School Projects

Lennis: We grew lots of vegetables when I was a child, and later on we lived where there were abandoned orchards and we used to go and pick apples because they would stay on the ground, one or two, and we would throw one apple down at a time for them to catch them, so they wouldn’t get bruised…and that way they would last, sometimes right up to February a nice King apple would last. And it was so good then! That’s how we kept our fruit, that’s what fruit we had.

And when I was littler and we lived by a lake, we used to catch fish. But we had no fridge, so we used to salt them and keep them, and then when you wanted to cook them, they would just be covered in salt, so we would have to wash it all off and then soak them for a few hours to get

some of that saltiness out, and then we would cook them. And we always had a cow or more than one, we all learned to milk a cow by the time we were six or eight. And so we would milk our cows, but we had no fridge to keep our milk, but we might have two gallons of milk, with the cream on top. ‘Cause we always had Jersey cows. We would take the cream, we’d set it for half a day or so in a cold place down by the well, and then we’d skim the cream off and and then we would in the summertime you great aunt Julie and i would go pick blackberries in our big blackberry patch, it was our job to go and pick blackberries for lunch and for supper,, and we would have blackberries and whipped cream every day because we had so much cream..And my mom and great grandma would make butter, sometimes we did too , with a small churn, not those big ones with the pump type thing. So we’d make our butter. And we canned a lot…fruit forever! Pears, crab apples, plums,applesauce. That was the fruit. And we also canned meat, because we had no fridge. If we butchered an animal we had to can the meat to keep it, and it would be nice and tender.

Taylor: How did you keep your food?

L: Mostly by canning, and by salting the fish when I was very little, and keeping the milk cold down by the well. By the lake, when I was small, this was northern Alberta, where we always had a big garden. The well was at Jedediah island, up the coast. Canning was everywhere. big vegetable garden, canned corn, lots of corn. One time the pressure canner top popped off the pressure cooker and there was corn all over the ceiling. That wasn’t a joke!

T: How was getting food different when you were a kid?

L: We lived isolated very much of the time, and when we bought food we bought it in bulk when we did buy food, big bags of dried beans and big bags of dried peas, and the rest of the food mostly, and wheat, for porridge.We would cook that up to supplement the food that we grew. Mostly we grew our own or collected it from abandoned orchards.

T: What is your favorite local food?

L: Here on Galiano? mostly I like fruit. I like King apples, they’re my favorite, they’re local, they’re right here.

T: Tell me about a food memory you have from your childhood.

L: Well, there were lots of children in our family so no one ever complained about what was to eat. So we quickly got whatever we could and ate! We didn’t want that because it wasn’t coming around again, the plate would be empty by the time it got back!

My favorite food memory..Making ice cream..it was nummy! That was it! That was when I was very little. One time my mother got the ice people to bring ice, and we had a big pile of sawdust,and they buried it in sawdust, because there was no fridge, there was no electric, we lived very far from electricity. And we didn’t have propane fridges or anything in those days, then in the summer we would dig it out from the sawdust, break it up with a sledgehammer, it came in big blocks, and we had a ice cream churn with a churn you turned by hand, there was a little container in the middle that you put the custard in; we had our own cows, and we’d add vanilla and sugar and good stuff in there….and then around the edge in the bigger container, the wooden container, you would put crushed ice and coarse salt, that would keep the ice frozen longer, and the inner thing was hooked to a handle that when you turned it it kept turning around and around and inside, in the inner container where the ice cream was being made, there were little wooden paddles that would scrape it off the edge as it got cool and then push it into the middle, and then more creamy custard would be cooling, making delicious ice cream so we had ice cream right at our house, without going miles to the store.

T: What seasonal food did you eat?

L: In the summertime we ate all our own vegetables and we ate fish and some of our own animals, sometimes sheep, I remember once we had goat but it wasn’t my favourite food memory.

T: What was the flavour of the ice cream?

L: Vanilla. We didn’t put fruit, I don’t recall putting fruit, cause the fruit wouldn’t be ripe yet, by that time the ice would be melted, because it would be very hot in the summer. And we used to pick wild strawberries, and wild raspberries too, there would be lots up there.

T: How do you overwinter your food?

L: Right now, how do I overwinter it? I still can, peaches and raspberries, pears and crab apples…fish. I love canned fish, salmon. I have a freezer that I use as well.

T: Where do you shop for your food?

L: I usually shop for most of my food in Sidney, at Fairway or the Co-op. Some things on Galiano. Usually on my trips to town, when I have to go overnight.

T: How did obtaining food change for you when you came to Galiano?

L: Most of my life I’ve lived isolated, so I bought food when I was in town and packed it. When I was first married and we were logging out on the mainland it used to be a whole day trip to come to town and get groceries. I remember once forgetting the eggs and the crew wouldn’t be happy with no eggs, I forgot a whole twelve or fifteen dozen eggs and had to go all the way back and get some. And I still pack. I’ve got a truckload of groceries that I haven’t finished unloading yet from today’s trip!

T: What foods make you think of spring?

L: Salmonberries. I guess. The first fruit to be edible in the spring.

T: What foods make you think of summer, and why?

L: Peas on the pod straight from the garden. I know a story about some boys, not from my family, but when I was little, this is a very cute story. They were out stealing peas from the garden and their mom asked them to quit pickin’ the peas out in the garden, so you know what they did? They were still in the garden, maybe they were supposed to be weeding,and they would reach up, split the pod open, and strip the peas out and leave the empty pods hanging .Weren’t they nasty boys?

T: What foods make you think of fall?

L: Ffish, pears, blackberries in late summer…pumpkin pie.

T: What food make you think of winter?

L: Soups and stews. I love pea soup, it’s my favourite.

Taylor had a recipe that she wanted me to give, a BREAD RECIPE.

The fruit and seed bread: I put flax, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, cracked wheat, millet, ground brown rice, cornmeal ,well, don’t put the cornmeal in, but the other I put in …cook it on the stove like a porridge for at least a half hour, and then you can let it sit for a long time, I do that in water, then I cook in soy milk, some cornmeal, that thickens it, then I add molasses,eggs, and some lemon juice, it helps the yeast work, and in a little while I put a bit of sugar, and some yeast, and let it bubble, and then I add brown flour and whip it in till it’s sticky and thick, too thick to whisk any more, and then I add unbleached white flour till it’s bread. The last time I made it, I don’t know whether it was the weather or what but it seemed to come up and then it fell down and I was lamenting it and your brother said that I shouldn’t worry because maybe the next time I made it I’ll learn to make it right again. I forgot..I also put chopped up dried apricots and craisins in.

