Dinner with the Canadian

I was getting nervous about my birthday (like I do every year) when Eric asked if I'd like to come over for dinner. I'd devoted the better part of the day to running searches on Epicurious.com and Chow.com and various food blogs figuring out what the heck I should cook for my parties. Somehow I'd wound up with about four celebratory events all thrown by different groups of friends and all to fete me-- I was so touched that (naturally) my response was to cook for every one! But now that it was Tuesday and my birthday was two days away I'd worked myself into a tizzy and my tastes were tied. After a day of imagining how Moroccan eggplant or Rajasthani squash curry or just a zucchini soup would taste I could barely bring myself to throw together a simple salad for the time being. So when Eric called I was relieved, and then I remembered that his Canadian friend (who happened to be a former chef ) was visiting. I immediately responded to the invite saying I hoped the fare would be particularly of the north country.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love surfing through on-line recipes to get inspirations for pairings and new flavors just as much as the next young Brooklynite, but for all my searching I couldn't come up with a semblance of dishes that would make a complete and complimentary meal. I came across an intriguing recipe for greens cooked with raisins, nuts, and tossed in an Asiatic vinaigrette, but it just didn't seem like this would go too well with squash ravioli which featured a different nut and a decidedly round, earthy flavor. Then I thought about making my grandmother's pearl onions, but the cream sauce seemed like it would be unnecessary along side the brown butter sauce for the pasta. Finally, I shut off the computer.

Chez Eric is around the corner, and when I arrived Stephen the Canadian had his ingredients well prepped. I was set to work chopping parsley while he stirred a cheese sauce and mashed potatoes. Eric cut the tops off bell peppers and provided the party with beer. I handle myself pretty well in the kitchen, but the Canadian obviously had his act together, so after the parsley I stepped back to watch him work the show. Fresh mashed garlic was mixed into the potatoes, roasted garlic cloves were tossed with the chickpeas and parsley and then the mixture was generously stuffed into the bell peppers. A little fresh cheese capped les poishice, and into the oven they went. At the last minute, just before we ate, cauliflower florets were steamed.

But in the mean time, while we waited for the stuffed peppers to roast in the oven, the three of us reposed in the living room where Stephen regaled us with stories of growing up five hours north of Toronto. I grew up in rural Maine, and like his neck of the woods, mine too was a land of drunken ice fisherman, hunters and plow drivers. The characters he spoke of (the neighbor who was perpetually drunk, the boys he had worked logging jobs with) were familiar to me, as was his obvious devotion to the land where seasons still rule, and where making it through yet another winter is always a triumph worth celebrating. Eric and I curled up like cats, happy for the entertaining yarns that felt so distant from this little city apartment-- imagine a land where the neighbor's house collapses in on the foundation again and again, so he keeps rebuilding it with his tractor and his own two hands!

Talk turned to college and the friends we cooked with in dorms. Eric and I know one another because we belonged to a group of friends at Sarah Lawrence who cooked family dinner for each other every Sunday. As it turned out, Stephen, up at his university in Canada, had headed up a similar Sunday night tradition. At our gatherings in Westchester one person cooked for the group each week and we rotated around the circle throughout the semester. Stephen, on the other hand, had taken the time to call up everyone involved to organize who would bring a starch, who would bring vegetables, etc. And then there was the meat. Due to an overpopulation of deer, there was always plenty of venison in the freezer, and the Family Dinner crew could have at it for free. As he explained this he prefaced the situation by saying “It may seem kind of cruel, but where I come from, people go out and kill deer because there are simply too many.” Was he trying to protect our city ears and liberal hearts from the reality of game hunting? Eric, who grew up in a ritzy suburb of Boston, looked like he was trying to figure out how he felt about this. It's precious to watch a deer walk undisturbed through your back yard in the dead of winter, and watching his reaction I could see where he was coming from. But then I recalled the over-stuffed freezers in Maine. One of the waitresses from my parent's inn would have a boyfriend who had shot a buck and there wouldn't be enough room in the freezer to keep all the meat. We'd get gifts of frozen venison steaks (or once we got moose burgers) when the overflow was too much to handle. I remember going to someone's house when I was only five or six to eat bear stew. I'd seen a black bear at the Bluehill Fair, but mostly I thought of the animals as characters illustrated in story books like Blueberries for Sal. The bear meat was sinewy but undeniably delicious in a heavy broth with carrots and potatoes. Now, twenty years later, the idea of eating dear or bear seemed so primal, so hunter and gatherer, so pioneer on the Western frontier. My parents now live in Michigan in a house by a river and some woods. There is a pack of deer who parade through their back yard several times a day at feeding hour, and whenever I go to visit I am stunned again and again by their size, their strength, and their wild, unpredictable darting movements. They terrorize my mother's garden, but being able to watch a wild animal in its natural habitat at such a close distance is something we cherish. We hold our breath to see how long it will be before they dash off, and always wish we could have watched them a while longer. I suppose restaurants in New York serve venison on the menu, but if I were to see it listed I would not instinctually imagine the bulging freezer door and the buck that Billy had shot back in October. Venison in the city would be braised in a complicated sauce, it would be considered a delicacy, and it would be so disguised by the theatre of the restaurants that I have become accustomed to, that I wouldn't recognize it as the meat I ate as a child. Our kitchen in Maine was the warmest room in the house, and we kept all the doors leading out of it shut for most months of the year to trap the radiation from the wood stove. When there were power outages we slept on the kitchen linoleum, and we warmed our clothes by the stove so they would be toasty when we got out of the bath. Because we moved away so long ago, and because the era of childhood now feels like a different time in history, I have a hard time believing anyone still lives the way we did (the houses I've lived in for the last ten years have had all kinds of modern amenities like base board heaters, dishwashers, and stainless steel stoves). How, in my twenty four years, have I gone from eating moose burgers without thinking anything of it, to being a city person who must be protected from the notion of killing deer not for game, but simply to keep the population down? I couldn't believe I looked the part of the latter. And yet, I have morphed into this role,so much so that I tried to imagine deer parading down Sixth Avenue in Park Slope but for the life of me could not. The young mothers with their baby strollers would be running for the bridge back to Manhattan. It would be like dinosaurs taking over the city. In the world I live in now deer just aren't part of the picture, and it's nearly impossible to import them from the memory of the rural day-to-day I once knew so well to the Park Slope latte and bagel routine that is so much my reality it seems I must have always lived like this.

Stephen piled our plates with food (smashed potatoes, cauliflower with cheese sauce, the chick pea stuffed peppers, and salad). After all that talk about wintering over and matter-of-fact stories about community members dying from exposure to the elements, we had convinced ourselves that we needed to eat every last bite of his meal to store up energy for survival. The flavors, like the Canadian himself and the stories he told, were simple and robust, not disguised as anything but themselves-- unapologetically pure without a hint of pretense. It was so good I couldn't stop eating, and I never lost sight of the ingredients in each bite-- parsley, garlic, salt and pepper. On the walk home, cradling my nice little box of leftovers, I rethought the upcoming birthday dinner entirely. My guests would be a gathering of old friends and new, an amalgam of companions from high school, college, time spent abroad, and time in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The food would bring us together around one round table, and I wanted the meal itself to be representative of the reunion. The food wouldn't be fancy-- no need to impress this crowd who know me so well, no need to get lost in the unfamiliar annals of archived Gourmet recipes-- the food would be decidedly a taste of me and all the places I've come from to arrive at this moment of turning a new age. On one plate I could share my history in flavors from Maine to Michigan to New York. There is nothing pretentious about the journey, or what I've grown up eating along the way, there is only the food and the story that each dish tells.