1.

I fell for a girl at the Top of the Horizon restaurant in the Blue Horizon Hotel. I was five years old, maybe six. Some Danish friends of my father’s were in town and they had a daughter around my age. She was this perfect doll: straw blonde, green eyes. I remember she wore a white dress with a red ribbon around her waist. The adults put us across from one another at the end of the table, so it was like we had our own little dinner date going on by the window, sipping Shirley Temples and eating those shish kebabs you used to see in the ’70s, with cubes of meat and green peppers skewered onto a miniature sword.

The food probably wasn’t great. But the dining experience was seminal, because I think even at that age I sensed what magical things were possible with the right person and the right meal. The right view. The right rays of orange sunlight sloping off the shoulder of Stanley Park. When that little girl caught me gazing at her—her name was Bridget, or Heidi—she smiled back sweetly as if she’d been thinking exactly the same thing. And at the end of the evening, she gave me a wooden horse lacquered blue that she’d brought all the way from Copenhagen.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Fast forward 20-odd years. I was newly married, and had just taken a job with the Toronto Dominion Bank in Vancouver. My wife and I had moved from Toronto, but in the weeks before we finalized our apartment, the bank put us up at… the Blue Horizon Hotel. We didn’t eat at the restaurant. These were our La Bodega years, and I’m not even sure Top of the Horizon was open at that time. But while unpacking, we came across an old scrapbook of my wife’s that she’d kept as a girl. And tucked into its pages was a photo of her when she was five. It was a picture I’d never seen before and, in fact, I hadn’t yet seen any picture of her at that age. Which allowed me to discover—in a strange temporal rush, that feeling of a vortex opening and connecting you to a very particular moment and set of feelings from the past—just how firmly that long-ago meal had stayed in my subconscious. How seamlessly woven into memory it had been. Because looking at that picture of my wife, I realized that at five years of age, and right at the same time, she and Bridget/Heidi had looked exactly alike.

2.

Memorable meals. Seminal, formative meals. The plates and flavors we never forget.

I’ve been thinking about these things lately, poring over old menus and recipe cards from the mid-’70s, trying to push myself back in time. What was food like for people before the food revolution hit Vancouver? Before that critical change in the scene here, when we passed out of one relationship with food and entered a new one. I called the post-revolution period The Food Fashion Era in Part One of this Foodville series. An era in which aesthetic sensibilities moved beyond any (quaint, classical, rigid) notion of what might be good or bad in the kitchen and on the plate, and began to refract instead within the endless prism of what, at any given moment, might be in or out.

I have an obvious fondness for the old school. My heroes are James Barber and Jacques Pépin, after all—both guys who published recipes for a stuffed whole head of cabbage. (You don’t see that on many menus, these days…) I always liked these guys for how settled they seemed to be in their own culinary personalities. Not much would change about either of them from the beginning to the end of their careers. In Pépin’s case, this single-mindedness made for some early television comedy. Here’s a guy who’d been working in the near-military environs of European kitchens since the age of 12, trying to be all casual and easygoing and ready for Food Network prime time. Even when he was cooking with his daughter Claudine for a while (some producer’s idea of how to make him more approachable, no doubt), you could tell he was struggling not to take the knife away from her every time she cut up an onion the wrong way.

In contrast, fashion seems an incredibly fickle mechanism, far too shifty and ephemeral to control something as important as how we eat. But none of us live in a bubble. So, after the revolution, we all changed. One of the most obvious things we’ve probably all noticed is the upward spiral of expertise and refinement. Everybody is a foodie, yes. Meaning everybody is frantically in pursuit of what’s the best in any given category. You know people like this. Certainly I do. People who only buy a particular kind of olive oil or fleur de sel, or who will only drink coffee made by a Clover espresso machine. Some of this has been tamped down in the wake of economic turmoil, sure. People backing off their highest-end obsessions. But we can’t unlearn what we’ve been taught, even if we make do with less.