Here’s some more about storing food: With potatoes, to keep them, we used to have a little trapdoor in the floor, and there was a hole under the house where we kept them, so they wouldn’t freeze, because it would snow all winter there. When we lived on Jedediah we had dug a big hole in the ground and we kept them down in that hole and covered it over so that they wouldn’t freeze. Even today I keep my potatoes in the coldest part of the house.

In the logging camp, when we forgot the eggs, I think we went halfway back, we could phone from there and then somebody else brought them out, because it was a long ways out, it took us two and a half hours by boat and then we had to go across Quadra and then catch the ferry on the other side to get to town….somebody rounded them up on Quadra for us and then brought them out most of the way. For a logging crew, they want their eggs for breakfast. You had a big list, and you tried not to forget things.

Even when I lived in town, I always just shopped one day a week. One shopping day, go get it and be done. And if you didn’t have it, well, just make something else. Don’t drive off to the store to get it just because you wanted to make that certain thing. You can substitute…the recipe’s a guideline. That’s all. You do the rest. Sometimes you forget how and your bread falls!

“I grew up in a sterile urban environment where I thought that the whole world was paved and that kind people dug up the pavement to plant seeds and let plants grow. My only joy was what was in the window boxes, my life long desire to be in nature.”

Here is a recipe from Dora Fitzgerald.

“I liked simple foods – no scary bits or weird flavours. One of those favourites was a nice serving of rice arranged on a plate to make 5 or 6 wells – just indentations. Gently pour melted butter into the wells and sprinkle the whole plateful with sugar & cinnamon. What a treat!

Rowan: When you were a child, how did you get your food?

Betty: Wherever we lived, my mother out a garden in right away. And we had chickens. We used to go to the butchers, and we got fresh cut meat. It was fresh, because we didn’t have refrigerators. And then where I lived, in South Vancouver, a Chinese fisherman used to come up. He had the big hat, and he had a pole over his shoulder with two baskets. The baskets had sacking on therm. And he’d lift the sacking and there were lovely fresh fish. He came to the door and all the bread companies had their bread wagons and they came to the door, whatever you ordered, bins or anything, brought to your door, fresh. And the same with the milkman, you put a note out saying you wanted a bottle of milk, a bottle of cream, or butter, and you got it fresh. Or, you could go to the store and get it, but we didn’t have refrigerators, we just had coolers, But now, if you don’t have a fridge, and you think you’ll keep something in an icebox and you buy something from a supermarket, it’ll go rotten in no time. That stuff’s not fresh, it’s old.

Of course, my mother was a wonderful cook, and the women made everything, pies and cakes. Wonderful food. My mother was Welsh, but it was sort of English cooking, meat and veg., that kind of stuff. And they made things that would take a long time to cook, like they’d take tongue and press it, and they’d make what they’d call head cheese, that was out of a pig’s head, and they made all kinds of stuff like that.

R: When you were young, how did you keep your food?

B: In the cooler. Just in the cupboard, but the stuff like milk and whatnot was in the cooler, which was simply a cupboard which had holes to the outside with screen on it, so that animals couldn’t get in.

R: How many days would milk last then just in that cooler?

B: Not too long, I can’t remember exactly except that the stuff was fresh, the stuff was fresh and they didn’t use sprays and all that.

R: How was getting stuff different when you were a kid?

B: I told you that already, a lot of it was delivered. Once a week my mother would go downtown to Woodwards. Woodwards was the big store that is now gone. It was famous for its food department, you went downstairs, they used to say foods from all over the world, and it was. Just once a week she’d go down in the streetcar, which took a long time, cause we lived way out on forty-ninth, and pick up like tinned stuff. We didn’t use a lot of canned stuff. I don’t know, maybe tea, coffee, I don’t remember. And then there were no bags. The girls at the counter had these great big sheets of brown paper, and they were absolutely amazing. They would pile this stuff up in a great big pile, and then wrap it in brown paper, and then they had really strong string…their poor hands! They tied it in a big knot, and then they cut it like that. And it was heavy, and it was big. And then we’d trail all the way home in the streetcar and all the mothers would be carrying this great big thing from Woodwards, as well as shopping bags. My little brother and I, we didn’t want to shop, so my little brother and I would sit on the steps, and of course it was wonderful, because we saw all these people coming into Woodwards, we just sat and watched the people, it was quite famous for its food department. The Woodwards family had a big ranch at the time, so they probably grew a lot of that meat. And then one of the other stores, Spencers, the big department store downtown, had an English couple, and soon in their food department they made crumpets! That’s all they did, this English couple with funny accents you know? They’d put the little metal frame down, and pour batter…they just made crumpets. And they were hot, oh! They were fresh, and so good!

R: What was your favourite local food?

B: Everything! My mom was a good cook.

R: What was your favourite food that your mom would make?

B: Oooooh! She’d say, what do you want on your birthday? And I’d say, roast pork with crackling, with mashed potato, mashed turnips, and gravy…..

R: You would ask for mashed turnips on your birthday?

B: Yeah, but they tasted better. Now, they don’t make….they’re not very interesting. There was no margarine then, and there’s no margarine allowed in this house. Ever! I don’t remember what I asked for for dessert. She used to make a wonderful rhubarb custard. I never tasted anything like it again. It even tasted good cold afterwards.

R: And you never got the recipe and made it yourself?

B: No. I don’t make pies. I can’t make pastry. I don’t like things sticking to my fingers.

R: Tell me about a food memory you have from childhood.

B: Well, my mother was Welsh, and so was my Dad. I’m Welsh. And And she’d just make them on the top of the stove.

R: What seasonal foods do you eat?we had a big wood and coal stove, black, and she’d make what they call Welsh cakes, make them right on the stove, they’re just like a soft round cookie and they’ve got currants in them Like a scone, a little round flat scone only they had currants in it.

B: Now? I like everything except okra. I hate okra. Slimy! Sometimes I find some of the kale and chard kind of strong.

R: How do you overwinter your food?

