The magic of deep-fried onion rings: From Kirby’s Pig Stand to A&W

A&W is credited for popularizing onion rings after adding them to their menu in the 1960s. I make my own contribution to their continued popularity here in Thompson, Manitoba many a Wednesday evening while stopping by my local A&W for a $5.25 order of onion rings on my way between the University College of the North (UCN) Thompson campus library and Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. I could call it a pandemic takeout indulgence perhaps except for the fact I’ve been doing it since around 2015.

Roy Allen and Frank Wright, founders of A&W Restaurants, were very likely the first true hamburger franchisers, selling franchises in California way back in 1921. In 1956, the first A&W drive-in restaurant in Canada opened on Portage Avenue right in Winnipeg.

It wasn’t long after A&W added onion rings to their menu in the 1960s that I discovered them, thanks to my late Uncle Bob Barker, who lived in Crown Point, Indiana at the time, and introduced me to onion rings on a visit, with my Aunt Joan, and cousins Lynne and Bob, to our home in Oshawa, Ontario circa 1970. I was about 13 at the time. Uncle Bob didn’t buy our onion rings at A&W, but rather at a food truck in Lakeview Park in the south end of Oshawa on the north shore of Lake Ontario. I’ve loved them ever since

I wrote back in September 2014 here: “It is, of course, not fashionable in 2014 to offer praise of any kind for fast food. Let’s put that on our table here as a given right away. But what a satiating trip down memory lane, admittedly as guilty pleasure, it can be to recall those more modest ghosts of hamburger joints past.” Almost three years later in March 2017, I would also write here in a post headlined, “The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger” that back in 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism? Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food?

An onion ring is a form of appetizer or side dish commonly found in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and some parts of Asia, mainland Europe, and Latin America. They generally consist of a cross-sectional “ring” of onion (the circular structure of which lends itself well to this method of preparation) dipped in batter or bread crumbs and then deep fried; a variant is made with onion paste. While typically served as a side dish, onion rings are often eaten by themselves. The cooking process decomposes propanethial oxide in the onion into the sweet-smelling and tasting bispropenyl disulfide, responsible for the slightly sweet taste of onion rings.

The exact origins of deep-fried onion rings are unknown. A recipe called “Fried Onions with Parmesan Cheese” is included in John Mollard’s 1802 cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined. Within the recipe, it suggests cutting onions into 1/2 inch rings, dipping them into a batter made of flour, cream, salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese then deep-frying them in boiling lard. It also recommends serving them with a sauce made of melted butter and mustard. A recipe for onions that are dipped in milk then dredged in flour and deep-fried appeared in a 1933 advertisement for Crisco in The New York Times Magazine.

One claimant to the invention of the onion ring is the Kirby’s Pig Stand restaurant chain, founded in Oak Cliff, Texas in the early 1920s. The once-thriving chain, whose heyday in the 1940s saw over 100 locations across the United States, also claims to be the originator of Texas toast.

A Dallas entrepreneur named Jessie G. Kirby built the first Pig Stand along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in October 1921. It was a roadside barbecue restaurant unlike any other: Its patrons could drive up, eat and leave, all without budging from their automobiles. (“People with cars are so lazy,” Kirby explained, “they don’t want to get out of them.”) Kirby lured these car-attached customers with great fanfare and spectacle. When a customer pulled into the Pig Stand parking lot, teenage boys in white shirts and black bow ties jogged over to his car, hopped up onto the running board—sometimes before the driver had even pulled into a parking space—and took his order. (This daredevilry won the servers a nickname: carhops.) Soon, the Pig Stand drive-ins replaced the carhops with attractive young girls on roller skates, but the basic formula was the same: good-looking young people, tasty food, speedy service and auto-based convenience.

That first Pig Stand was a hit with hungry drivers, and soon it became a chain. (The slogan: “America’s Motor Lunch.”) Kirby and his partners made one of the first franchising arrangements in restaurant history, and Pig Stands began cropping up everywhere. By 1934, there were more than 130 Pig Stands in nine states. (Most were in California and Florida.) Meanwhile, the chain kept innovating. Many people say that California’s Pig Stand No. 21 became the first drive through restaurant in the world in 1931, and food historians believe that Pig Stand cooks invented deep-fried onion rings, chicken-fried steak sandwiches and a regional speciality known as Texas Toast.

But wartime gasoline and food rationing hit the Pig Stands hard, and after the war they struggled to compete with newer, flashier drive-ins.

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Aloha: ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Hawaiian pizza?

 

In the Great Pizza debate there is really only one main question: Is Hawaiian pizza a delight or an abomination?

Sure, there are some subsidiary questions connoisseurs ask about, such as whether anthracite coal-fired or wood-fired ovens bakes a better pizza pie, although it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because the answer partly depends on the kind of cheese topping and other ingredients, or whether the best pizzas in North America come out of a handful of pizza joints in New York City or New Haven, Connecticut? That sort of thing.

Coal-fired ovens typically run between 800°F and 1,000°F, sometimes even higher, according to Pizza Today, the industry’s leading trade magazine, which was launched in 1984 by pizzeria owner Gerry Durnell in the tiny town of Santa Claus, Indiana.

Durnell had worked his way through college as a rock and roll disc jokey, a TV cameraman, and as an announcer for the Ozark Jubilee. He was running an ice cream shop in Santa Claus, in southwestern Indiana, not too far from the Kentucky state line , when he decided to add baking pizzas to his restaurant menu.

In a Dec. 15, 2104 article in Pizza Today, headlined “Respecting the Craft: Wood vs. Coal,” Tony Gemignani, who got his start in 1991 as a pizza thrower at his brother’s Pyzano’s Pizzeria in Castro Valley, California, notes “specialty cheese like a dry mozzarella, also known as a Caprese loaf, is common. This cheese is typically sliced and applied before the sauce. Common pizzas are tomato pies, clam and garlic, and sausage, says Gemignani, the first and only Triple Crown winner to date for baking at the International Pizza Championships in Lecce, Italy. “When you’re cooking at such a high temperature, even higher than a wood-fired oven,” he says, “you still have a longer bake time because a coal oven doesn’t have a high flame like a wood-fired oven. The pizza is typically 16 to 18 inches in diameter and is charred yet pliable. It has a slight crispness, with some stability.