I found myself thinking about that last point during a recent visit with some friends who have a daughter the same age as our son—five years old, echoes of the Top of the Horizon. We adults were sitting around on the deck, and overheard the two of them down at the bottom of the garden. What were they talking about? Not Monsters vs Aliens or the meanest kid in their class. They were talking about food. Specifically, we tuned in just in time to hear the little girl asked my son if he liked pheasant. My son said he wasn’t sure, because he’d never tried it, but did she like truffle oil?

My son has tried truffle oil once, I stress. A couple of drops on his scrambled eggs. I do recall the look on his face while he chewed, however. His eyes went all trippy and drifted past the horizon, as if he had found some great answer floating there, visible to anyone who could see into a fifth dimension. Then he swallowed and refocused on his toast, eating it bite by bite until it was gone. Then he did this thing he does at moments of pinnacle culinary pleasure, which I did not teach him. I don’t know where he got this one, probably daycare. He raised his arms, clapped both his hands over his head, and yelled: “Yummy!”

Fine. Yummy. I happen to agree. But what I found interesting, watching the two kids together, is how they enacted the exact underlying process that drives the upward spiral of refinement and good taste in the rest of us. They were competing. She put an idea on the table: eating pheasant, and the sophistication and maturity that this conferred on the five-year-old in question. My son picked up the idea, even though I’m quite confident that he was thinking about something else entirely up to that moment (Monsters vs Aliens quite likely). There they were, gripped by the same desire, vying for the prize of top-dog connoisseur. For a few seconds, anyway. And then, because they’re kids, they went off to play and forgot all about it while the adults laughed behind their hands and rolled their eyes and were secretly a little proud to have raised kids with tastes just like their own.

Now here’s where I’m heading with all this. Yes, in a world of fashion we copy ideas from one another, we pick things up and drop them, we rival with each other for esteem, we compete mimetically. But, at least with food, and at least among five-year-olds, it was not always thus. And I feel confident saying this because I just know that even if Bridget/Heidi had spoken English, we would not have known to think it a cool idea to spend the evening talking about whether I liked pickled herring and she ate homemade granola.

I’ll take responsibility. I talk food at home. And inevitably, I make it sound like a topic on which you are supposed to be opinionated. Ask my kid about Rule Number One. I somehow got this wrong, because if you were to ask him to name it, he wouldn’t reply with: Don’t Steal, or Make Sure You Graduate From Medical School. Instead, I must have said something once—no doubt too harshly, too sweepingly, too dogmatically—because the following has turned into the cardinal rule of our household: Never, ever eat at McDonald’s.

I had to break it to him eventually. I have, in the past, eaten at McDonald’s, although only under one strict set of conditions: when embarking early on a road trip. So I’ve actually eaten quite a few Egg McMuffins behind the wheel. And while they are truly awful on just about every level, they’re perfect too, because every Egg McMuffin I’ve ever had has been exactly like the first one I had. Here’s a product that competes with nothing, which is beyond fashion. And that still seems virtuous to me, in a way.

We went driving early one Saturday morning, just my son and I. He piped up from the back seat: “Is this a road trip?” I knew where that question was leading, so we broke Rule Number One together and hit the nearest drive-through. He took about a minute to scarf down an Egg McMuffin and one of those potato-confit shingles they call hash browns.

Then he told me he felt sick.

3.

I maintain some of the old family recipes in my own kitchen today. When I went away to school for the first time, I carried away a clutch of recipe cards, now brown with age and stained with use. The cuisine to which they bear witness is a strange hybrid one, the result of my strange hybrid background. My mother was a German Jewish refugee after the war, whose family ended up settling in Ecuador. My Canadian father was a nomad by personal choice, living in the Philippines and Hong Kong, and travelling through Europe and the US before taking a job in South America, where he met my mother. They ended up staying there and having five kids before returning to Canada to settle in West Vancouver. And so, by the time I was first forming memories of food, that was the pastiche of personalities and experiences and places and traditions that informed our cuisine.