B: My old stables where I kept the horses is wonderful. There’s an old cupboard in one of the seed rooms, that one of my partners built for me, and I store apples in there, and pears, and I don’t store anything else, because I really don’t grow it. I could store squash, but I don’t have to because I can get it from Daystar.

R: But I know, for example, that you grow peaches, and make jam.

B: I grow peaches, pears and apples. Oh, and I freeze them, I slice the peaches and I just boil them a little bit, and I put them in containers so I basically have fruit year over for dessert. And my freezer is full of frozen peaches. And when my pears ripen I’ll have frozen pears to eat all winter. I make peach jam, gooseberry jam and pear ginger jam.

R: Yeah! Do you ever pick the blackberries?

B: I used to. I used to put a lot of berries in, but I have an itchy skin and I discovered it’s berries that cause it.

R: Oh man!

B: This is sad. So for the last few months I haven’t had raspberries, strawberries or blackberries. But normally I would, I had a lot in my front field and I’ve gotten other people to come and take them.

R: How and where do you shop for your food?

B: Daystar. On Friday. A little bit at the store for the stuff Daystar doesn’t have. Like Scotch. That’s its own food group.

R: How did obtaining food change for you when you moved to Galiano?

B:Well, I freeze a lot more. I think I probably eat more fruit and vegetables. I think Daystar’s a lovely store when it comes in on Fridays. It just looks like a painting in there. If Sandy goes to town I go with her, and then we go to the Red Barn. They sell some meat that’s non-medicated and they buy as much as they can from Vancouver Island. But I don’t like large portions of meat and I don’t eat meat every night.

R: What food makes you think of spring? Why?

B: Well, I guess lettuce and tomatoes and fruit. Those tomatoes you can buy, they look gorgeous and they have no taste at all. I’m growing my own now. I have three pots of tomatoes and a great big thing of green beans. I used to have a great big vegetable garden until…I guess when I went back to work, after my husband died, I stopped because I had so much to do. I was working and I had two horses and cats and dogs and all these things to look after…..but I love gardening.

R: What food makes you think of summer?

B: All the lovely fruits. Fresh vegetables. Corn on the cob!

R:What food makes you think of fall?

B: I guess the squashes, they’re so beautiful, all the different kinds, that’s a fall thing.

R: What foods make you think of winter?

B: Brussels sprouts. Cabbage. Because they grown in the winter!

R: Thank you.

B: You’re welcome. That wasn’t too bad!

We lived in Cheshire England, the war was on, the war started in ’39. Food was rationed, we were only allowed so much per week per person. We were only allowed one egg per week per person. The food that was rationed for families was generally termed as fats which was butter or margarine or lard plus sugar and meat. Meat was rationed in a different way instead of them saying you can have so many ounces per week it would go by price, so they may say that for this period of time your meat ration would be a shilling. Therefore when you went to the butchers you would look around for the cheapest cut. You may get a lot of cheap meat or you may decide to get two chops. We were rationed because we were at war and we were an island and we got as lot of our food from different countries. The Merchant Navy sure helped us out. The convoys coming across the Atlantic they helped us out with food. Sometimes the rations were decided on by whether there had been a lot of shipping that had been bombed or torpedoed and there would be not as many ships coming in with food so then we knew that our rations would not be as big. We were often hungry. Oranges were very, very scarce and the only people to get oranges were expectant mothers and toddlers for the vitamin c. I don’t remember oranges at all and I never ate a banana until I came to Canada. Even sweets were rationed, sweets and chocolate you couldn’t just go to the store and buy some you needed a ration card. We couldn’t believe the variety of food when we came to Canada; rows and rows of cookies I remember particular. Even now I prefer to shop in a small shop where I can only see so many cookies so I don’t have to choose from 50 packets of cookies. We had never seen so much food. Well the ration was on for ten years by the time we came over so we had never seen so much food. We came over in ’49 and the rationing went on until ‘53/’54. The war was over in ’45 but we were still on ration. After the war we sent food to Germany and Europe. We were in need but they were more in need.

Coming to Canada

Friends of our lived in Chilliwak and my brother had just got of the army just after the war and the friends said come on over to Canada, it’s a beautiful place and lots of work and of course England was in a real big turmoil in 1946/47so he came over. And my Mum decided, right we’ll follow, so we followed him in 1949. I was 21 (Jean) and I was 17. You have no idea what a big change that was….we are still getting over it! Everything was so different, the amount of food….you could eat and then eat again if you wanted to. I remember coming over on the train and the waiter came to see what we wanted to eat and we chose ham, I think. He brought two plates and put them down in front of us, there was five of us and then he went back to get more food but we thought that these plates were between all of us because it was such a huge amount of food and what we were waiting for was more plates and knives and forks. I think he was quite stunned when I asked is this just for me? I think that after you have been with limited food for a long time you don’t need as much and I do really think that we were all very, very healthy children. And we have said between ourselves and friends of mine, “if only we could get back to the rations during the war”, everything was given to us for a purpose. It was the best food available at the time and obviously it was enough because none of us starved to death, although we often went to bed with an empty stomach. There was no sense in saying well go and get a cookie or a piece of toast. Well if you were permitted so many slices of bread a week and you ate two on Tuesday you could forget bread on Wednesday. But some of us liked sugar but we got very little per week so my brother liked sugar and he would eat his very rapidly whereas I would eat mine slowly. I still do, I still ration myself.

You didn’t drop into anyone’s home for a cup of tea or a coffee or whatever, you just didn’t. And you never went anywhere during a meal ‘cause they couldn’t help you and if they did help you then the lady of the house was probably going without.

Spring

Spring Cabbage and Strawberries, rhubarb, which I am enjoying right now. I very seldom ever buy fruit or vegetables out of season. I don’t think they are worth having; there is no taste to them. I’d rather wait which of course we did in England. We didn’t have the opportunity of having all the food that you have in Canada. A lot of the food in Canada comes from the States or Mexico whereas in England it was a much bigger trip to come so we generally ate things in season.

Cooking Changes

Our Mother made all of our bread in England and the flour is so different over here and the recipes just didn’t work so we had to change to Canadian recipes. Very, very few English recipes worked over here unless you adapted them so you had to learn by trial and error.

M: When you were a child, how did you get your food?

E: The local butcher, and we had a garden, and we had chickens, so that’s about it.