“A wood-fired oven typically runs between 650°F and 900°F. At 900°F, pizzas can cook in 60 to 90 seconds. Fresh mozzarella and buffalo mozz are typically used. The pizzas that come from these ovens are typically 11 to 13 inches in diameter and come out of the ovens charred, soft, delicate and sometimes wet (even soupy at times). They are not recommended for delivery.

“When it comes to the price of wood and coal, they are very similar.”

Lombardi’s (a favourite of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso) was founded in 1905 on Spring Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan in New York City, and is the oldest pizzeria in the United States. While it is generally agreed pizza originated in Italy, the date of its invention is hard to pin down with exactitude. 

Neapolitan pizza is first mentioned by name in the late 18th century, and that’s usually considered to be the origin date for pizza, but a minority opinion in recent years is that pizza dates back to 997 in the 10th century, when it appears on a Latin list of foods to be supplied annually at Christmas and Easter as a tithe to the archbishops of Gaeta (“whether to us or our successors”) in central Italy, payable by the tenants of a mill on the nearby Garigliano River.

In support of the later Naples origins of pizza theory, an often recounted story holds that on June 11, 1889, to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, the Neapolitan pizza-maker Raffaele Esposito created the “Pizza Margherita”, a pizza garnished with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil, to represent the national colours of Italy as on the Italian flag.

Carol Helstosky, an associate professor of history at the University of Denver, and the author of Pizza: A Global History, told CBC Radio earlier this year that “pizza never had that great a reputation throughout much of its history. As people tried pizza, it had its origins in Naples, right, in the 17th century. And as people outside of Naples, even other Italians or foreigners, tried pizza they reacted with absolute disgust. I believe American inventor Samuel Morse, when he visited Naples and tried pizza, he described that as a type of ‘nauseous cake.'”

In Naples, Helstosky says, there were several different types of pizza, but “mostly pizza was consumed by the poorest of the Neapolitans – soldiers, workers, families who didn’t have access to kitchens and purchased cheap street food. This was also a place where people could eat pasta street side, and so pizza would be a cheap takeaway snack. And so the pizzaiolo would make pizza out of whatever ingredients he happened to have on hand. Near Naples, tomatoes were certainly popular but also fish. And then some mozzarella made out of buffalo milk, fresh herbs like basil or oregano. Whatever was on hand would be sprinkled on top of a pizza.”

Morse, who hardly tried to telegraph his opinion on the matter, apparently was of a minority view on the subject of pizza, which in the 21st century is, if not quite a universal dish worldwide, well, at least and international dish. In March 2015, Pope Francis told Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa,  the only thing he really missed after two years as pope was the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/).

Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,”  Pope Francis told Alazraki.

Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

I also recall writing on Oshawa’s “Share Your Memories” webpage that “in keeping with the spirit of the thing, my own comment Feb. 3 [2014] reads, ‘Pepi’s Pizza, eh? Simcoe and John streets. I had a friend who worked there circa 1973-74. I still have fond memories of the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.’”

Mother’s Pizza was founded in 1970 by three partners, Grey Sisson, Ken Fowler and Pasquale Marra, and got its start in the Westdale Village area of Steeltown. The chain eventually grew to about 120 locations in Canada, the United States and England.

In 2008, Brian Alger acquired the then-expired trademark to Mother’s Pizza – one of his favourite childhood brands – and along with another entrepreneur, Geeve Sandhu, re-opened April 1, 2013 at 701 Queenston Rd. in Hamilton, Ont.

When Sam Panopoulos emigrated, along with his two brothers, when he was 20, from Greece to Canada in 1954, pizza was an oddity. “Pizza wasn’t in Canada – nowhere,” he told CBC Radio’s As It Happens last February.

“At the time, the food was available in Detroit and was slowly making its way to neighbouring Windsor, Ont., not far from Chatham, Ont., the small town where Panopoulos had settled and opened a restaurant,” CBC reported.

“When visiting Windsor, he dined on pizza and decided to try making it at home. ‘Those days, the main thing was mushrooms, bacon and pepperoni. There was nothing else going on the pizza,'” said Panopoulos.

“Inspired by a can of pineapple on his shelf, he took a chance and tossed the fruit on his pizza. The year was 1962. Hawaiian pizza had arrived at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham.

“We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste,” Panopoulos told the BBC News last February. “We were young in the business and we were doing a lot of experiments.

“Customers ended up loving the savoury sweetness of the dish.

“The creation also capitalized on the mid-century tiki trend, which popularized Polynesian culture in North America.

“Nobody liked it at first,” said Panopoulos. “Those days nobody was mixing sweets and sours and all that. It was plain, plain food.”

That debate continues 55 years later. Icelandic President Guðni Th. Jó­hann­es­son made world headlines earlier this year at a university in Iceland, in a story that became known as “Pineapplegate” after he was asked  whimsical question about his views on pineapple as a topping on pizza and he responded in a lighthearted way that he thought that it should be banned and that he was “fundamentally opposed” to pineapple on pizza and suggested. “I like pineapple, just not on pizza. But I can’t make laws that make it illegal for people to put pineapples on their pizzas,” Guðni said. “I am happy I don’t have that authority, presidents shouldn’t be tyrants. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where those in my position could ban things they don’t like. But I recommend putting seafood on pizza.”

Sam Panopoulos, who was 83, died last month. “From what I have read, Sam was a decent man with a good sense of humour,” Guðni wrote on Facebook. “Indirectly you could say we crossed paths after I jokingly (yeah, right) said that this particular topping should be banned.”

Me? Well, I don’t know that I tried any kind of pizza until maybe the early 1970s when I was 13 or 14. My parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, although I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

I think I may have had my first Hawaiian pizza in the late spring or early summer of 1976, at the very, very end of my Oshawa Catholic High School Grade 13 days, on a picnic table at Lakeview Park in the south end of Oshawa on the north shore of Lake Ontario, hanging out in those last glorious days of high school freedom with my comrades in numerous adventures, both big and small, Ann Marie (a.k.a. Annie and A.M.) McDermott, and Gerry Byrne, both of whom are friends to this day. I might even have been just finishing up my part-time after-school driving job for Mothers Pizza Simcoe North at the time, as I got ready to move to a higher-paying student summer job at General Motors of Canada, before beginning my higher learning at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario that September.