We ate my mother’s truncated childhood: rouladen, spaetzle, long-simmered pot roasts, buttered carrots, and cookies made with ground almonds and hazelnuts and dusted with icing sugar. We also ate the memories my father had of the long-ago road: pomegranates and plantains, yams, chili peppers, eggplant, mangoes, once a big wheel of Brie. And when it came time for me to go away to university, I remember sitting with my mother at the kitchen table and going through her recipe box and copying out my favorites. I’ve lost most of those cards. But the ones that remain read like a menu fixe at a very unusual restaurant that only my family could run, and at which perhaps only my family would ever dine.

Ceviche, lentil soup, Brazilian rice, arroz con pollo, and two different recipes for beef stroganoff, one of which is actually made with hamburger.

That last item there sounds pretty dreadful, I realize. But it introduces an important point about the comfort of family recipes, even when the expertise and refinement you have acquired makes you well aware that a given dish could be greatly improved. Hamburger stroganoff, for example. On paper, this is a recipe that could use much refinement. It calls for Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce, one can of mushrooms and another of cream of chicken soup. Every time I make this dish—say, once every five years—I think of how it could be improved, how really, it demands to be improved.

Then I just head on down to the grocery store and get the cream of chicken soup and make it the old-school way. And the stuff is good. In fact, it kicks your ass in a very particular way. It says to you: What? You were planning to refine your own memories?

At a chef friend’s house the other day, on this very topic, I noticed that he kept French’s mustard in the fridge. I pulled it out, held it up. I said: “Are you serious here? You’re like one of the best cooks I’ve ever met in my life and you’re using French’s mustard?” He shrugged and grinned. It goes into the batter of a particular fried-fish recipe that he learned from a very old friend whose family owns a restaurant in Baja. It’s in the warp and woof of the dish. It can’t be changed without unraveling the whole thing. So when it’s time to make that dish, he digs out the French’s mustard. Don’t even talk to him about whether Dijon would be better because, of course, it would be, but it wouldn’t be.

I have a French’s mustard confession. If you’re squeamish, this next paragraph may not be for you. I cook this dish reasonably often at home, but never for friends. I just don’t think they’re up for it and I’d like them to stay friends. It’s one of my mother’s all-time classics: beef tongue in mustard sauce. Say it in French if you have to—it definitely sounds better: langue de boeuf a la moutarde. Here’s how you do it, for those of you who like the nasty bits:

Simmer a beef tongue in water with carrots, onions, celery, peppercorns and garlic cloves. When the tongue is fork-tender—about three hours for a 3- to 4-pound tongue—remove it from the liquid and skin it. Next, make yourself a white sauce using butter and flour and the simmering liquid. Finally, the crucial step here… dig out the French’s mustard from the back of the fridge and use a couple of tablespoons to turn your white sauce into a brilliantly (almost blindingly) yellow sauce. Adjust seasonings. Serve over rice with green beans.

Why not go Dijon here? See above. Because it would be better and worse simultaneously. Which is the same reason, incidentally, I sometimes horrify my wife by serving this dish with canned green beans. Yes, they’re difficult to find nowadays, what with all this fresh local produce available. But a can of green beans flown in from Chile lends the meal a 1970s super-authenticity that it would otherwise lack. It gives the meal stability, a rootedness in the pre-fashion era. The plate aspiring to be nothing more than what it has always been.

And it’s not just comforting, either. It tastes brilliant too.

4.

Of course I recognize that a little healthy competition for refinement and sophistication is probably doing us good, even if it does get irritating on some levels. Take the local-food phenomenon. It used to be a sign of sophistication, of advanced thinking, to know which place on Earth made the best version of any given thing. So on the menus of the mid-1970s—I have a few dozen open on the desk next to me—a sole filet was always from Dover, a crab was always Alaska King, a chateaubriand was always served with sauce Béarnaise from France, and rice was always wild and from Manitoba.

In the pre-globalization era, in other words, while it meant something to fly to Paris, it also meant a lot to fly Paris over here: the ingredients, the menu, the whole repertoire of sauces. Which is more or less what was going on in the dining rooms at Chez Joel and Le Napoleon and L’Escargot—three Vancouver restaurants that had almost identical menus, from the escargot de Bourgogne to the riz de veau à la crème. Those restaurateurs and diners were just reaching out for what was considered to be the best.