M: How did you keep your food?

E: Well, there weren’t any fridges, when I was a child. We had a cold pantry, usually in the shade at the back of the house. It had long, sometimes marble slabs, and that’s where we kept milk, and fish, and everything.

M: How was getting food different when you were a kid?

E: Well, when I was a child, we were lucky to get food. It was just after the first world war, 1918, when I was born, it was what they called the Depression. Not a lot worse then what they have now, they call a recession. And then when I was about thirteen it was really bad so we had to grow as much of our food as possible, and use our chickens, and my father used to catch rabbits, I used to go with him to help catch the rabbits. I grew up in Durham, County Durham, on the North East coast of England, a coal mining town.

M: What is your favourite local food?

E: Fish.

M: Tell me about a food memory you have from childhood.

E: We always had a big pot of soup, or broth as we used to call it, hanging on a hook over the coal fireplace. A big bowl of soup with a big ladle in it, it was always there when we came home from school. And homemade bread. We didn’t know any different then. It was during the second world war that sliced bread came out. I remember that. But mostly home-made bread was what we had. My mother used to make about ten loaves at a time. We used to have a fender in front of the fireplace and I remember all the loaf tins when I came home from school, full of bread rising. And we used to have the coal oven. It was a round one. We didn’t have an electric stove when I was a child, that was mostly later on, when I was a teenager.

M: What seasonal foods do you eat?

E: Seasonal food, well, it depends on the season, in the summer there’s fruit, and berries, and in winter mostly vegetables, I like asparagus in the spring.

M: How do you overwinter your food?

E: Mostly by freezing.

M: How and where do you shop for food?

E: Locally, as much as possible. The market for fresh vegetables and fish and chicken.

M: Why did you choose your recipe for the cookbook?

E: Oh, parsnip and carrot soup is very nutritious, good for you. Easy to make. and the pineapple cake has no fat in it, it’s very moist and makes a nice big cake. I have Yorkshire puddings there because they remind me of family gatherings, we always have Yorkshire puddings, especially in England. And my granddaughter, whose name was Yarrah, she used to come to this school, and she and her father used to have a competition who could eat the most Yorkshire puddings. And she always won. She could eat about twelve at a time.

M: How did obtaining food change when you moved to Galiano?

E: Well, we shopped in the city, in Ontario,mostly in supermarkets. Here, we shop locally.

M: What foods make you think of spring and why?

E: Spring….mint, parsley, asparagus, lamb, mint sauce and lamb, parsley..and fish.

M: What foods make you think of summer?

E: Strawberries, fruit, making jam, blueberries,and freezing; preparing for the winter.

M: What foods make you think of fall, and why?

E: Pumpkin pie, root vegetable and soups, I make a lot of soups, and freeze them, too.

M: What foods make you think of winter, and why?

E: Turkey, Christmas pudding, pork and bean soup, mincemeat pie.

Tina: When you were a child, how did you get your food?

Dave: Well, over here on the island I used to only come over here in the summer time with my grandmother. And we used to stay down at her cottage and we used to get some of our food from some of the local farmers here. They weren’t big farms but they were small farms. We would get our vegetables in the summer time from them, that’s the only time I can remember. I don’t remember much beyond ten years of age, but when I was ten and twelve I used to go down to the rocks with my cousins and we would catch fish, we would catch rock cod off the rocks, off of our place, off of the Lawrence’s. We also used to get some salmon from Felix Jack, who was an aboriginal person across the Pass on Mayne Island on Helen Point. We used to get blackberries when they came out. Other than that, Eddie Bambrick used to have a store, and Stanley Page, who was the taxi driver at the time, would take my grandmother down to the store and get food from Eddie Bambrick’s store. I remember that. My grandmother would bring some over, but not a lot. We had dried foods like Kraft dinner from time to time – that was big! And my grandmother was a really spectacular cook, so we would have ham and things like that – does that answer your question?

Tina: Yes

Dave: Here’s some more….we would also get clams from the beach too, OK. At that age I wasn’t into oysters, so, clams I liked but I didn’t care for oysters. Now I do.

Tina: How would you get the clams? How would you find where they were?

Dave: Oh well they were on the beach in their little holes. You could just go down their at the low tides and in the summer time, when you have your low tides there were lots of clams on the beach then, you know Little Neck clams and Butter clams and not so much now, but then there were lots. And what we used to do is, we put them in a bucket with salt water and oat meal so that they would clean themselves. And then you’d eat them the next day. That was the theory anyway.

Tina: When you were young, how did you keep your food?

Dave: Well, there was no electricity, so my grandmother would sometimes get an ice box, and actually we had a boat house, and the boat house was over the water under a maple tree. There was a little attachment to the boat house, with screens on it, and it was out over the water, you know, on the high tides. At low tides, of course, it wouldn’t be. And it was cool because the maple tree shaded everything and there was an ice box, and she would get some ice, and I don’t know where she got the ice from. That would be stuck in the ice box and you would keep your butter there, keep your milk there, and all your perishables. There was a lot of them, but you would keep them there. That was how you used to keep them. So, you’d walk down from the cottage if you needed some more butter. There were no fridges. That’s how it was done. And the cooking was all done on a wood stove. We had a wood stove, there was no electricity like I said. But eventually we had an oil stove, and Mr Lorenz, who lived on the island and had the gas station at that time, would bring down a big 45 gallon barrel of stove oil, and we got pretty fancy with this stove – we had an oil stove!

Tina: How was getting your food different when you were a kid?

Dave: It was a lot different because you didn’t have anywhere near the selection. You didn’t have cold storage like you’ve got now. Although, I’m sure Eddie Bambrick did, he probably had a generator, but I don’t remember much about that, except that the variety wasn’t the same. You’d have ham because it was preserved, but if you didn’t catch your own fish, you didn’t have that. There wasn’t as much access off the island as there is now. It was a lot different. There were way more fresh vegetables when we got them from various places on the island. So, that’s how it’s different than now. Nowadays, we’ve got fridges, we’ve got freezers. We also had a cold storage, I should mention this too. We also had a cold storage on the north-east corner, where we would put apples and vegetables that don’t need to be kept really cool, but have to be cool, but not as cold as butter and all those other things. So,that would be kept, and I still have that. That’s where I…I guess I’m getting ahead of myself on the questions, but that’s where we still keep all our apples and stuff, over the winter now, and our fruit.

