QUEBEC (NYTIMES)- When Algonquin chef Cezin Nottaway was 5 years
old, her mother taught her how to kill and skin a beaver with her
bare hands. The little girl also learned how to snare a rabbit and
to draw a moose out of the forest by emulating its haunting grunt.
"We were using local ingredients long before it became fashionable,"
Nottaway, 38, said in her log-cabin kitchen on the Kitigan Zibi
reserve, near this town about 136km north of Ottawa, Ontario.
|
Seared seal loin with beets and watercress
at Ku-kum Kitchen in Toronto, Canada.PHOTO: NYTIMES
|
Here, she prepares dishes like smoked roast moose with tea and
onions for weddings, wakes and charity events. Her company, Wawatay
Catering, has fed elementary school students, a group of judges
and even former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark.
Nottaway, who took her company's name from the Algonquin word
for northern lights, is part of a new generation of Canadian chefs
who are reclaiming and popularising indigenous foods as part of
a growing culinary affirmation of identity.
|
Seal tartare with salmon roe at Ku-kum Kitchen
in Toronto, Canada.PHOTO: NYTIMES
|
"Embracing this cuisine is a form of taking back what is ours,"
she said.
That renewed interest comes at a time when Canada is trying
to reconcile with its troubled colonial past. Among other abuses,
government and church authorities deprived indigenous children of
their native dishes at the "residential schools" that were created
to assimilate them. The government also restricted access to food
in order to clear people from land so it could be developed.
|
Smoked moose (lower right) and side dishes
at the home of an Algonquin, Cezin Nottaway, in Maniwaki,
Quebec, Canada. PHOTO: NYTIMES
|
In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the
nation's past "humiliation, neglect and abuse" of indigenous people,
and vowed at the United Nations to improve the lives of the country's
1.4 million indigenous citizens. The effort, however belated, has
accompanied a renewed appreciation of indigenous culture, including
a rich food tradition that stretches back centuries.
That tradition is resurfacing all over. Starting this summer,
Rich Francis, an indigenous chef who finished in third place on
Top Chef Canada in 2014, will host Red Chef Revival, a new series
on YouTube that will explore, among other subjects, the roots of
indigenous cooking.
|
Cezin
Nottaway, an Algonquin who runs a catering business, pours
tea one of her favorite culinary secret weapons
into the sauce for her smoked moose, at home in Maniwaki,
Quebec, Canada. PHOTO: NYTIMES
|
There are indigenous food trucks in British Columbia, cooking
courses in Ottawa and new restaurants and cafes in Toronto, including
Ku-kum Kitchen and NishDish, which serves plates like dandelion-cranberry
salad. Nottaway served smoked char chowder to a crowd of thousands
on Parliament Hill in Ottawa during Canada's 150th birthday celebrations
last year.
"Because of the political reconciliation, there is a culinary
reconciliation and renaissance," Quebec chef Jean Paul Grappe said.
At 75, this eminence grise of Canadian cooking, an early champion
of indigenous cuisine, is traveling around the province teaching
young chefs reared in the age of Twitter how to use the techniques
of their ancestors - such as covering a partridge in clay and simmering
it for eight hours on top of hot stones in the ground.
Nottaway, who also goes by her French-Canadian name, Marie-Cecile,
is a member of the Algonquin nation, one of the 11 indigenous groups
in Quebec whose people lived here long before European settlers
arrived in the 17th century.
After decades in which these communities have grappled with
discrimination, poverty, gambling, suicide and alcoholism, Nottaway
sees her embrace of traditional cooking techniques as nothing less
than "decolonising myself".
"This is the food I grew up on," she said. "They took away our
land, our culture, our language, and I am fighting to bring it back
with my food."
The charismatic chef, who speaks three languages (English, French
and Algonquin), juggles her catering business with raising her two
children, and is as at home with a shotgun as with a skillet. Her
interest in traditional cooking took root when she was a teenager,
eschewing trips to McDonald's in favour of learning Algonquin recipes,
passed on orally from her grandmothers.
Both her parents had been forcibly sent to residential schools,
where, she said, a priest who taught at her father's school told
him to use a metal brush to scrub the brown from his hands, until
they bled.
To ensure she did not lose touch with the land, her grandmothers
taught her how to smoke moose meat with rotted wood, and how to
kill a rabbit for dinner by pressing an index finger on its heart.