Think, then, how confusing it would have been to ask a fine diner of that era to cultivate an interest in Skeena steelhead instead, or Salt Spring Island lamb, or beef from Pemberton. We tend to accept that such a request would have been ludicrous, but for the wrong reasons. We think: Well, of course a 1970s diner could not appreciate local food as we do, because we have educated ourselves over the intervening years. We have voyaged into the future—in years and sophistication—and left those proto-foodies of yesteryear behind.

But I don’t think that’s the reason why the request would be ludicrous. The locavore ethic of today would not have seemed to those diners like idea from the future, but a throwback to the past. An erecting of walls around the encampment of Vancouver. A re-embrace of medieval insularity and ignorance. Perhaps even a conservative bigotry from which mid-’70s liberals thought they had only just recently been freed.

We know that new information has since been brought to the table. Understanding our world to be interconnected—culturally, environmentally—it’s now high boorishness, a kind of anti-human insensitivity, to expect the world to ship its delicacies to the highest bidder in foreign lands. So the farmer’s markets are jammed with people carrying $40 bags of heirloom tomatoes. So the waiter at the Pointe Restaurant in the Wickinninnish Inn can offer a jug of water to the table, uttering the words in a tremulous whisper: “Local water?” And so, in Ganges the other summer, I could witness an American tourist planning a barbecue wave aside the organic chickens on offer because they weren’t from the island.

“Where are they from?” I asked the woman, who stood staring after the man, red-faced with exasperation.

“Duncan,” she said. “That’s like what, 10 kilometers away?”

The sea change in tastes—from foreign exotic to local exotic—may well be a net gain in the sense that it’s made people take food more seriously, thereby decreasing the likelihood that they will eat factory-processed crap from, say, McDonald’s. Only it remains a profound irony to me that foodies of our era will not give the 1970s ethos any credit for having made the culinary eureka-moments of our present day possible. After all, were it not for the exploratory, outward-looking zeal of our foodie ancestors, how would our awareness of the globe’s interconnectivity ever have arisen, such that we might draw back from it, scared at what we have wrought? Just what kind of person was eating jellied madrilène Orloff at the Carriage Room in the late ’60s and early ’70s, if not someone who sensed themselves complexly linked to distant traditions? Because that’s the ancestor of our present-day agri-moral fixations right there, folks: consommé with tomatoes and chives served cold and a bit of veal Orloff aspic’d into the bottom of the bowl.

(I’m actually forced to guess the veal Orloff part, since the menu doesn’t explain it. But veal is the most famous Orloffian preparation. To make it you slice a veal loin very thinly, daub each slice with a bit of onion soubise and mushroom duxelles, reassemble all the slices into the original loin shape, tie with string, paint with mornay sauce and bake until brown and glazy. Clap hands over head and yell: “Yummy!”)

But no, we don’t give the past much credit because we always want to make ourselves out to be smarter than our forebears. Or, in the riptides of a fashion-obsessed world, smarter even than the dummies who were high on the radar last month, or last week. This constant toppling and overturning, this relentless high-contact game of usurpation. Check out the big food stars of our era and recall that the foodie sensibility of an earlier generation was captured by the gentile enthusiasms of Elizabeth David and M.K. Fisher. Now we have the sous-chef stabbing Tom Aikens, or the shrieking Rachel Ray, or that thug-in-whites Gordon Ramsay. And then there’s the existentially dissatisfied Observer food critic Jay Rayner who wrote The Man Who Ate the World, in which the reader is forced to accompany Rayner on a nauseating world tour of restaurants, through galaxies of Michelin stars, at the end of which he remains as hungry and irritable as ever. Over-fed and underfed. Stuffed and insatiate.

Where did all this anxiety come from? What the hell is everybody looking for?

As it must be in all realms governed by fashion, the answer is everything and nothing. What’s good and truly satisfying in the Food Fashion Era will be an endlessly moving target. Raynor won’t ever find that satisfactory meal. But then, he wouldn’t really want to find it, because if he did, he’d be out of a job.