Tina: What was your favourite local food?

Dave: I like it all! I liked the clams, I like oysters, I like salmon, I like cod. I like apples from our apple trees, I like the lamb that we raise, I like the lettuce that we grow. I don’t know that I have one particular favourite food – I like it all. Sorry I can’t be more specific. I like everything. Arugula, we grow that, I like arugula in my salad.

Tina: Tell me about a food memory that you have from your childhood?

Dave: Well, I guess my favourite food memories were the pies that my grandmother used to bake, and the pastries that she used to make. It was amazing because she had this wood stove, and it was pretty hard to maintain, at least for us nowadays, yet she could cook unbelievably on that stove. She used to take the pies and and pastries and put them out on the window to cool, and my cousins and I would try and sneak more cookies, and we’d try to filch some when she was having a nap or something. They were blackberry and apple pies, and she used to make a German cinnamon roll which was really pretty good. That was my favourite memory. Also, we used to make some ice-cream the old fashioned way with salt, and real cream that wasn’t pasteurized, that I think she probably got from Allen Stewart’s farm. Then you’d spin that with salt, and bust up these blocks of ice. But that was only once a summer that we’d do that.

Tina: What seasonal foods do you eat?

Dave: I eat mushrooms, I eat lettuce and cabbage, we grow our own. We buy some too, but we do grow it. Garlic, carrots, peas, beans, we grown that and we freeze it for the winter. Kiwis, we grow kiwis.We grow grapes, but the raccoons get the grapes before I ever get them. Various types of apples – we’ve got 40 apple trees, so we have orange cox pippin, we have graven-stein, gala, newton pippin, grimes golden, transparent – those are the sort of foods that we have. I like it all.

Tina: How do you overwinter your food?

Dave: We have a freezer, a desiccator, which dries food. Sometimes we take the apples and dry them, and preserve them that way over the winter. We have a vacuum packer, so we vacuum pack a lot of our food. We vacuum pack our blackberries, freeze them first. You put them on a tray, put them in the freezer. They get hard, and then you vacuum pack them. If you do it when they’re soft, they squish, and you get nothing because of the pressure. So, things like fish, if we catch fish, which we do from time to time. We get crab, but we haven’t been very successful at getting prawns. We get them off Lloyd Baines when he gets prawns. But we do a lot of vacuum packing of our stuff because it preserves it longer. But my son and I, both, we go fishing from time to time to Renfrew or other places, and we catch our fish, and put it in the vacuum packer, and store it in the freezer. The freezer is big now. The other stuff, like the apples, I keep in the cold storage we talked about, and they keep right through. I actually made an apple pie four weeks ago from apples that I kept over winter. But you have to look at them regularly, because sometimes if they’re bruised when you put them in there they might rot, so you’ve got to make sure you take them out. You know the old saying, “one rotten apple ruins the barrel.”, you know what I mean. So you’re looking at them and checking them, and you shouldn’t put vegetables with certain apples because they give off certain gases, which problems in terms of deterioration. So, that’s sort of how we do it.

Tina: How and where do you shop for your food?

Dave: I shop on the island to some extent, I shop in Sidney sometimes, but I don’t do a lot of shopping for food. We have our lambs. We sell our lambs, but we always keep a couple for ourselves, and we both really like lamb. I catch a fair amount of fish, not as many as I used to but I still catch fish from time to time. I eat more vegetarian now than I ever used to. I get fish off Lloyd Baines, for example, and when I hear Lloyd has some prawns, I try and get some off Lloyd, so there’s a variety of ways to shop. And as I said, there’s clams, I dig for clams sometimes. I make a clam chowder or I’ll make a chioppino, you know, a clam fish dish and stuff like that. So I try to use a lot of natural stuff. I don’t like to buy too much from other places because I’m concerned….ours is all organic and we don’t use any pesticides or any fertilizer. We only use sheep manure for our fertilizer, and I’m a little nervous about the stuff they put on food today.

Tina: What are your favourite recipes?

Dave: I’ve got lots of recipes! Again, it’s like the question about favourite food. I’ve got a lot of favourite recipes. I like to make paella, which is a Spanish rice dish which has got prawns in it, it’s got clams, it’s got sausage in it. It’s a big rice dish, it’s got peas in it. It’s made in a big dish. I like clam chowder. My favourite lamb dish is a recipe from the Pink Geranium, which I don’t think you can beat. Every time I’ve served it to people, they go crazy! So, I’ve kept that and without a doubt, for me it’s just the most spectacular lamb recipe that you’re going to do on a barbeque. So, how did I choose it? One day I looked at it and it looked pretty good, so I tried it out, and it was fantastic. Although, my favourite way to have lamb is to barbeque a whole lamb. And I’ve done that from time to time for fund raisers – once for the Conservancy, and I’ve done it for the Rod and Gun Club, and I’ve just done it myself, where I just take to whole lamb, and just barbeque it on the spit. I’ve got a big barbeque for doing that. We put garlic inside the meat and rosemary inside the meat and make a oil with herbs, such as rosemary and basil and pepper, and also put salt inside the cavity of the lamb before I put it on. But there are lots of those dishes, and I like them all! I like to pan fry cod. You know, I’ve got a big recipe book that I’ve made over the years, from the newspaper, The Times Colonist, from other things, where I’ve seen something that looks good, so I’ll try it out to see if I like it, and if I do, I keep it, and then I’ll cook it. Another recipe, not my favourite, but it’s not bad, is an aboriginal recipe for clam chowder, which I think my dad got from Felix Jack. It is cooked with clams, seaweed, dulse and the green, and there’s usually a bunch of sand at the bottom, at the end of it. It’s a different kind of clam soup because they didn’t have milk, they didn’t have all kinds of other things to put in it, but it is really quite delicious.

Tina: How did obtaining food change for you when you moved to Galiano?

Dave: When I lived in town I had a bit of a garden, but I didn’t have the time, and I didn’t have anywhere near the garden I’ve got here. So, I grow way more of mu own food than I ever did. I tend to my apple trees, like I have to prune them, so I get apples, and blackberries and so on. I think I eat a whole lot healthier than I did before. Don’t go out for dinner like I used to go out for dinner,but I think that’s better for me. I think it is a real bonus in terms of what has happened to my diet, and food – and I like growing it, I get a kick out of it.