The Hawaiian pizza verdict? Well, last night I had both chunks of pineapple and anchovies’ paste on the pizza I constructed at home (pictured above), suggesting I’m quite OK with mixing sweets and sours, and enjoy the savoury sweetness of the Hawaiian pizza model (I tend to improvise a bit) that Sam Panopoulos first offered us in 1962 at his Satellite Restaurant in Chatham.

Thanks, and aloha, Sam!

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The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger

 

 

 

 

Back in September 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism?  Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food? Who’d a thunk it?

Admittedly, I had written on occasion about food, especially fast food, prior to venturing forth with soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) but not that often.  Mainly if it involved a road trip from Southern Ontario to New England or vice-versa that wound up taking me to my favourite Red Barn, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, New York, or something got me thinking about high school back in Oshawa, Ontario and memories of Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza. That sort of thing.

Just taking a quick look here, it looks like I’ve become an insatiable lowbrow fast food blogger who dreams of being to blogging what Guy Fieri of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is to TV. And that’s just looking for headlines that trumpet food, not so much others posts that mention food either in a secondary or passing fashion, overshadowed by a main non-food story. Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

In a similar vein, I’ve written a couple of times about the Burntwood Curling Club’s monthly, from November to April anyway, fundraising pickerel fish fry, now in its third season, to bring in some revenue at $20 a plate for the older crowd and $10 a plate for those 12 and under, with proceeds going towards what it cost to replace the club’s aging ice plant, a big ticket six-figure item for curling clubs. The last fish fry of the season is set for Monday, April 3 in the upstairs club lounge from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The fish fry involves club volunteers cooking about 50 pounds per fish fry of  fresh pickerel, also known as walleye, from the commercial fish packing station in Wabowden. Pickerel is the most valuable commercial fish catch in Manitoba, with an average value of  about $20 million per year, which is about 70 per cent of the landed value of all species, and comprise more than 40 per cent of commercial fish production in the province by weight. Am I writing primarily about curling or pickerel? I suppose some of both really, but I know a bit more about pickerel. Jeanette and I are looking forward this spring and summer to marking a decade fishing together off the dock for pickerel at Paint Lake Marina!

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

Maybe we all just love food, no?

In Winnipeg, we have V.J.’s Drive Inn at at Broadway and Main with its overstuffed double chili cheese dogs, greasy spoon certified cheeseburgers, golden fries and chocolate milkshakes, all for the more discerning among the Fort Garry Hotel clientele methinks.

And speaking of chili dogs: should you ever find yourself down in Durham, North Carolina, you can’t go wrong enjoying a meal at The Dog House, locally owned and in business in Durham since 1970, and serving up an assortment of Bull-Dogs, Boxer Dogs, Collie Dogs, Hound Dogs, Puppy Dogs, Ol’ Yallows and the like.

Living in North Carolina was where I developed tastes for chili dogs, deep-fried cornmeal-batter Hushpuppies, pork barbecue and fat back, cracklins and wash pot pork rinds, while prudently not losing said tastes by overdoing it with low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol testing at nearby Duke University Medical Center, although I visited the world-class medical facility for other ailments on occasion.

The Dog House says its chili is made from a family recipe with pure beef, and no beans, soy or other fillers; just a blend of secret spices and 47 years of experience.

As for the slaw, it is “not too sweet and not too spicy,” and always freshly made.

But closer to home, when you’re appetite is a bit larger than a sausage dog or one of its cousins,  my pick is Lovey’s BBQ in St. Boniface for hand trimmed briskets, pork shoulders and ribs. Yum!

Sometimes you get to combine your writing interests, say about Catholicism and food, as I did in “Catholic cooking: From Pope Francis’ love for Buenos Aires pizzerias to Father Leo Patalinghug, the TV show Filipino ‘Cooking Priest’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/)

I combined Catholicism and food on a few other occasions as well: In “‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/make-mine-halibut-please-fish-and-chips-catholic-on-friday/) I wrote that until Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays. Catholics had been eating fish on Friday under an edict in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851. With the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day.

No need to feel too sorry though for us fish eaters for having to forgo meat on Fridays from 851 to 1966. We made up for it on an annual basis on “Fat Tuesday,” which fell on Feb. 28 this year. Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.  Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd.  Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur.  Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev.  Užgavėnės.  Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but we made sure we ate  – and ate big and ate rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon – the last day of Shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name.  Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes. Come to think of it, even though we can eat meat on Fridays now outside of Lent, we remain fond of Shrove Tuesday.

“If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste,” I wrote in a blog post headlined “With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth.” I noted that we had borrowed the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail, “in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table” from our “Anglican or Episcopalian brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/with-our-o-antiphons-smoking-bishops-and-sinful-servants-we-are-the-church-militant-on-earth/).

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

And you can be pretty sure that while I might not post about it on soundingsjohnbarker, I’m quite likely to put in a bit of a plug on my Facebook page at least for annual Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day come Wednesday, April 12. I’ve done so for the last two years.

Melting cheese on top of bread is a culinary concept that has been around since the time of Ancient Rome,  but modern grilled cheese sandwiches, as we know them, didn’t become popular until the 1920s. Due to the ready availability of cheese and sliced bread for the average consumer by the early 20th century, they became an American staple, but a connoisseur’s love for grilled cheese sandwiches also spread around the world.

Thanksgiving, of course, gives me a change to give holiday nod to turkey, such as in this piece, “Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/mouthwatering-american-thanksgiving-recipes-correction-in-the-new-york-times-and-other-pardonable-acts/):

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

And I wouldn’t be much of a former New Englander, if after enjoying a “blue” rare steak, I didn’t enjoy  scarfing down some super premium ice cream, like Steve’s Ice Cream, named after Steve Herrell, as it was in the early 1980s at the original location on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, or Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., which got its its start  in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont. In 1980, they were  showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.\

Burgers have been the continuing jackpot for my food entries, however, which may not surprise many. What might surprise you, however, is the relatively big numbers (outpacing anything I’ve written on Thompson city council, can you believe it?) has been for two posts on two defunct American burger chains, both of which also operated for a time in parts of Canada, particularly in the 1970s.

Apparently former employees of the two burger chains and hungry aficionados who remember them fondly, salivate, or so it seems, to a helping of words on the Red Barn and Burger Chef, gone, but never forgotten.

Both stories get read pretty much daily somewhere in the world and “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) was published here back on Sept. 13, 2014, while “Burger Chef: The story of the greatest might-have-been in the history of the fast food business” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/burger-chef-the-story-of-the-greatest-might-have-been-in-the-history-of-the-fast-food-business/) appeared originally on March 13, 2016.