I decided to cook a ’70s-era dinner. I wanted to try the impossible, the punch back through time. What was it like to eat before the revolution? Could I get back to that mindset? I mentioned this to a foodie I know who had already been a bit perplexed by my whole Foodville Part One thesis, which suggested we’d lost it all to fashion. The foodie asked me, “Well, like what for example will you cook?”

I had only picked one dish at that point, from this stack of ’70s menus. So I told him/her, “Prawns in Canadian Club sauce, an appetizer from the Quarry House in Queen Elizabeth Park all those years ago.”

My foodie friend took a step back, hand to the throat, and said, “Eeew.”

Well, exactly so. What could be more disgustingly out than prawns cooked in Canadian Club rye whiskey? How dreadfully embarrassing. What if someone were to actually see me eating it?

5.

I needed help, so I convinced my friend Chris to host a party and help me cook. If there were such a thing as a celebrity home cook—that is, a cook with a fan base but no restaurant or television show—I’m fairly sure that Chris would qualify. So prolific a host is he that, on more than one occasion, having enjoyed a late dinner at his house, I’ve called the next morning to say thanks and found him in the midst of hosting a brunch.

We got together at a café on West Broadway to look at a stack of menus I collected from the Vancouver Archives, and from the personal menu collection of the very helpful Joan Cross, wife of legendary local food and wine critic Syd Cross, with whom she has been eating out in Vancouver restaurants for the better part of four decades. We spent the morning travelling back in time. As you might expect, some of the mid-’70s dishes did look terminally dated, even when they sounded delicious.

Turtle soup, for example, is unlikely to hit menus again soon, given that it involves eating an endangered species. I only remember eating it once myself at a Cajun place (remember Cajun places?) that used to be at the corner of Seymour and Davie, opposite the Vancouver Film Centre. It was strangely delicious, velvety and tangy at once. Although I must admit to being vaguely unsettled by the ovoid bone I found floating in it.

Likewise, even though offal has made a comeback in Britain—see Saint John, Hix Oyster and Chop House, Tom’s Kitchen and other places—the popularity of sweetbreads seems unlikely to surge here. I don’t understand this, particularly given the Asian influence in our cuisine. Not to mention the fact that the “creamed calf sweetbreads with truffles in a light Madeira sauce over noodles” served at the Three Green Horns sounded fantastic. I’m just not sure that in the land of Lululemon we’ll ever get back to sweetbreads. Which is too bad.

It was interesting to see, on a Euro-Germanic note, the cultural influences that ran through the menus back then. You could get stroganoff all over town, even in the fancy places. Top of the Horizon had it. So did the Carriage Room and the William Tell. Schnitzel, too, which was dressed up very finely indeed at the Quarry House, with asparagus and crab legs and an anointing of sauce Béarnaise.

If there was an Asian influence at the high end, it tended more towards Bali Hai than Beijing. This was the day of Trader Vic’s, of course. Lots of places snuck in a tropical note, as if to provide for the member of the party who was planning to get a little tipsy and loud. For the Jackie Gleason on hand, there would be the Seafood Waikiki at the Devonshire Seafood House, baked in a papaya with a light curry sauce. (That one actually doesn’t sound so great to me—something about hot papaya.) But I’m prepared to bet that the Bongo Bongo soup at Trader Vic’s, creamed with spinach and oysters, tasted pretty decent with a shot of Tabasco and a rum drink on the side. Ditto the Salad of the Sea with prawns and crab on hearts of palm at the Cloud 9.

Clearly, things that flamed up big at the table were popular. Steak Diane and steak au poivre flambé were everywhere. It makes you realize why restaurateurs all opened up their kitchens to the dining room in the ’80s. Their cooks had spent the ’70s trotting the kitchen out into the dining room with every second dish.