Tina: What foods make you think of Spring?

Dave: I guess, lettuce. It is something you can grow in the Spring and eat early. But I also think about other things like brussels sprouts and broccoli, because I plant my own seeds in my greenhouse to put in my garden. You think of a whole variety of things like that. And then this arugula I talked about. It self seeds, same with mustard grains which we grow, they self seed so we have some of that early on in the Spring, but when the weather gets warmer it bolts, so the spring foods are the ones that don’t bolt in the heat, and grow in the cooler weather. You think about tomatoes so you can get them growing for transplanting later. There’s a whole variety – Spring is one of my favourite times. And Fall is one of my favourite times, mainly because in the anticipation of planting and growing it, then in the Fall, not all of it, but then for some of it, harvesting it. Then your apples are there, your brussels sprouts, your broccoli can be done in early Spring too. Radishes are something to think about in early Spring. They grow easy and grow quick and they’re tasty. Also, in the Spring, oysters. It’s the best time to harvest oysters, in the months that have an “r” in them, so that’s January, February, March, April. After that they start getting milky. That’s when they start their reproduction cycle, so May, June, July, August, again you’re not eating many oysters. You start thinking about it again in the Fall.

Tina: What foods make you think of Summer?

Dave: Maybe, salmon. It used to be that we’d catch most of our salmon, the best fishing for salmon used to be between July 7 to the end of August. Sometimes you’d get winter springs, but they weren’t as big and they weren’t as predominant. We used to catch a lot of salmon in those summer months because the fish were moving through, feeding on herring.

Tina: What foods make you think of Fall?

Dave: Apples, kiwi, brussels sprouts of course, beans, scarlet runner beans, long green beans. I harvest them usually in the early Fall. Another Fall vegetable is a pumpkin.

Tina: What foods make you think of Winter?

Dave: Squash, and chard. Turnips, they’re not in the real winter, but just when winter is starting.

Tina: Why do they remind you of Winter?

Dave: I guess because that’s when you start harvesting them or storing them. It’s later on in the year when they’re ready. I used to get venison in the hunting season, so you think about deer at that time. I’m not a fan of venison, but my dad used to shoot them from time to time. Elk, moose, you get that in the Fall. I like all that kind of meat, because I have friends who do that and will give me some from time to time.

Tina: I ‘d like to go back to when you were talking about your garden. Did your grandmother have a garden?

Dave: Yes, she was a fantastic gardener. She had a great garden, so did my grandfather. He had a big orchard, not where we live now, but up at the end of Morgan Road, where they originally settled. They had chickens, cattle, a big orchard. And my grandmother was a spectacular gardener. I’ve got pictures, paintings of their place when they had it. So some part of my interest in gardening is through my grandparents. My dad loved to garden. I remember when I was a kid he grafted a tree that had four different kinds of apples, and they all came out at different times. That was in Vancouver, and that apple tree is still there today. It was still yielding when we sold it, and the people who bought it were delighted to have this apple tree. And we used to keep bees, and get honey. I haven’t done it here, well I was doing it, but the mites took out all my bees, and so I haven’t bothered with the bees. But I’m thinking of doing it again. We got all our honey ourselves from the bees. We used to take it out of the combs, and pour it through a cheesecloth and get the bits and pieces out of it. I guess that sort of farming, growing things was something that was in my family. We grew mushrooms for example, at different times. I grow asparagus. I guess that’s all how I got interested in doing this stuff.

We were talking earlier about how you keep foods. Well, I never did canning, but my grandparents did it, and my dad did it. I remember that they had a canner, which I still to this day have. I should have mentioned that, because last year I canned cherries, peaches. Some of the fruits like that that don’t keep as well, if you can them, in a low sugar mixture, well, we’ve had cherries and peaches all winter through that. But my grandparents used to can with cans, not jars – we can with jars now – and they would can with tin cans. And I’ve still got all this equipment, I don’t have the cans anymore, or the lids, and they would do that. They had quite a big Bur-pee canner. In that canner I can probably can about a dozen jars at a time. I used to can my salmon a lot too. I don’t do that as much now because of the freezer, and because of the vacuum packer, but I still from time to time will can salmon, and I’ve probably got about a dozen jars of canned salmon still in my big highboy cupboard that I have. So we do can. There’s a variety of ways in which you keep stuff. I like salmon better canned than I do frozen because a of of times, even when you put it in the vacuum pack it’s a little better, but a lot of times it gets freezer burn. So I just love to have a jar of canned salmon.

Tina: My dad used to can salmon too. I’d put a cracker in it with some cream cheese with the canned salmon…

Dave: Well you can’t beat it can you! And the other thing I’ve done, is I’ve smoked salmon. OK, and there’s two ways of doing it, hot smoke and cold smoke. I don’t do the cold smoke because I’m not skilled enough to do that, and you have to be very careful doing that. But I’ll do a hot smoke and sometimes I’ll take a piece of hot-smoked salmon and put it in the salmon I’m going to can. Now you only need a small piece and it pervades the whole jar of salmon, so you’ve got smoked salmon in the jar, which is pretty good on a cracker too. That’s the way people used to do it. That’s how they did their preserved stuff.

“I do have a food memory, and it’s about lack of food. I was a child in the 1930’s when there was a nasty depression, as we’re having a recession now as they call it. But then it was The Great Depression.

And many, many people were out of work, particularly the miners in the north of England, and they set out on a long march to London, to plead their case. They had no money, they couldn’t afford to buy food, they had no housing. And I was in school when they came through. I was 11 at the time, and my school was in Stafford, which is in the middle of England, and we went to feed them. All the school children, all my school mates anyway went to give them food. Our parents made soup and we took it to the county hall, a big place in the middle of the city. It made a profound impression on me because they hadn’t any shoes, they’d got bits of cloth wrapped round their feet, and they had absolutely nothing. And that was probably my first social learning, that people really were starving in the country that you were living in. And that was pretty hard to take.”

When she was a child her family grew their own vegetables in their allotment, and also went to the local grocery store. They went to different stores for their food because in England everything was separated. There were greengrocers for vegetables, and grocers for sugar and tea. She kept animals for eating only during the war, especially remembering the importance of keeping bees because that meant they had sugar. During the war they also kept pigs and rabbits.