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Catholic cooking: From Pope Francis’ love for Buenos Aires pizzerias to Father Leo Patalinghug, the TV show Filipino ‘Cooking Priest’

“If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste,” I wrote last Dec. 18 in a blog post headlined “With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth.” I noted that we had borrowed the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail, “in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table” from our “Anglican (also known as Episcopalian and Church of England, depending what country you are reading this post in) brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens….” You can read that earlier Christmastide post in its entirety at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/with-our-o-antiphons-smoking-bishops-and-sinful-servants-we-are-the-church-militant-on-earth/

As today marks the Fourth Sunday of Lent, could be food is simply on my mind a bit, as I wrote in another post Feb. 13 headlined “Shrived by the confessor: Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday arrive for penitents as the liturgical season of Lent is upon us, but not before one last rich feast of pancakes Feb. 17 as shrovetide ends” and Ash Wednesday was some 26 days ago now: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/shrived-by-the-confessor-fat-tuesday-and-ash-wednesday-arrive-for-penitents-as-the-liturgical-season-of-lent-is-upon-us-but-not-before-one-last-rich-feast-of-pancakes-feb-17-as-shrovetide-ends/

In any event, something Pope Francis said in a recent interview,  to mark the second anniversary of his election to the papacy March 13, with Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa at Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel where he has lived since his election on March 13, 2013, caught my eye. Alazraki has covered the Vatican for Noticieros Televisa since 1974. The Spanish-language section of Radio Vaticano published a full transcript of the interview March 12, which you can read here at: http://es.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/03/12/segundo_aniversario_de_la_elecci%C3%B3n_del_papa_francisco/1128922, while an English-language summary of its contents published March 13 by Vatican Radio is available to read here at: http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/03/13/pope_francis_on_his_pontificate_to_date/1129074

It wasn’t the prediction that the 78-year-old pontiff expects to have a short papacy of maybe four or five years that really caught my eye.  Perhaps if Pope Francis had suddenly embraced Jack Van Impe, Cris Putnam and Tom Horn’s view, along with others on the far reaches of Protestant evangelicalism, that he was indeed “Petrus Romanus” (Peter the Roman), who would be history’s last pope, according to the Prophecy of St. Malachy (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/), also known as the Prophecy of the Popes, from 1139, then the time element really would have caught my eye. Alas for would-be date setters and their eschatological ilk (some of whom like to deny they are date setters even when they are for all practical purposes) he didn’t do that. No, what really caught my eye was Pope Francis saying the only thing he really misses as pope is the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes.

Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim  Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,”  Pope Francis told Alazraki.

What I want to know is what pizzeria is Pope Francis’ favourite in Buenos Aires? Is he a double-cheese kinda guy with extra pepperoni? Those strike me as the kind of questions this pope just may answer if posed to him.

In a similar vein, I am a big fan of  Father Leo Patalinghug, who was born in the Philippines,  raised in the Baltimore area, ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Baltimore on June 5, 1999, and who works at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland – and who finds time along the way to host Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN’s) half hour Savoring Our Faith show, where he uses the kitchen as his pulpit to preach the Catholic faith while at the same time showing viewers how to prepare flavourful dishes.

Father Leo developed his love for cooking while attending seminary at the North American College in Rome. There, he became friendly with several Italian restaurant owners and would often invite them back to the student kitchen to trade cooking secrets. They would teach him about rigatoni and lasagna; he would show them how to make hamburgers and ribs.

I haven’t caught an episode of Savoring Our Faith for a few months, but I did  see a special report with Father Leo, known as the “Cooking Priest,” back home in the Philippines walking through Central Market in Manila Jan. 16  to do an open air Filipino street food tour, explaining local delicacies to a journalist during January’s papal visit to the 7,107 Islands of Faith.

Mouth watering. Soul satisfying. And so very Catholic.

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What ‘Cat Sherman’ has learned on Facebook

All food photos courtesy of Jeanette Kimball

While I wouldn’t quite qualify as the last Facebook holdout on the planet, I’ve been enough of a Luddite to be a contender probably.

In a way that’s odd because I haven’t approached all social media that way. I became the managing editor of the locally owned online-only and now long defunct Kingston Net-Times in November 1996. I very much doubt any of my almost 300 Facebook friends or 3,852 followers on LinkedIn were working in online media way back more than 18 years ago (just the kind of statement every good journalist knows invariably invites contradiction). I still remember our lone ad salesman trying to sell local advertising in the fall of 1996. It was a tough go given most of our potential mom-and-pop advertisers in Kingston had barely heard of the Internet at that point, although a few had dial-up modem ISP connections and a handful maybe had the brand-new high-speed cable broadband connection. Very few indeed.

The next year, I actually jumped back to print for a second tour of duty with the daily Peterborough Examiner as City Hall reporter (I had worked there from 1985 to 1989 as a court reporter). When I went back to the old Hunter Street building, Jack Marchen still had the desk facing directly across from me in the newsroom and Phil Tyson was still at the desk beside me. The arrival of the Apple iMac was still a year or so away for when we moved buildings down to The Kingsway. I understand the Examiner is now back on Hunter Street in East City. Good on them. Newspapers don’t belong in industrial wastelands, even if it is easier for deliveries. They belong downtown or at least close to it. Where reporters can actually walk their beats and encounter the people they are covering walking to the courthouse or City Hall or in a local coffee shop. Progress being progress, I worked my way up from an iMac to an eMac by the time I arrived at The Independent (which actually was independent) in Brighton, Ontario in 2004. Who remembers eMacs?

I also worked my up from being a reporter to managing editor in that time-honoured journalism tradition of the managing editor who hired me having enough of things less than three months after he hired me and never coming back from lunch one overcast November day. The publisher, knowing talent when she saw it, or at least recognizing the last remaining body in editorial, fast-tracked me to the top. Stories of journalists quitting and not coming back from lunch of course, are legion in the business. My predecessor at the Peterborough Examiner in 1985, I was told had enough by lunch on day one of his probation and never returned from lunch.

