Friday, June 20, 2008

Canadian Food Words: The Juicy Lore & Tasty Origins Of Food That Founded A Nation

Here’s another book about Canada – a fun book this time – Canadian Food Words: The Juicy Lore & Tasty Origins Of Food That Founded A Nation by Bill Casselman. Amusing names and facts - this book may explain some of the unfamiliar words seen in your family's old letters, diaries or receipt books.

The author is well known in Canada, first as a broadcaster and producer on CBC Radio and TV and then as a writer. Some of his other books that may be of interest are: Canadian Sayings, Casselman’s Canadian Words and Canadian Garden Words.

Thinking about food words in British Columbia, Nanaimo Bars do come to mind right away! I’ve always thought those served at Sam’s Deli on Government St. in Victoria, our province’s capital, are the very best, but maybe I’ve never had a ‘real’ Nanaimo bar in Nanaimo. I notice Bill skirts the largely undocumented history of the Nanaimo Bar altogether, but there’s a link below with recipes and some information.

Lots of older food words are discussed more completely in this book, however, like brown sugar houses (poorer inns or other travellers' accommodations), Marquis wheat - hybridized in Manitoba, Canada at the turn of the century, Ragged Robins -a meringue dessert from Prince Edward Island, cottage roll (boned, rolled cooked ham – we had this often when I was growing up) and vinegar pie, a prairie or wartime recipe with vinegar and lemon or orange extract substituted for real fruit juice. Lots of meringue probably topped these pies though, as long as the chickens were busy and the sugar lasted.


Canadian Food Words: The Juicy Lore & Tasty Origins Of Food That Founded A Nation by Bill Casselman ( Toronto: McArthur & Company, 1998)


Bill Casselman’s website: http://www.billcasselman.com

You Say Nanaimo. Words, Praise and Lore on the Heavenly Nanaimo Bar, Cakespy.com: http://www.cakespy.com/2008/05/you-say-nanaimo-words-praise-and-lore.html

Friday, June 13, 2008

Carnival of Genealogy - Family Pets




Rogers family with Viola, (Miss P) and Blackie the cat, August 1925, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

The topic for this edition of the Carnival of Genealogy is: family pets!



Well, I’ve always been a cat person and expect I always will be. We didn’t have pets when I was very young – my brother had lots of allergies and I believe my parents thought a pet wouldn’t be good for him. My mother had had a dog, I know, (a dog named Sandy who was afraid of thunder) so she might have liked a dog, but one day a cat showed up on our family's back porch looking for some dinner. My mum fed it something, the cat stayed on; eventually she adopted us and condescended to let us call her ‘Twink’. (The name was my idea - you know, 'twinkle, twinkle little star...')

My dad’s family did have cats. The cat in the photograph in my dad’s arms was called ‘Blackie’ apparently (really original, aren’t we?). This was taken in August of 1925 according to my grandmother’s note and shows my grandparents (Joe Rogers and Sarah Saggers) with their two sons, my dad, George, with Blackie, and his brother, David, and also Miss ‘Viola P’, in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Viola was visiting and the family must have taken her around to see all the sights, as there are a few other photos like this one of the two boys -- shown here in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. (My grandmother must have treasured these pictures of happy times later, after David died of polio in 1927.)

But the ‘pets’ I associated most with my dad when we were young, probably were never pets at all. As the story was told to me by my mum, who got it from her mother in law, my grandma, and told it to me, my grandparents had chickens at one time and my dad was fond of some of them. Likely he helped to look after them. One day though he came to realize that a chicken or two had turned up on the dinner table, and he then refused to eat.

Never again, as far as I know, did he eat any kind of fowl – not even turkey at Christmas. The rest of us ate chicken and turkey, mind you, but he didn’t even want to be in the house while fowl was cooking. Nowadays, a boy in the same situation would likely become at least a vegetarian, but dad must never had met a pig or a cow he specially liked, as he didn't give up meat, just 'fowl' which, of course, he said was - 'foul'.





George and David Rogers, August 1925, at the Oppenheimer monument, Stanley Park, Vancouver, B.C. Canada

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Carnival of Genealogy – “Swimsuit Edition”: Newdale, Manitoba, Canada 1908


As I read the topic for this Carnival of Genealogy – “Swimsuit Edition”— this family photograph came to mind right away. It’s a clear favourite of mine – the bathing costumes alone are worth a good look. That’s my Na, Amy Estella Irwin, wearing the darker bathing dress and standing in the water. (She’s my mum’s mum.)

I’ve tentatively identified a few other people in the photograph, but not the place it was taken. Written on it is “Merry Widow Camp Aug ’08 Wolfe Lake” and apparently painted on the boat is “The Merry Widow 1908”.

I’d always thought the ‘Merry Widow’ reference meant that this was a local summer excursion or holiday, perhaps during the week when husbands weren’t able to stay. (The Merry Widow operetta came to Broadway in New York in 1907 and the music very quickly became well known. I loved the ‘Merry Widow waltz’ as a girl, but that’s another story.)

There is a Wolfe Lake in Manitoba, Canada, but it’s far, far north of Newdale where Na and her family lived. Could this have been a local name for one of the lakes nearby?

Although there’s no photographer’s name or information given, I do think it’s a Newdale area photograph as there is at least one other professional looking photograph identified in what seems to be the same handwriting. That shows the ‘Newdale Gun Club 1908’. My grandpa-to-be, James Walter Scott, is in that picture, but not in the ’Merry Widow one. He would have been clerking in a store in town in 1908.

Na looks a bit saucy here – she was a bit of a flirt, even in later years. I do wonder if she and the other two younger woman weren’t along to watch the children, so I hope they did have a good time at the ‘Merry Widow’ camp – all good, clean fun, of course.