In all our reading, only two menu items (other than the baked papaya) perplexed us to the point that we couldn’t imagine making them work. In other words, only two items beyond which our taste buds had evolved, as opposed to our aesthetic sensibilities. The first was a drink called the Vancouver Fizz, which Il Giardino used to serve in the early ’80s. Vodka, Triple Sec, Kahlua, orange juice and whipping cream—a boozy Orange Julius as best I can make out, without fizz. I just don’t get it.

The second was the Carpetbagger Steak that they used to serve at the Timber Club. What you do here is take oysters and mushrooms and sauté them in butter, then stir in crumbled bacon, blue cheese, parsley and Sauternes (cough). Then you stuff all that into a pocket in the side of a piece of beef filet and cook to the desired degree of done-ness. It’s not the unfashionability of this dish that disturbs me. It’s the idea of that gray mass in the middle of my steak.

In any case, we had to choose some representative items, and the choice was tough. Should we go for the ultimate expression of ’70s super-fine? That would surely be tournedos de boeuf Rossini in Bordelaise sauce, richly incorporating filet mignon, foie gras, truffles, plus a sauce of port, brandy, Madeira and demi-glaze. This is the kind of dish that makes the chic foodies of today go “Eeew.” But I dare any one of them to sit down in front of an appropriate portion, a nicely balanced proto-tower atop a crostini, and not eat the thing immediately.

There were certainly other strong candidates, dishes very typical for the day. Lobsters Thermidor and Newburg. Things dressed up “Louis” or “Rockefeller,” “Strasbourg” or Jurassiene.” Meat sauced with a ladle of Hollandaise or Béarnaise.

In the end, though, we went with dishes that captured the essential twin paradox of the assignment. That is, dishes that were hugely popular but are nowhere to be found today, and that do not immediately sound good on paper, but which—using good ingredients and maybe scaling portions back a bit—we became convinced would actually look and taste great.

And here’s where we ended up.

Menu Fixe:

Special cocktail: the Nine O’Clock Gun

Local spot-prawn cocktails

and

Local spot-prawn skewer with Canadian Club sauce

Duck à l’orange with braised endive and wild-rice pilaf

Steak Diane with asparagus Polonaise and potatoes Parisienne

Peach Melba

And, allowing for the fact that I’m reviewing myself, here’s the verdict:

Awesome aps. I’d make these anytime. The local spot prawns were out of the water that afternoon, steamed live. The mango chutney-horseradish mayonnaise was a nod to an English presentation. On a butter lettuce leaf with a garnish of avocado and paprika, very ’70s and very delicious. And don’t let a foodie dissuade you from making a sauce out of Canadian Club, either. The only changes we made to the classic Scottish shellfish in whiskey sauce, besides using the Quarry House’s rye idea, was to nix the broiled-cheese stage at the end. This was mainly due to wanting both aps the same temperature on the plate. And it was a hit: the sauce velvety, with just a touch of sweet and a trace of thyme.

Duck à l’orange, meanwhile. Campy but great stuff. Do use Grand Marnier in the sauce, and maybe a bit in the chef. This is an old-fashioned dish and you want it sticky, baby. Put a tiny puddle down under the duck, which you can cook to the new-era rosy standard, and the sweet foils wonderfully against the caramelized duck skin. You do need some edge on this plate, and the tart endive gives it, cooked to brown and crispy at the edges.

Steak Diane, likewise—much better than you might think. There are lots of ways to ruin this dish by overcooking or oversaucing it. But the cognac cream with the foresty back-flavor of the mushrooms is high-end comfort. And the geyser of flames convinces people you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t.

We did not make a special cocktail in the end. The Nine O’Clock Gun seemed to fit the twin paradox nicely: nowhere to be found today and, with rum and vermouth, not sounding particularly good either. But in the mad Saturday afternoon rush to provision our dinner for 10, the rum and vermouth never ended up on either my shopping list or Chris’s.

So we toasted each other with the dinner wine instead, picked as most suitable to the era: a non-intrusive, pre-fruit-bomb Rhone from Perrin et Fils. We toasted the moment and all the moments that led up to it. And we hoped for future moments quite the same.

 To you and you and you and you. And to you, Bridget/Heidi, wherever you are.