They had a cold pantry with cold marble shelves in it for keeping pheasants, hares and rabbits. She didn’t like eating animals that she had known!

As a child she ate less exotic foods. The only exotic foods were bananas and oranges, but never saw a mango until she came to Canada.

She loves oysters. That’s her favourite food on Galiano.

One of her strongest food memories is of the lack of food during the great depression. She saw miners who had marched to a public place where school children, and Margaret was one of them, brought them food. She noticed that some of them had no shoes. Overall, people actually were starving.

Noal asked her how she adapted to living here, food wise. Margaret said that the only differences were maple syrup and corn.

“We eat corn in Canada, but not in England. Corn was something we called maize and fed to the chickens”.

Her favourite food is seafood. She likes cooking seafood on Galiano.

For the cook-book, she brought a recipe for marmalade. She chose it because it is the recipe she knows best, and people on the island know her marmalade well. That’s what she does best. It’s made of sour oranges, Seville oranges.

Nettles remind her of spring. She has always eaten nettles, since she was a little girl. The beginning of spring here also makes her think of carrots and parsnips which she digs up after they’ve been in the ground all winter – they seem to have a special taste.

Summer makes her think of strawberries.

Winter is a time for all the Christmas special foods, like mince meat and Christmas pudding. When she was a little girl she had jelly, all the coloured jellies that they used to make themselves.

“We used to have jellies, coloured jellies. We made them ourselves. We used to make our own jello from calves’ feet. You’d boil the calves’ feet and get the jelly and add it to the fruit”

Fall makes her think of apples, plums and all the fruit we get in the fall.

At the end of the interview Noal asked a few more questions:

Noal – Did you ever have big Christmas feasts when you were young?

Margaret – Oh yes, very big Christmas feasts and very big Easter feasts as well. When I was a child in England we didn’t have easter bunnies, we had easter chickens. Chickens were the thing. So living on the farm we always used to get new chickens at easter time.

Christmas dinner in our house was usually roast goose and bread stuffing, which was lovely, and all sorts of vegetables, whatever we had in the garden. And then we had Christmas pudding and brandy sauce, and mince pies, and Christmas cake with icing on it. It was all decorated. And I’ve still got the decoration that we used to put on our Christmas cake when I was a little girl. It was a Santa Claus, only he was called Father Christmas then.

Noal – What’s your favourite food that you used to eat in England?

Margaret – You know, I really like porridge, real oatmeal porridge with cream, which is very bad for you when you get old. I liked other special foods, but that’s the daily food that I really liked.

Depression Kid

I grew up during the depression on a farm in Northern Alberta. I was born in 1931, right at the beginning of it. I was never hungry. This was one advantage we had over city or town kids. We grew almost everything we needed to eat. The garden was huge, we grew enough vegetables to last to spring or even past spring and then started the cycle again. We were a lot better off then city kids. Meat, moose or deer we could kill them if we needed meat. When I think back on some of the dishes we ate there couldn’t have been very much in the old larder because it wasn’t a real sophisticated type of meal; it would just fill us that’s all….sometimes just hot milk and dumplings or something that created bulk and was warm and filled you now that I think back on it but to us as kids we always left the table full.

Lutefisk

There was something Mother made around Christmas that I haven’t had since I left the country. It was called Lutefisk. It’s cod, it’s a Norwegian dish and it’s dried for the sake of preservation. It was hard, as hard as this board. What you did was restore it back to an edible food. This doesn’t sound very good but you soaked it in lye, but then you soaked it in water and flushed all the lye out of it and then it was restored back to cod, good and soft, served with butter. And that is a dish I haven’t had since I left the farm.

Cabbage Rolls

This was another favourite recipe of mine. These were not Ukrainian style. I asked Mother one time if she brought that recipe over from Norway. She no, no I found this one in the Free Press Prairie Farmer, which was a Winnipeg paper. Ukrainian cabbage rolls have no meat, theirs is cabbage and rice but Mother’s were just loaded with hamburger and she served them with whipped cream, not whipping cream but at the end of the cooking cycle she poured cream over it and let it cook into the food. It is very rich.

Jacob: When you were a child, how did you get your food?

Kate: Well I grew up in England and I grew up during the war. So that was a special time in England and most of our food was local becase there were a lot of submarines and warships all around the island of Britain and so we couldn’t have food brought in from outside. We used to buy most of our food in stores, but not super markets like you have today, more little stores which would sell one particular kind food, like fish shop, or a meat shop or a veggi shop. There were a few little stores, more like our corner stores that would sell a variety of things. We had a few thing delivered to our door, and one of the main things was milk. Our milkman came every day, and during the war there was a great shortage of gasoline in England, so he brought it in a van pulled by a horse. We also had a little farmers market where some of the farmers would bring veggies and fruit, and occasionally things like chickens, although they were rather rare, and eggs to that market on a Saturday so that’s mostly where we got our food.

J: When you were young, how did you keep your food?

K: Well, we shopped basically every day. We kept some root veggtables and potatoes in a cool room in the house. We had a refrigerator so we could keep food. If we bought fish in the morning we could keep it cool, or meat and eggs or stuff like that. We also canned, in England that’s called bottling, so we bottled a lot of fruit and some veggies in the summertime for the winter. We also pickled things and spiced them, veggies particularly, we used to spice onions and beetroot and other veggies too, I think. Some people, I think, dried things .We were not very much into drying things in my family.

J: How was getting food different when you were a kid?

K: Well, getting food was different in the sense that we used to walk, and we walked quite long distances to get food. Now, my mother was a doctor and because she was a doctor she had a car and gasoline, so my mother and my father, (my father was ill,), but he used to drive my mother, and so they would go to some of the stores for big heavy things. Now, because my mother was a doctor, she worked in some of the rural areas around the little city were we lived, because a lot of the male doctors had been called up and were in the war, so she had a huge practise. She worked very hard but she would go out to the farm houses if there was a serious illness or particularly to deliver babies. And there was a maternity nurse who would go out and deliver the babies with her, but she would usually come for the deliveries if she could, and the farmers would often give her a little gift of food. It could be butter or eggs, or if we were really lucky, a chicken, because she had done that and there was also a convent nearby. She looked after the nuns in the convent and they kept bees. Now, in England during the war, if you kept bees you were allowed a big ration of sugar to feed the bees, and so when she went out to the convent she often came back with honey, and sometimes the nuns would sneak a little bit of the bees’ ration of sugar, and would make candies, called sweets in England, and we would get a little present of sweets, usually fudge. It was very good.

