuck’s sake?

Other times, she was excessively specific. My old file rather incredibly contains a recipe with her instructions for Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice. “Remember,” it reads, “stock cubes may be salty so do not season until the very end.” Fortunately I turned out to be a fast learner. Uncle Ben’s quickly gave way to pommes Anna, and from her spaghetti Bolognese, I tried my hand at replicating on instinct the poulet de grain—sauce moutarde I liked so much at L’Express bistro on Rue Saint-Denis. And it was not nascent talent that drove this learning so much as an epiphanous, experience-based realization that girls dug boys who cooked. On that front too, my mother’s tutelage was often useful. I remember, for example, early in university days, getting into a bit of a state one afternoon about what to cook for an imminent dinner for two, for it was a first date, the prey was almost absurdly fetching, and I so desperately wanted to get the meal right that I could not stop wavering on my menu. So I ran an idea by her.

“Oh no,” she said, her tone heavy with disapproval. “I wouldn’t make the duck à l’orange.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Well, what will you do to impress her next?”

Good point. In my enthusiasm I had neglected to consider the possible requirement of a second date to close the deal, and in that tense eventuality, my repertoire had nowhere to go but down. And so it came to pass that I learned that when in doubt, it is always better to embrace and run with well-executed simplicity rather than risk overreaching one’s grasp. (I still believe it now. But after nearly twenty years of writing about food, eating in great restaurants, hanging out in their chefs’ kitchens, and collaborating with them on cookbooks, my idea of simplicity has evolved some.)

So what does an experienced home cook throw together for his mother, two brothers, two sisters, two children, and a niece over a weekend at the country when there is far too much to pack and no time to cook? There were some things I had no choice but to bring with me. Such as a side of smoked salmon from a chinook I had caught that summer in the Haida Gwaii. And bread, from Toronto’s Petite Thuet, which, between chef Marc Thuet and his baker Martial Ribreau, turns out the best breads in the country. I do not just mean great baguette but real French bread: a sourdough miche as good as if not better than what you find at Poilâne, on rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris. I also had them toss in a few snacks to tide us over between proper meals: onion tarts, quiches lorraines, mountains of croissants, pains au chocolat, pain aux raisins to keep the children (young and old) happy. And I had ordered a couple of Thuet’s dark farmer’s rye, because for lunch one day I would be steaming up a smoked meat brisket sourced from Abie’s—Montreal’s finest—and it really does taste better on superior bread with real mustard. Other than that I would rely on local sourcing as much as possible. For dinners that meant leaning on the AGA and its proclivities for easy roasting, for the oven is all but guaranteed to reward your low effort with crisp, moist results. One night I would do some plump, organic chickens from Bio de Charlevoix and serve the birds with the easy accompaniment of roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions. For the next I would tap into the local duck supply and pop in a tray of Brome Lake Pekin duck confit, with a side of slender French green beans and wild rice, and a splash of port, red wine, and veal demi-glace reduction to dress things up a little. And that would pretty much do it—along with a fairly shocking amount of wine. My only regret is that I never did find that pie bird.