"My grandmothers taught me from a young age that I shouldn't
feel sorry for killing animals, since they suffer and are lonely
if they are not hunted," she said as she doled out a stewed rabbit's
head served with wild garlic to three guests. "We respect animals
and pray to the animal spirits to show our thanks."
Nottaway said her interest in reviving indigenous food was also
part of a wider national effort to improve nutrition in those communities,
where, she noted, the removal of people from their land has contributed
to poorer health conditions, sedentary lifestyles and the proliferation
of processed and junk food.
Yet even as indigenous cooking is now being celebrated in some
quarters, it is drawing criticism from animal rights advocates,
who complain that serving the meat of hunted animals breaches Canadian
food safety rules prohibiting that in most restaurants.
|
Ku-kum
Kitchen in Toronto, Canada, offers seared seal loin and seal
tartare. PHOTO: NYTIMES
|
In 2014, the Quebec government proposed a temporary exception
to the law that would allow 10 celebrated restaurants, including
Au Pied de Cochon and Joe Beef in Montreal, to serve game that had
been killed by licensed hunters. But the plan foundered.
In Quebec, indigenous people are allowed to hunt and serve game
on reserves. Protesters have organised petition drives against some
indigenous restaurants, including the newly popular Ku-kum Kitchen,
which offers seared seal loin and seal tartare. Serving seal meat
is allowed by law, and Ku-kum is supplied by SeaDNA, a seal meat
producer, which Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans allows
to harvest an annual quota of seal "for meat and oil."
Late last year a petition calling on Ku-kum to remove seal from
its menu gathered more than 6,500 signatures. "The seal slaughters
are very violent, cruel, horrific, traumatising and unnecessary,"
the petition said, adding that the seal meat came from a "commercial
company" and "had nothing to do with the indigenous hunt". But a
counterpetition asked why that restaurant was being singled out
when so many other Toronto restaurants served meat.
"It's time to stop the cycle of willfully ignorant Canadians
who continue to impose their ill-considered values upon indigenous
practices and people," said the counterpetition, written by Aylan
Couchie, a Toronto artist, who is an Anishinaabe from the Nipissing
First Nation.
Nottaway contends that hunting is part of her identity, and
that the meat she hunts and butchers for her customers is the same
she lovingly serves to her own family.
|
Cezin
Nottaway smokes moose meat using a method she learned from
her grandmothers in Maniwaki, Quebec, Canada. PHOTO: NYTIMES
|
"This food is who I am and there is no reason I shouldn't serve
it, even if that means breaking the law," she said with indignation,
noting that mass-produced meat is often treated with additives and
chemicals.
Still, an even bigger challenge looms for indigenous cooks:
identifying and preserving their cuisine.
George Lenser, a chef in Montreal who cooked at Joe Beef and
is a member of the Nisga'a Nation in northern British Columbia,
pointed out that indigenous ingredients like wild berries and traditions
like hunting game have long been relabeled "Canadian" or "Québécois".
"If you use local ingredients, you are bound to be appropriating
indigenous cuisine but may not realise it because it is so absorbed
by Canadian culture," said Lenser, 27.
He and other chefs and scholars are on a mission to excavate
and codify recipes and ingredients that disappeared when their ancestors
were forcibly assimilated.
"When our grandparents and parents were forced to go to residential
schools and torn away from their families, that knowledge was lost,"
he said, noting that he had spent hours badgering his elderly aunts
to share their old recipes and secrets, including how to make oolichan
grease, or fermented smoked fish fat, which he uses to flavour soups
or sauces.
Nottaway considers cooking her best weapon against assimilation,
and on a recent Thursday afternoon, she set out to hunt for deer,
partridge and beaver in a snow-covered forest on the reservation.
It was well below zero. But Nottaway, dressed in traditional
deerskin mukluks and holding her gun, was undeterred as she examined
paw tracks and urine in the snow, sniffing out whether a deer was
lurking nearby.
When her prey proved elusive, she returned home and pulled a
moose carcass out of the freezer instead. Before long, there was
a feast spread on the table, including thin tranches of smoked moose,
roasted and seared with maple syrup, made from the sap of a nearby
tree.
"It doesn't get more Canadian than that," she said with a grin.
|