J: What is you favourite local food?

K: Well, one of my favorite local foods for sure, is blackberries. I had a lot of blackberries growing in my garden or all around my garden. I pick those in the fall and enjoy them a lot.

J: Tell me about a food memory you have from childhood.

K: Well, I can remember going with my father, because as I explained, my father used to drive a car, and while my mother was in her office he would sometimes do some shopping. And he was a very good shopper because of course it was unusual for a man to go shopping in those days, and some of the storekeepers were men and they really liked to chat with my father, who was a very good social person .And I remember particularly going to the cheese shop with him and in those days the cheeses were huge big things. They were great big round things and we had rations of cheese that were tiny, really minute, about 2″x3″x1″ – that would be the ration for an adult for a week. But i remember going in there and being lifted up beside these cheeses which were actually taller than I was, and having the cheese monger chop a piece of cheese that was big enough to fill my hands, and eating it. So that was a very special thing to do while my father and the shop keeper were chatting away, and I was chewing on the cheese.

J: What seasonal foods do you eat?

K: Well, I have a garden and, oh I forgot to mention, actually in England we had a house that was built around a square and that usually that had a nice lawn in the middle and bushes and flowers and things, but during the war that was dug up and turned into allotments. Each house around was able to have a little allotment if you wanted. And so we had an allotment, so we grew some veggies, but not very many, and the person who did our gardening for us liked to have the veggies for us when they were very big. they were usually very tough and so people form the house would try to sneak out and pick beans and peas and carrots while they were kind of small, and would get into a lot of trouble. So we grew a little bit of our food. I grow veggies and things in the summertime. Nowadays I freeze my food so I freeze corn, I freeze a lot of fruit and I eat fruit through ut the winter that I’ve frozen in the summertime. So I buy rather little fruit in the wintertime because of that.

J: How and where do you shop for your food?

K: Nowadays? Well, I shop partly here on the island in the stores on the island, but it is very expensive to shop here, and the choices are a little bit limited, so when I’m in town I also shop in town, and I don’t very much like shopping in really big supermarkets, so I prefer to shop in small stores, and these days I’m trying to buy a lot of organic food. So I tend to shop in stores that sell organic food.

J: Why did you choose these recipes?

K: Well, partly I chose them because I thought a lot of people would choose sweet things, so I decided to do pickled things, and because we used to pickle things when I was a child and I thought it would be nice to include things that were sort of pickled. I included one jelly recipe because those are actually fruits that are growing around my yard here. I have hawthorn trees which have a lot of bright red berries that the birds eat in the wintertime, so do squirrels I discovered, and rose-hips too.

So I included those because I have them growing around me. I also have a crabapple tree out on the road where there are lots of crab-apples. The ketchup was just fun, and I don’t actually pick mushrooms myself but I know a lot of people who do, and I thought it would be fun to have a mushroom recipe so people could make something fun with mushrooms.

J: How did obtaining food change for you when you moved to Galiano?

K: Not really very much. When I was younger and kids at home and we used to have a lot of food because I had four kids and so the shopping was huge especially when they were teenagers. Of course I used to shop in a supermarket getting huge quantities of stuff. But once they were grown up and I was living in a smaller arrangement I used to shop particularly in the smaller stores. I’ve kind of kept that habit going. I’ve tended to, and still tend to shop locally, here and in the city because I like to support local stores as I do here.

J: What foods make you think of spring? Why?

K: Well, the big food that really makes me think of spring is rhubarb., because I’ve got masses of rhubarb growing. I’ve got a really big rhubarb patch growing and I picked my first rhubarb last week. I really like it stewed with strawberries, a little bit of honey and then I eat it in the morning with some yoghurt and granola and it is very very good.

J: What foods make you think of summer? Why?

K: Well, in summer we have such wonderful veggies, so I really like to grow peas and beans and beetroot and garlic. I grow a lot of garlic and onions. So I would say that I tend to think of the food that I eat particularly in terms of veggies and fruit. Of course we have a lot of fruit, I have a great big strawberry patch. They’re really delicious. I expect a huge crop of strawberries this year and a few raspberries, but then I grow currants and apples and plums too.

J: What foods make you think of fall? Why?

K: Fall, well, late summer and the beginning of fall is really blackberry season, and so I’m out gathering blackberries. And apples, I think, go into the fall too. I see people gathering mushrooms and things then so I think of mushrooms in the fall, and I do eat them, that other people have collected.

J: What foods make you think of winter? Why?

K: Well, one of the foods that I really dislike makes me think of winter. And that is the brussels sprout. I hate it! But there it is, a common food in the wintertime, which I try to avoid. So in the wintertime I’m eating my frozen fruit and some frozen veggies which are very delicious. I like those a lot. I don’t really pick much to eat in the wintertime. I’m growing some things usually in the winter. The other thing in the spring which I didn’t plant last fall, which I usually do, which I like very much are broad beans, and they usually are ripe in the early summer as I leave them in over the winter.

by Jacob Parfitt

When you were a child how did you get your food?

She didn’t have stores, they had cows. Milking cows and meat cows. They had chickens. They went hunting, looking for deer and grouse. Her dad, when he got home, right away he guts the deer, and the offering to her mother is the liver. That was the prime part of the deer.They made it hot. They always had flower and sugar.

When you were young how did you keep your food ?

Her mom kept butter, milk and eggs in the pantry that was cold. They had no refrigeration, so they had a root cellar. They had apples and all the vegetables all winter, and fresh meat canned. A lot didn’t can fish or meat.

How was getting your food different when you were a kid ?

No shopping, no stores. They fished and they hunted, getting getting food in the forest. Now she goes to the store, but they never went to the store when she was a kid. She never saw a can of soup.

What is your favorite local food?

Her favorite local food is her home grown apples. Her favorite food in the spring is nettles.

Tell me about a food memory you have from childhood.

Her favorite food memory when she was a child is her mom’s home made bread. It was a really big treat for her and her mom would save some of the bread dough and fry it in bacon fat.