As for Facebook, my employer at the Thompson Citizen required me to set up a page on March 19, 2010 to keep an eye on things when our then general manager, Donna Wilson, a Facebook maven ahead of her time, set up a page for the paper. Since I was reluctant to do so, it wound up flying largely under the radar for years as “Cat Sherman,” named after my black cat, who would be with me for another two years. That may not have been 100 per cent in compliance with Facebook’s true identity requirements, but, hey, Facebook has a lot of fine print to read, and it wasn’t me looking to be on Facebook. When Donna decamped from the Thompson Citizen about six months after getting us on Facebook, the publisher told me the de facto job of moderating the Thompson Citizen Facebook page was going to fall to me alone, suggesting that as a journalist I should have been at the rudder solo on it from day one, rather than sharing the job with the general manager whose idea it was.

Ironically, the Thompson Citizen wound up leaving Facebook amidst national headlines in January 2013, after problems with racist comments in relation to aboriginal issues. While many of our colleagues in the media, not to mention academics and human rights officials, publicly applauded us for the principled stand we took, we noticed no one, at least to my knowledge, followed us in our very public pledge, by the publisher, general manager and myself, to permanently have the Thompson Citizen leave Facebook. If you are interested in what happened and the rationale behind the decision, you can read the editorial I penned on behalf of the paper on Jan. 30, 2013 headlined, “Racist anti-aboriginal slurs and offensive comments prompt Thompson Citizen to permanently close Facebook page” at: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/racist-anti-aboriginal-slurs-and-offensive-comments-prompt-thompson-citizen-to-permanently-close-facebook-page-1.1372321

The Wednesday Thompson Citizen and Friday Nickel Belt News are owned by GVIC Communications Corp. of Vancouver’s Glacier Media Group. They are one of the few, if not the only, Glacier newspaper, not on Facebook in 2015. Perhaps that is just as well if you read my Feb. 11 post “Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/louis-riel-21st-century-hero-to-the-metis-of-manitoba-rogers-hometown-hockey-tour-set-to-roll-into-thompson-manitobas-hockey-hotbed/ and then take a glance at their weekly Thompson Citizen POLL question, which is into its third week up online: “Was racism the reason for the violence in the stands at the midget AA Thompson King Miners game last Sunday, as some have alleged?”

• Yes.
• No.
• It played a role, but it wasn’t the only factor.

As of this morning, as I write this, 49 per cent of the 63 Thompson Citizen readers who responded to the poll were saying racism wasn’t the reason for the violence: http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/thompson-citizen-7.23996?ot=gmg.PopupPageLayout.ot&showResult=true, with the helpful disclaimer, “This is not a scientific poll,” lest readers be inclined perhaps to think it might be.

Needless to say, with the Thompson Citizen no longer on Facebook as of Jan. 30, 2013, “Cat Sherman” had little that he needed to do. Somehow about 20 people back in 2010 had figured out his true identity and requested to be his “friend” and that’s where things sat until late last year when I decided since I was no longer editor of the paper, it might be time to revisit the whole Facebook issue, at least in terms of a personal page. So Cat Sherman got friendlier than he had been in the previous four years and accepted about 10 long-pending Facebook requests that had been hanging out there in virtual limbo forever. I think it quite likely that when I finally accepted the friend requests the requestors very likely had long forgotten they had ever made them in the first place and wondered how they had got a new friend called Cat Sherman.

And then being a good Facebook citizen, Cat Sherman changed his name to his true identity on Feb. 14. And what did I learn? At least so far. Well, I like to think I write a fairly interesting, if admittedly eclectic and maybe even eccentric, blog at times at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ On its best day ever last Oct. 4, a month after it started, a story called, “The hauntings of October: Three Thompson unsolved murders: Kerrie Ann Brown, Bernie Carlson and Christopher Ponask” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-hauntings-of-october-three-thompson-unsolved-murders-kerrie-ann-brown-bernie-carlson-and-christopher-ponask/ had 5,113 “views” the day after it was posted. It’s now been looked at more than 11,000 times.

But while people do link to the blog through Facebook, sure, what they are really interested in, because they are your friends and family, after all, is your holiday pics. People love photos.  While I like to think my latest prose on eschatology demands interest on its own merits, my friends want to know where the last photo from holidays was taken. And they readily “like” and often “comment” on photos on Facebook. Instantly. Really.

Perhaps my next Facebook post, or at least one sooner than later, should be on the cuisine and foodstuff we sampled on a gastronomical odyssey through Île du Cap aux Meules in Quebec’s  Magdalen Islands, or Îles-de-la-Madelaine, a small archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence? Maybe even a taste of it right here with some dessert photos? Jeanette has assured me for years, if there is one thing friends on Facebook like as well ,or even more than vacation photos, it is pics of food. And if you combine food with holidays on Facebook, well, really, who needs prose anyway, eh? Bon appétit.

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With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth

A week from today we again celebrate Christmas, the second most important date on the Christian liturgical calendar, surpassed only by Easter. On Jan. 9, 2013, I wrote that when I looked around St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church here in Thompson, Manitoba, part of the largely missionary Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, which takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and stretches across the northern parts of three Canadian provinces – Saskatchewan, Manitoba and a small portion of Northwestern Ontario, during the 2012 vigil mass Christmas Eve, and saw Father Guna Sekhar Pothula, robed in his white and gold sacramental vestments, swinging a thurible, a metal censer suspended from chains and holding burning incense – I found the scene comforting and liturgically meaningful in both sight and smell. Too often, we forget that as Catholics we use all our senses in a participatory way in worship.

Take the Great Antiphons, known as the O antiphons, for example, those Magnificat antiphons chanted or recited at Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours during the last seven days of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas and also heard as the alleluia verses on the same days from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23 inclusive at mass.

They are referred to as the O antiphons because the title of each one begins with the interjection “O”: O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us). Taking the first letter of each and reversing the order – Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia – gives the Latin words ero cras, which means “tomorrow I will come.”

While the exact origins of the polyphonous O antiphons are now shrouded by the mist of time, they probably date back to the late 5th or 6th early century. At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire in France,  also known as the Abbey of Fleury or Abbaye Saint-Benoît de Fleury, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in Western Europe, founded in the 6th century, the O antiphons were traditionally recited by the abbot and other abbey leaders in descending rank, and then a gift was given to each member of the community.

The second O antiphon, which is chanted today, is O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel): “O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, Who didst appear to Moses in the flame of the burning bush, and didst give unto him the Law on Sinai: come and with an outstretched arm redeem us.” But while Catholics are indeed People of the Book, we are also people of song and praise, as you can hear here from the Dominican Friars of England & Scotland (English Province) student brothers at Blackfriars, Oxford eight years ago today on Dec. 18 , 2006 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvafrxZ_Ww4#t=11

If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste. Take the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail,  which in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table, we have borrowed from our Anglican (also known as Episcopalian and Church of England, depending what country you are reading this post in) brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 171st anniversary of which falls tomorrow:

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It it is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

We Catholics also share a collective memory and remember our saints and martyrs in Eucharistic Prayer 1, an essential of the rubrics comprising the Roman Canon or Missal, with origins that reach as far back as the 4th century, and which made an indelible mark on my Catholic boyhood, although it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for most of my Protestant friends, I’ve found.

“In union with the whole Church we honour Mary, the ever-virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God. We honour Joseph, her husband, the apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude; we honour Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian and all the saints. May their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection … to us, also, your sinful servants, who hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy apostles and martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and all your saints: admit us, we beg you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon….”

Every pope from Peter up to and including Sixtus II, beheaded Aug. 6, 258 under the edict of Roman Emperor Valerian, was a saint and martyr, including Linus, Anacletus (Cletus), Clement I, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I (also called Xystus I), Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, Callistus I, Urban I, Pontain, Anterus, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius I and Stephen I. Sixtus II was the 24th pope.

When it comes right down to essentials, Catholics pray for deliverance at Christmas and the remainder of the liturgical year through a series of petitions and pleas for intercession, not so unlike many of our Protestant, and for that matter, non-Christian friends, from myriad faith communities. We just like to do it as part and parcel of a history lesson.

As Pope John XXIII, said in Ad Petri Cathedram (“To the Chair of Peter”), his first encyclical, promulgated June 29, 1959, “…the common saying, expressed in various ways and attributed to various authors [including Marco Antonio de Dominis, a 17th century archbishop of Spalato, Peter Meiderlin (Rupertus Meldeniu), a 17th century German Lutheran theologian, or even St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century] must be recalled with approval: in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.”

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Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts

I’ve read a good number of corrections and clarifications over the years in newspapers as a journalist. I daresay I’ve had to write a few myself. That’s the nature of the beast. But the correction appended Nov. 26 by New York Times editors to a Nov. 18 story headlined “The United States of Thanksgiving,” which overreached it turns out in scouring “the nation for recipes that evoke each of the 50 states (and D.C. and Puerto Rico)” takes the cake for both its length, reflecting the rather larger number of errors, and something unique in my experience as a reader. It was so mouthwatering it made me hungry just reading it.

As a former resident of North Carolina, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, all I can say is yum. Happy Thanksgiving to all north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You can read the original New York Times story here at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/18/dining/thanksgiving-recipes-across-the-united-states.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The correction appended the bottom of the story online reads:

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

“And, finally, the label for the illustration for the nation’s capital misspelled the District of Columbia as Colombia.”

Much like Canadian Thanksgiving, which I wrote about last month (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/canadian-thanksgiving-eh-february-april-may-june-october-november-a-very-moveable-feast-historically/) our American cousins have an older and equally interesting Thanksgiving history of this very moveable feast in both countries.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is a more complex feast. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family.

Canadian Thanksgiving, or Jour de l’Action de grâce, by contrast is a somewhat more low-key affair.

While we do travel to visit family and many of us will sit down to eat turkey with family and friends, it’s nothing on the scale of the American experience.

Perhaps that’s because we have our Thanksgiving on a Monday at the end of a weekend, not on a Thursday at the beginning of a long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as  Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.'”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago (and which was on the shelf today I noticed) there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour yesterday offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

Cheese, a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” was this year’s recipient yesterday of a presidential pardon from U.S. President Barack Obama during the annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief Wednesday at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”

The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.

This year’s duo was Mac and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.

“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”

He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”

Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July this year, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.”  Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”

Mac and Cheese will be sent to a park in Leesburg, Virginia, a Washington suburb. The property has been used to grow turkeys in the past. The estate was owned by former Virginia Governor Westmoreland Davis, who raised hundreds of his own turkeys there in the 1930s and 1940s.

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‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday

If you grew up Catholic in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, you probably have memories of having a favourite fish-and-chips shop, serving halibut, haddock or cod, along with French Fries, maybe some coleslaw and a wedge of lemon.

Now true enough, Pope Paul VI had proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a prescription which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851 (with the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day).

The fact such substitutional acts of charity or piety have never really been spelled out in any great detail or emphasis by most bishops in Canada or the United States has meant that the Friday-abstinence story has been cast not surprisingly by reporters since 1966 primarily in terms of “no more going to hell for eating a hamburger on Friday,” as Daria Sockey wrote in “What Ever Happened to Meatless Fridays?” in the National Catholic Register on June 1, 2003, “rather than a call to continue the tradition of Friday penance, embraced out of love, and with leeway for more variety.”

Following the lead of the Vatican and national episcopal conferences in France, Canada and Mexico earlier in 1966, the U.S. norms (which are similar but not identical to those in Canada) were approved in “On Penance and Abstinence,” a pastoral statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on Nov. 18, 1966. The first day Friday American Catholics could eat meat on Friday under the new regulations was the first Friday of Advent on Dec. 2, 1966.

I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966. As far as I can remember, it didn’t really change our family practice and the fact that for years, well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work.

My earliest memories of that were fish and chips from the Rose Bowl that operated at the corner of Bond and Prince streets for many years, memories that include malt vinegar and newspaper wrapping.

Sometime in the early 1970s, an H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise came to Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, and we enjoyed their fish and chips also for a time. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965.

At its peak in the 1970s, there were close to 60 H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips restaurants in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), including Oshawa. Today, the company is headquartered in Monterey Park, California, and has about 18 remaining locations operating in Chino, Corona, Covina, Downey, Long Beach, Gardena, Garden Grove, Hollywood, North Hollywood, Orange, Rancho Palos Verdes, Reseda, San Fernando, Temple City, Upland, West Los Angeles, and Westminster in Southern California.

