Podcast
Transcript of the Podcast:
Transcript of the Podcast:
-Intro Music
Nathan [00:00:11] Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Nathan Davis, and this is "The Podcast That Shmecks." Today on the show, I have a co-host and none other than my own mother, Nancy Davis, whose experience is that of a home chef for over 40 years, roughly the same amount of time she had access to Edna Stabler's cookbook "More Food That Really Shmecks." So to start off with some interesting things about Edna herself. She in particular is interesting because she was not a woman who cooked. She self-admittedly in the beginning of "More Food That Really Shmecks" says that people responded really well to her first cookbook and assume that she is a like master Mennonite cooker. She wasn't. All she what she was was a good writer. She got her start in well, she wrote articles for different magazine companies. She wrote books. Her first cooking-related book was "Sauerkraut and Enterprise." And that's really interesting. One of the reasons I really like it is because when you read her later cookbooks, people that she met in "Sauerkraut and Enterprise," because the whole book is about her moving in with this Mennonite family, and at the beginning they are like they ask questions to her, like, are you here to make fun of us? Like, do you think that? Yeah. So they're initially a bit, but they're very like she describes them as being very warm and very kind to her, just a bit weary. Like, you know, we do something a little bit different than other people. So is this a positive or negative thing. Yeah. And the book then essentially where it goes is she just describes their life and I believe, although I'll have to do a bit more research on this, that the first recorded recipe that she ever put to print from the Mennonite community is in Sauerkraut and Enterprise, and it's just a very simple five-ingredient recipe. So very basic instructions on it, but it's kind of like "Sauerkraut and Enterprise" then becomes one recipe, 1 or 2 recipes with.
Nancy [00:02:21] Framed around.
Nathan [00:02:23] The story, instead of the opposite.
Nancy [00:02:25] Well, isn't that interesting.
Nathan [00:02:26] Yeah. Oh super interesting. Yeah.
Nancy [00:02:28] No, I've not read that. But she admittedly, she states kind of apologetically, I don't I'm not a cook. I love to eat. Yeah. And I went, okay.
Nathan [00:02:39] The love of food.
Nancy [00:02:40] I love that, I love that, yeah.
Nathan [00:02:42] One of the things that she talks about in "Sauerkraut and Enterprise" is the Kitchener market. Its long history because it starts off she describes the Mennonite family. But then later in the book she goes and then starts discussing, like the history of Kitchener, Waterloo, the market that she went to. I don't know if it's still around.
Nancy [00:03:05] Oh yeah.
Nathan [00:03:06] Yeah. Okay.
Nancy [00:03:07] Going strong.
Nathan [00:03:07] Yeah. So it's still to this day that's around. And I think that's very, we don't think about it nowadays. You know we get annoyed when we don't have access to guavas oh 100% of the time.
Nancy [00:03:21] Well she didn't like that.
Nathan [00:03:22] No.
Nancy [00:03:22] She didn't want to put out something that required any kind of if you couldn't go and pick it off your tree. Or acquire it at your local, right, local supermarket or local market. She just didn't. And she mentions that in the introduction. Yeah actually. So no, she wasn't looking for guavas.
Nathan [00:03:45] You've been an owner of More Food That Really Shmecks for a while now. Do you have any favourite stories in the book?
Nancy [00:03:52] I love the "Agnes at her best" story. That's just the best. I love it, and you probably won't have time for it. Say it. You want me to say it? Sure. Okay. Um. Great story too. She talks about this family that just all they wanted was they wanted to live. They wanted to live this way, not off-grid, but just live the simplest way possible. And one of the things that they wanted for their children was a cow to milk, but not necessarily didn't even have to. It was more as a pet that they could just love.
Nathan [00:04:25] Well, there are eating cows and then there are dairy cows. Yes, so.
Nancy [00:04:29] That makes sense. I don't think Agnes was a well, she was a little bit when they got her. She was a little bit pregnant with her fourth calf, I think.
Nathan [00:04:37] So you could get dairy from that.
Nancy [00:04:40] Yeah. Well, yeah. Once she calved, you could keep that going. But I guess she just started getting really, really ornery. And they named her Agnes. And they decided not to keep Agnes anymore. And so the recipe in the book was a stew because Agnes' meat was tough, just like Agnes. And. