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Tales from the Canadian woods
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Stephane Paquet, celebrity chef, takes Chennai-ites on a week-long voyage through the rich culinary history of Canada...
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HE'S the son of a Canadian diplomat, a gold medallist in the hotly contested field of culinary enterprise and the owner of three different types of restaurants at Hull near Quebec, Canada, but Stephane Paquet wears his celebrity as lightly as one of his Maple Syrup Mousses.
Sitting at one of the tables at the Cappuccino, the ITC Park Sheraton's coffee shop, where he is presiding over a week long festival of Canadian food and wine, Stephane has the larger than life presence of an Italian tenor, with the enthusiasm of a small boy who is still running around in his Mother's kitchen sticking his finger into the pie.
"That's how I learnt, in my mother's kitchen, where she had all these very talented people cooking for her, so I would go in and watch them and they would always let me get my hand into things." By the time he was 13, he says, he was already working the nights at different eating-places, doing the dishes and waiting at table, while going to school during the day. "That's what we do in Canada, girls do baby sitting to earn a little extra money, and boys work in restaurants. I may be boss in my restaurant but I still do the dishes from time to time, if I see that it's getting a little crowded down there. "Much later he went through a regular course in classic French cooking and then worked his way up learning all the aspects of working in and running a restaurant.
He waves his arms and uses his small podgy hands to make a point when he talks. He bends down low over the table and mimics the slow, heavy grunting movements of the pig that he says has been bred to enormous proportions to provide the tender little sausages that he has devised for the four part `entrée' that forms part of our lunch. It's much bigger than I am," he says stretching out his arms and conjuring a pig of gargantuan proportions, not like one of the Indian pigs, "and it spends all its time just being fed, never getting its feet dirty."
There are delicate pink slivers of "Canadian Pacific Salmon", a mound of "Corn Chowder with Canadian Whiskey", the sausage that comes with a thin twist of bacon around it, and a finely slicked bouquet of vegetables doused in a vinaigrette made with Maple Syrup at the side. Just listening to him describing the ingredients proves to be a journey into the history and geography of Canada. Canadian Cuisine is an exploration of the icy cold upper segment of North America tempered by the exuberance of its French settlers. For instance, if you ask Stephane if there really is any difference between a Pacific Salmon and an Atlantic Salmon, you will discover that one lives in slightly warmer waters than the other, and so will have a less of oil than say the salmon living in the cold waters of the Atlantic." "You have to imagine Canada like this wedge shaped piece of land," he says drawing an imaginary map with his hands. Right up in the North," he gestures showing a wide swathe of country up at the top, "it's always frozen, there is snow twelve months of the year, there are no trees, so no fire, so what do you do about food? You make a hole in the ice and you fish, raw fish, that you salt and preserve." He conjures up the image of shoals of tuna and salmon, which form part of the dish that he has served. He tells us how exactly the salmon is smoked by an elaborate process of salting and slow smoking over wood chips made from apple wood and elder wood, which he collects himself and allows to gently infuse the salmon with the smoke caused by sprinkling the embers with regular applications of droplets of water.
"In the second'' he continues with his geography lesson, "you find the shell fish, from the Pacific Ocean, scallops, shrimps, mussels, lobster and langoustine and, of course, salmon.'' In the middle of this region he conjures up a vision of all the huge "furry animals'' as he calls them, the moose, caribou, deer, reindeer that used to form the basis for the hunter-gatherer tribes that inhabited the area before the European settlers arrived. He tells us, much to our astonishment, not to mention horror, that today, even bears are bred for their meat and that a favourite pie that is sometime made could contain the meat from bear, deer, moose, caribou, porcupine and even beaver!'' There's a pastry called "Beaver Tail'' he says which is a rich pastry made into the shape of a beaver's tail and friend,'' he demonstrates by showing us how he likes to pick up the pastry with both hands and bite into it.
Again, the traditional cooking in these areas would mean finding ways to preserve the meat by salting it and hanging it up in the cellar as a stand-by for the long winters. He describes the technique of hanging and curing a leg of ham in the most romantic of terms. Not only does he massage the ham with regular applications of cognac, but as he evokes the process, he talks of letting it hang in his forests around his house, is drawn in through a window at night, just to encourage the ham to mellow and ripen at its own pace. The technique of preparing a Prosciutto Ham is what has earned him many of his prizes he tells us.'' I live in a house surrounded by forests'' he tells us, "At night, you can sometimes see the deer who come to drink the water from the lake.''
Finally, there is the third and lower segment of the country that he describes for us. This was where the settlers from Europe came, thinking that they had stumbled upon the Indian sub-continent. It was warm enough to grow corn, but even to this day it is called "Ble de L`Inde'' or Indian Corn. They found strains of wild rice growing in the valleys and to pay homage to this tradition, Stephane has included a portion of `Stuffed Capsicum with Wild Rice'. The vegetables that the early settlers were able to grow in what remained a very cold place, through most of the year, were root vegetables, such as potatoes and turnips and carrots and so these form the ingredients of most of the heavy soups that people used to make. They also felt the need to make whiskeys and rums to keep warm, which is why there is a liberal dose of liquors that are used in many of the dishes, as for instance in the French-Canadian dessert that he produced, made of "Crepes Flambe-ed with Canadian Whiskey and Maple Syrup.''
Not only did the Cappuccino evoke the spirit of Canada with a lavish use of the red maple leaf in its doctor, but Stephane himself demonstrated how the sap of the maple tree would be very laboriously collected one drop at a time, in a tin container. As he explained it, the maple syrup was used as the flavouring of choice, from salads dressings to glazes and as the delicate accent to a Maple Syrup Mousse, as he had done.
The early settlers also found that they could eat the wild berries that flowered in the spring. As though to pay homage to those early strawberries and black-berries Stephane had also included a glass bowl that he called, "French Strawberry Cup Marinated in Ice Wind'' which was as exciting as it sounds. To hear how Ice Wine is made is to feel the Cold Canadian Winter coursing through one's veins. For, it's made out of grapes that are left on the vine, through the winter months, so that they ripen very slowly. When they are really sweet, the wine makers go out to their fields in the darkness of the month of February and cut the bunches of grapes that are still slightly frozen. As each basket comes in, they are pressed on the spot so that the fresh grape juice is still chilled, before it is allowed to ferment in the normal course. The price of even a small bottle of Ice Wine is astronomical, like sipping from the table of the Snow Queen who kept her palace of ice, in the fabled tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
As we tasted each of the different layers of food items that Stephane had prepared we ourselves felt transported to an understanding of Canada that seemed to be made of the stuff of legends. Stephane Paquet is not just a fabulous chef, he is a worthy ambassador to the rich culinary history of his country.
GEETA DOCTOR
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