American cooking instructor and author Julia Child once said, “You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients."
Look no further than Canada’s East Coast to find traditional foods made from the freshest ingredients.
Often described as a vegetarian’s delight, hodge podge is a Nova Scotia favourite that's all about celebrating the vegetable harvest, says Chef Claude AuCoin, a culinary arts instructor at Nova Scotia Community College.
While he wasn’t familiar with hodge podge when he was growing up in Cheticamp, Cape Breton Island, AuCoin did discover the dish later in life.
“You cook the vegetables from your garden - the fresh peas, the corn, the carrot, the potatoes into a cream broth,” he said.
Although the one-pot wonder is often cooked in a milk or cream broth and made without meat, AuCoin sometimes adds a little homemade bacon to his hodge podge.
There are also online recipes that see cooking enthusiasts adding seafood to the dish.
AuCoin grew up with traditional foods.
“We had a large family … we lived off the farm and the sea, wild game … so traditional food was very important," he said.
"I grew up with our version of Jiggs Dinner, too. It didn’t have the peas pudding, but it was a boiled dinner … my father even salted some deer meat."
As a culinary instructor, AuCoin teaches his students everything from international foods to local favourites, including Acadian dishes.
He enjoys adding his own touches to chowder and has introduced that to his students as well.
“I use all the seafood imaginable and seaweed, smoked haddock… it’s a traditional recipe, but I’ve worked on it as well,” he said.
From stews to soups, AuCoin enjoys cooking meals his mother also fed to her family.
“My mother often made a chicken soup .... She would stretch it by adding more broth or water … and add lots of potatoes, celery, and onion. It was a very traditional soup, and sometimes, she’d add a package of gizzards or chicken hearts. We loved it.”
Another traditional dish that reminds him of his mother’s cooking is a vegetable-based soup where you add a weed from the garden called wild sorrel or wild spinach.
“They would add that to the soup to give it a distinct flavour,” he said.
That particular soup was popular in the summer, he said, as – similar to hodge podge – the main ingredients were freshly-harvested vegetables from the garden.
“My mom was born in 1921. She left me when she was 40 … there are some traditional dishes that may disappear because, even growing up, it was very rare to have some of these dishes,” AuCoin added.
Seafood and potatoes
Stephen Hunter is a chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of Canada at Holland College in Charlottetown, P.E.I. Originally from the Yukon, Hunter has lived all over Canada and settled on the Island about 28 years ago.
“Shellfish and potato are the big things here. Culturally, on Prince Edward Island, a seafood boil, boiled lobster and steamed mussels are very common,” he said.
Acadians living on the Island have their own traditional food, including a popular potato pie, Hunter said.
Like the potato, bar clams are also popular on both the English and French parts of the island, he said. As the name suggests, these large clams are found on sandbars at low tide.
They are often shucked, jarred, and cooked in a pressure cooker.
While some recipes remain long-standing traditions, Hunter said, other traditions haven’t been passed down through the generations.
“Food tradition is always changing. There is certainly some carry-over but quite a bit has been lost in the last 20 years … and that goes for everywhere, not just here (in P.E.I),” he said.
Jiggs Dinner
It’s not unusual for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to get together to make cold plates - salads and cold, sliced meats - to serve as fundraisers at community events.
But in Newman’s Cove, on the province’s Bonavista Peninsula, jiggs dinner is the meal of choice at the community’s annual garden party, and it's a staple in many Newfoundland kitchens every Sunday.
“We cook it in these massive pots … and I’ve learned all the different ways of how to do and not to do jiggs dinner,” Chef Katie Hayes said.
Jiggs dinner starts by soaking salt meat overnight in water.
It’s then simmered the next morning for a couple of hours before the vegetables (carrot, turnip, potato, and cabbage) are added to the pot.
Peas pudding, made by boiling split peas in a cloth bag with the other vegetables, is also popular served with jiggs dinner.
Hayes and her husband Shane Hayes own the Bonavista Social Club in Upper Amherst Cove, a short distance from Newman’s Cove.
Born in Ontario, she moved to Newfoundland with her parents, Mike and Lorie Patterson, when she was three years old. Her mother is a retired physiotherapist and her father operates a woodworking business next to the Bonavista Social Club.
Although jiggs dinner wasn’t a tradition in her family when she was growing up, Hayes has fond memories of enjoying the meal at friends’ homes most Sundays. It was a tradition that bought people in the community together, she said.
“I always thought it was called Sunday Dinner. It didn’t matter where you stayed the night before … you come home from university, Nan or Mom was always cooking Sunday Dinner and everyone in the family and the neighbours were at the table or sitting at the counter. Wherever you could sit … You ate it, then you talked about how much you ate, then you put your feet up (for a rest) after,” Hayes recalled.
Newfoundlanders love it so much that some chefs have even found ways to serve the traditional with a modern twist. While working at Raymonds Restaurant in St. John’s under owner Chef Jeremy Charles, she says, the restaurant served a jiggs dinner ravioli.
“We stuffed all the jiggs dinner flavours into a pasta … we also mixed in the juice that we cooked the vegetables in … it was like a deconstructed jiggs dinner in a fine dining restaurant.”
Does the younger generation carry the same passion for traditional foods as their ancestors?
With the busy lives young people live today, Hayes says, they may not be in a position to devote the time to prepare such meals.
“I don’t know if people now-a-days stay home long enough to soak the meat overnight and cook the meal the next day. And not everyone is together as much now. So, I definitely think we are losing (the tradition),” she said.
