Christmas Lunch

Lynne scored this beautiful fish kettle at Ashley's. When she pointed out that it had a small dent on the lid, they gave it to her for $180. (List = 1300.)

So we stuffed an arctic char with shrimp, mussels, and clams (see Marcella Hazan) and baked it. Fabulous. Next time, though, I might experiment by skipping the parchment paper and letting the kettle do the job of concentrating the heat.

Should Canada Try to Be a Country?

After thirty years of immigration and multiculturalism, Canada is not the country it was. The question: is it a country at all?

It is an excellent place to be a citizen. People whose families immigrated here a generation or two ago have had the advantage of an excellent educational system and a prosperous, tolerant society. When they work abroad, they benefit from their exposure to a wide range of cultures thanks to Canada’s cosmopolitanism. When they work at home, they are able to take advantage of their inside knowledge of their parents’ culture. Second and third generation Canadians are at home here – and with their easy mobility, they are Canada’s eyes and ears abroad. Canada is a brilliant base for a glittering international career – ask Adrienne Clarkson or Irshad Manji. And make no mistake: these Canadians are deeply attached to Canada and its values. (It seems superfluous to say this about a former Governor-General – one of the best we have ever had.) Since they embody the best of Canadian values it would make very little sense if they did not.

Let it be clear then that I have no sympathy with rants about how foreigners are diluting our values. Tom Kent, a former principal secretary to Lester Pearson, issued just such a rant recently in the Globe and Mail. I thought it came very ill from an expatriate Brit, who came here in the days where a moderately good job in Blighty gave you immediate entree to the very top jobs in Canada. And the right to expatiate publicly on how the miserable brown and yellow people who followed you have no real attachment to the country, and are only diluting homegrown culture.

My question has nothing to do with “foreign” values, or foreign ways, and whether they have a place in Canada. It has to do rather with the cumulativity of cultural discourse. In a country, people talk to each other. They build on each other. In Canada, people seem to engage only in global conversations. These conversations leave no residue here: as brilliant as many Canadians are, and as much as they have contributed to English-speaking civilization, nobody here picks up their work and makes out of it a national discourse. This is perhaps why the most brilliant Canadians – Glenn Gould, Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant – leave nothing behind.

David Armstrong tells a compelling tale about Australian philosophy in his wonderful little piece “Black Swans”. He starts by recounting precisely the same kind of sneer about Australia that all the colonies have had to cope with – including the India of my youth. In 1958, one L. Sturch wrote in an Oxford magazine:

It is a mistake to think that the name "Australia" has the same logical grammar as "France", "Switzerland", "Siberia", "Rutlandshire", or "North Dakota". It is no more like such names than "Utopia", "Erewhon", or "Ruritania" are. . . "Australia" is not a real place; . . . the word "Australia" is not a name. (There is a certain heaviness to this: could Sturch have been a satirizing Australian, I wonder.)

Armstrong counters with a great story: how John Anderson in Sydney, George Paul in Melbourne, Jack Smart, Ullin Place, and Charlie Martin in Adelaide – all foreigners – began a tradition so robust that there is now such a thing as “Australian philosophy”. Philosophy – or at least philosophy in the tradition that comes to us from Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein – is as international a discipline as physics. Germans and Croats argue with Hungarians and Canadians, about the same questions, using the same dialectical tools. Yet, there is in this discipline an Australian style -- virtually no other country can say that. Armstrong himself is one of the great proponents. And today you see something recognizably Australian in the topic-wise extremely diverse writings of Frank Jackson, Kim Sterelny, Michael Smith, and David Chalmers (as well as immigrants such as Philip Pettit and Graham Priest). If you read Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, you’ll find evidence of the same sort of thing in other intellectual fields. (I venture to say that much the same is true of Australian wine-making -- happily, there is some evidence of an emerging Canadian culture in this field, at least in British Columbia.)

What about Canada? In philosophy, it has had the same opportunities. Some pretty good philosophers have grown up here. Bas van Fraassen, David Gauthier, Ian Hacking, Charles Taylor, and Patty and Paul Churchland are among the most influential philosophers alive today – and Gerry Cohen, David Braybrooke, Barry Stroud, Tom Hurka, Ted Honderich, and Brad Inwood are not far behind. We have had our share of inspirational foreigners: including Jonathan Bennett, Mario Bunge, Terry Penelhum, Kai Nielson, (the same) Charlie Martin, Michael Ruse, and Ronnie DeSousa. Yet there is no such thing as Canadian philosophy. Why not? Partly because there is in Canada no particular ferment around these figures – all of whom are challenging, controversial, and deserving of discussion. Canadians just don’t think it’s cool to get excited about local intellectual controversies: they would rather participate in discussions without boundaries. The figures I have mentioned are just as much discussed outside Canada as they are here: when they leave the scene, they, like Gould, Davies, and Gallant, will vanish without leaving a mark on Canadian discourse.

Countries that have a culture pull up their citizens. A talented philosopher in Australia benefits by participating in the philosophical culture of that country – you do not have to agree with somebody to be excited by their ideas. David Armstrong in Australia did not agree with John Anderson or George Paul, and Kim Sterelny in turn does not have much time for how Armstrong did philosophy. Yet, one thinks of these people as belonging to a powerful and coherent tradition, and deriving some of their influence by so belonging.

Canada is not on a path to developing the same kinds of incubators. I would even question whether there is such a thing as Canadian literature -- there are great Canadian writers, but after Robertson Davies and Alice Munro, they haven't much written about Canada. Australia progressed from colony to country; Canada has chosen the more modern vision of a state that is not a country. Doubtless, that has virtues too.

Is there any harm in starting a little country within our global community? Maybe I could (should?) make a modest start by writing a combative book about Ian Hacking.