When I went off to Trent University in 1976, my love of fish and chips followed me to Baker’s Seafood (now gone) at 262 Hunter St. W. on the edge of downtown and an old residential neighbourhood fronting Hunter at the corner of Bethune Street. A sign midway between the first and second storeys of the Hunter Street side of the building had a white background and red letters proclaiming Baker’s Seafood. On the  side facing west on Bethune Street was a similar sign reading “Fish and Chips” and on the wall next to the front door was a sign with a cartoon-like blue fish in the middle holding a knife and fork and a lemon that said: “Est. 1954. Seafood. Chicken. TAKE OUT. Shrimp – Scallops. Salads – Veggies. HALIBUT Fish and Chips. Peterborough’s Tradition.”

Another great Peterborough fish and chip is Jeff Purvey’s Fish & Chips, which has two locations, although I am more familiar with the older Rubidge Street restaurant.

The Purvey tradition started in 1919 when Henry Purvey went into business on Dundas Street in Toronto. Henry’s son, Jeff Purvey, was born there. After serving for six years in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945, Jeff joined his father and together they expanded into three Toronto locations on Yonge Street, Danforth Avenue and McRae Avenue in Leaside.

In 1956 Jeff moved to Peterborough and opened the Rubidge Street location with just 12 seats originally.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Pilot House in downtown Kingston, Ontario, established in 1981 at the corner of King and Johnson streets, where I spent some cheerful Friday evenings during my graduate school days at Queen’s University from 1993 to 1995, and the pints were as famous as the fish and chips.

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Thompson, Manitoba: Home of local honey and potatoes

Potatoes come from Prince Edward Island or Idaho, right? True enough, they do. But they also come from the Thompson area in Northern Manitoba. Same for honey.

Little Farm potatoes, Yukon gold and reds, are available from Barry Little for $13 for a 35-pound box. You can call him at (204) 778-7723 or (204) 679-5349 to ask about them, while Eugene Larocque, on Manasan Drive, and his son, Steven, have their locally-produced Northern Gold Honey, with a one-kilogram jar costing $15 or a 500-gram jar for $8. They can be reached at (204) 307-6217 or by e-mail at: ngoldhoney@hotmail.com

Little, known for his agricultural projects at the old Thompson Zoo, is also an inventor and innovator, who along with Shawna Henderson, Bill Beardy and Donna Lundie, and residents of Fox Lake Cree Nation, built a hoop-style greenhouse in 2011, used to grow tomatoes and cucumbers for local residents on the reserve out of recycled trampoline frames. Little developed the innovative idea for the greenhouse based upon using the available resources in the community. In this case, he searched in different dumps for materials to build growing structures.  The total cost including hardware and lumber needed for the greenhouse was between $250 and $300.

Steven Larocque, who works for Manitoba Jobs and the Economy’s Apprenticeship Manitoba in North Centre Mall on Station Road, has been the Northern apprenticeship training co-ordinator for the last five years.

Food Matters Manitoba, a registered charity, which works to support local, affordable, nutritious food for Northern Manitobans in partnership with the province’s Northern Healthy Foods Initiative,  has long been working to get the word out when it comes to promoting locally-grown produce from North of the 53rd parallel.  The typical food item on a Manitoba table travels an estimated 2,200 kilometres before landing on the plate, the organizaton says. For a 100-day period from Sept. 1 until Dec. 9, 2007, 100 Mile Manitoba ran an “experiment in local eating … 100 people, 100 days, 100 hundred miles,” which attempted to get 100 Manitobans to eat food produced and processed within 100 miles of their kitchen table for the 100-day period.

During the Grow North Conference in Wabowden earlier this year, a kindergarten class from Cross Lake’s Mikisew School had the opportunity to see some baby chicks and learn the importance of where your food comes from and how to take care of it. Children from Cross Lake were able to participate in observing the chickens that were being raised for the Cross Lake Chicken project.
Mel Johnson School teamed up with the Bayline Regional Roundtable and co-hosted this year’s conference in Wabowden on May 22-23, with help from Frontier School Division, Food Matters Manitoba and Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. There were 263 participants from Wabowden, Ilford, Cross Lake, Cormorant, Pikwitonei, Thicket Portage, Cranberry Portage, Thompson, South Indian Lake, Winnipeg, Ponton, Setting Lake, Manigotogan, Moose Lake, Nelson House, Sherridon, Fox Lake, York Landing, Norway House, and Creighton, Sask.

Northern Manitobans were winners in two of seven categories at Food Matters’ 2013 Golden Carrot Awards, presented at the Manitoba legislature in Winnipeg on World Food Day last Oct. 16. This year’s  awards in a couple of weeks are on the same Oct. 16 date (a Thursday this year) and location at 9:30 a.m. in the Rotunda Hall of the Manitoba Legislative Building at 450 Broadway in Winnipeg. The Golden Carrot Awards were started in 2006 to recognize work being done across Manitoba to ensure access to healthy food for residents across the province.

Last year, Andrea McIvor’s Grade 7-9 class at D.R. Hamilton School in Cross Lake were presented the Golden Carrot in the youth category after working together to raise 50 chickens for eating and 25 layer hens, watering, feeding and cleaning their litter before participating in the final slaughter and eating of the birds.

For several years, there was a Northern Harvest Forum, co-ordinated by Food Matters Manitoba, which took place in Thompson. The Oct. 22 and 23, 2009  “Northern Food from Northern Hands” forum included the Golden Carrot Awards.

The two-day annual event, which had taken place in Thompson since 2007, featured workshops that focused on hunting and gathering traditional foods; food preservation; gardening; grocery store and healthy cooking demonstrations.

Also, a World Food Day dinner took place at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 244’s Centennial Hall. Before moving to the Legion in 2008, the inaugural event in 2007 was held at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall on Juniper Drive.

A  two-day Northern Harvest Forum and World Food Day banquet, attended by Stan Struthers, then Manitoba’s NDP minister of agriculture, food and rural initiatives, was held Oct. 19-20, 2011 in The Pas.

In October 2007, the City of Thompson became the first municipality in the province to sign the Manitoba Food Charter during the two-day Northern Harvest Forum here.

Among the steps the city committed to seven  years ago by signing the charter was to play “a more active role as the regional hub in promoting lower food prices in outlying communities” and Nunavut; and becoming a “staging centre for food distribution” through Canada Post’s Food Mail Program; and “lobby for the regulation of milk prices throughout Manitoba.”

The seeds for the Manitoba Food Charter were planted in 1992 with a document known as “An Action Plan For Food Security For Manitobans” created by the Nutrition and Food Security Network of Manitoba.