Nose to Tail

Cowbell Toronto (see below) is a place where meat is not only treated very seriously, but where it is not wasted. You don't just get steaks -- in fact, you don't get steaks at all -- you get organ meat, tough cuts cooked tender, nose, ears, tail -- the lot. (The Linkery in San Diego also goes some distance in this direction -- it too is a meat restaurant, but proudly not a steakhouse.)

The movement is worldwide, I have discovered: in London (England) there is St John, a restaurant that promotes "nose-to-tail" eating, and simple cooking.



See here: http://www.stjohnrestaurant.com/menus/

Syrian Christian cooking

The Syrian Christians are an old community in the state of Kerala, on the southwest coast of India. Christianity came to Kerala from the middle east; in the old days, the Kerala Orthodox church fell under the control of the Patriarch of Antioch in Syria -- hence the name.

Kerala cooking has received its share of kudos recently, but most people would be surprised by the consistency of its values -- perfectly cooked, tender fish and meat, vegetables with bite, short grained, unpolished red rice, and a variety of breads. Many Indians are careless about texture and bite -- does that ring true about your favourite local Indian restaurant? -- but not in Kerala. The spicing is in some ways characteristically Indian Ocean. Usually, one starts curries by thoroughly cooking the spice base, which is turmeric and red chilli that you find in most of India, plus coriander seed in place of the cumin that they use in North India. Usually the ratio is turmeric:coriander:red chilli as 1:2:4. After the spice base, comes the fresh base: ginger and garlic made into a paste. On this foundation of spices and fresh aromatics comes whatever makes a dish different: the fish or meat and the special flavours -- very often coconut milk is used as the liquid and thickener.

The fish curry shown above is the emblematic meen vevichathu, commonly known as Kerala Red Fish Curry. I took the photograph from a good recipe at http://sairaboby.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/meen-vevichathukerala-fish-curry/. (Saira's sauce is slightly lighter in colour and thinner than you would find in my family.) The characteristic ingredient in this dish is kudam puli -- the large black pieces in the photo -- a fruit which imparts a somewhat taramindy taste to the curry, giving it an attractive complexity of flavour -- it's a hot curry, with a characteristic back-of-the-mouth sharpness. (I don't know where one would get kudam puli in North America.) The fish is generally dense, not flaky -- a big fish like sea-bass or halibut -- the local equivalents, of course -- not a flat fish. Syrian Christians are good at cooking fish just right -- it's cooked (not raw, as in Japan), but still tender and moist. (Grilled flatfish is divine in Kerala -- I am sorry to my Croatian friends for saying so, but Dubrovnik doesn't have anything to match it.)

This is a Syrian Christian banquet:

You get a glimpse of the red rice on the right edge of the table, three dishes from the bottom. The meen vevichathu is at the back: here is a closer look -- in the long dish:


It's served with a dense fibrous starch, often kuppa or tapioca, but here breadfruit (just above the fish).

Below we have a bread known as appam -- the rice flour is raised with fermented coconut milk and yeast, and eaten with a light coconut milk chicken curry:



Kerala cuisine is complex and varied. Syrian Christians have the best of it, I think -- though the dishes are closely related to those other Malayalis make, there is a refinement in their flavours which surpasses the rest. It is probably not the easiest cuisine to get into -- the flavours are unfamiliar, and the routines and rituals of combination and order and what to eat when are complex. (For instance, you never eat yoghurt until right at the end -- you use it to sop up the left over gravies on your plate.) As a child, I preferred other things. Now, I think it's one of the best country cuisines -- i.e., it's not to be compared with the showy metropolitan cuisines you find in Delhi or Instanbul or Paris -- the world has to offer.

The Linkery, San Diego

San Diego is very green, and you forget how close it is to the desert:


But this guy is a reminder:


Up until recently, I am told, the city was not noted for its food. I went one evening to a Mexican restaurant named Candelas, and found out why. The food here was good, the wine-by-the-glass excellent, and the service elegant. But I was depressed by a party of six, who ordered enormous plates of food and scarfed it all down before my soup came. I don't know if they were military or athletes or what, but the mere sight made me feel slightly queasy. And they're the customers. No wonder the plates are full of food to the point that you face the main courses with apprehension in your heart.

I ordered two primi: a black bean soup made with beer, which was terrific -- lots of complex flavours -- the black beans, pretty much as expected, and then a nice dark beery finish. Then, an avocado and shrimp concoction that tasted more of lime than of the seafood or fruit.

The next night, Jonathan and I tried The Linkery, a restaurant that advertises single-source everything, and having been to Chez Panisse and Cowbell recently, I thought it would be interesting. Jonathan even had a coupon for a free main course.

The Linkery turned out to be an industrial looking restaurant, which had just moved into new quarters:

Single sourcing is at new heights here. They even tell you how the paper is made and where it comes from:


We ordered a charcuterie plate to share, and then lamb. The charcuterie itself was very good -- from top to bottom, landjager, bresaola, copa -- but it was the accompaniments that made this plate:


Each carrot, date, walnut was full of flavour and it was all that I could do to leave Jonathan his fair share. And a wonderfully inky, deep tasting Nebbiolo from Mexico. The main was breast of lamb with merguez, the former tasting milky and the latter perfectly spiced with pepper (but no turmeric that I detected). A great Bordeaux-style blend called Chukker accompanied. (It's wonderful being in California, where one regularly drinks wine of quality that one would go broke for in Canada.) Like Chez Panisse, the vegetables were terrific; unlike CP and Cowbell, the meat was good enough, but not memorable.

With dessert, another first: a dessert beer. An edifying end to a most enjoyable evening.