A decade later, in 2001 and 2002, a coalition known as FoodSecure Manitoba brought Rod MacRae, food policy analyst and former co-ordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council, to Winnipeg in April 2002 for a “strategic visioning session.” Areas for concrete action were developed and the group made its first priority to be a “food security” two-day conference in 2003.

The Manitoba Food Charter project built on energy created a year later with the National Food Security Assembly in Winnipeg. During March and February 2006 a steering committee of volunteers crisscrossed the province listening to more than 70 groups of people and food security participants involved in various aspects of the Manitoba food system.

Seventeen per cent of the input came from Northern Manitoba and on May 10, 2006, more than 80 individuals from across Manitoba gathered in Winnipeg to engage in a provincial conversation on food. Community gardeners, academics, farmers, politicians, local food retailers, government folks, food activists, community health workers, neighbourhood residents, university students, and educators gathered to set priorities for future action for the Manitoba Food Charter project.

Funding for the Manitoba Food Charter project also comes from the Public Health Agency of Canada; the Rural Secretariat of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and Heifer International of Little Rock, Ark., a non-profit organization whose goal is to help end world hunger and poverty through self-reliance and sustainability. An American Midwestern farmer named Dan West, who was a Church of the Brethren relief worker during the Spanish Civil War, started Heifer in 1944.

In its own words, the “Manitoba Food Charter emerged from Manitobans’ common vision for a just and sustainable food system.

The charter provides a vision and a set of principles that will guide and inform strategic planning, policy and program development and practice in mutual effort toward food security and community development.”

The charter analyzes the current food situation in the province this way in part: “Manitoba’s food system has both strengths and weaknesses. We have a significant and diverse agricultural sector and many Manitobans can access the food that they want. However, agricultural communities are challenged by an increasingly urban and globalized economy. Many Northern, inner city, and low-income citizens have difficulty accessing quality food and realizing their fundamental human right to adequate food. Rural, urban and Northern communities are disconnected. Not all of our food is necessarily nutritious, not all information about our food is complete or accurate; and much of our food comes long distances.”

The “vision” the charter notes for “a just and sustainable food system in Manitoba is rooted in healthy communities, ensures no one is hungry and that everyone has access to quality food.”

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A taste for yesterday: Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza

Readers know that it’s not unheard of for me to sing the praises of some long-forgotten (by most anyway) defunct fast-food restaurant I have known, or present day greasy spoon. A reference to fried clams from the Northumberland Strait at Chez Camille’s in Cap Pelé, New Brunswick made it into the very first Latitude 55 column I wrote for the Thompson Citizen on July 25, 2007.

I got thinking about defunct fast-food restaurants I have known earlier this year when I stumbled on a webpage called “Share Your Memories – Oshawa’s Municipal Heritage Committee” at: http://www.heritageoshawa.ca/share_your_memories.php#post, which is dedicated to “Keeping Oshawa’s Heritage Alive.”. The page has apparently existed since Friday, Dec. 22, 2006, so I guess stumbled is the right word to describe me landing on it some seven and a bit years later.

What I noticed is how many of the contributors talked about bygone Oshawa restaurants and their fond food memories of yesteryear. On Dec. 22, 2010 – coincidentally four years to the day after “Share Your Memories” went up online – I wrote a Soundings column in the Thompson Citizen headlined, “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster,” extolling the culinary wonders of the Red Barn, a fast-food restaurant chain founded in 1962 in Springfield, Ohio by Don Six, Jim Kirst and Martin Levine. Red Barn peaked in its heyday in the early 1970s with more than 400 restaurant locations in 22 states, as well as locations in Canada, and even a dozen in and around Melbourne, Australia.

On Feb. 20, 2013, I wrote a column ostensibly about my two university roommates, but also in part about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North for $2.65 per hour – plus tips. Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

I’m happy to say that in 2008, Brian Alger acquired the then-expired trademark to Mother’s Pizza – one of his favourite childhood brands – and along with another entrepreneur, Geeve Sandhu, re-opened April 1, 2013 at 701 Queenston Rd. in Hamilton, Ont. Mother’s Pizza was founded in 1970 by three partners, Grey Sisson, Ken Fowler and Pasquale Marra, and got its start in the Westdale Village area of Steeltown. The chain eventually grew to about 120 locations in Canada, the United States and England.

“I have fond memories of downtown too with the lunch counters at Karn Drugs and Kresge’s. You could get a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk without it being enough food for two meals and costing $12,” Andrew McCarnan wrote on Oshawa’s “Share Your Memories” webpage on March 27, 2011.

That must have trigged thoughts of food among the site’s readers because a few days later on April 1, 2011, a poster known as doraryan@cogeco.ca wrote, “I was born and grew up in Oshawa. One of my memories as a child was going to the Oshawa Bakery after church on Sundays to get their warm rye bread. Does anyone know if their rye bread recipe is still in use and can you still get their bread?”

Clearly, food, especially not particularly fancy fast-food, resonates for us working stiffs from Canada’s Motor City. The closer I looked, the more I realized many, if not most commenters, had at some point mentioned a bygone restaurant or food favourite in their posting. Vince Robichaud on Sept. 29, 2012 wrote, “I don’t know if anybody remembers Mike’s French fry truck that drove around selling fries. The truck was a 1948 Dodge Fargo. The best fries in town, back in the 60s.”

In keeping with the spirit of the thing, my own comment Feb. 3 reads, “Pepi’s Pizza, eh? Simcoe and John streets. I had a friend who worked there circa 1973-74. I still have fond memories of the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.”

Pepi’s Pizza restaurant locations in Oshawa were owned by the Firmi family.  Brothers Lewis and Ron Firmi opened the doors of Pepi’s Pizza, still famous for its handmade dough, at the corner of Water and Weber streets in Kitchener in 1962.

The Record, Kitchener’s daily newspaper, reported on Dec. 20, 2014 (https://www.therecord.com/shopping-story/5216482-history-of-pepi-s-pizza-kitchener/): “Most people expected the restaurant to fail soon after it opened.  They thought the brothers were crazy, that pizza would never catch on.  The brothers were determined to prove people wrong and to encourage customers to give it a try. They offered incredible specials, such as all you can eat pizza on Friday nights for a dollar.

Rhonda Firmi, the daughter of one of Pepi’s founders, and her husband John Guy, have been operating the remaining three Kitchener Pepi’s Pizza locations for more than a decade.

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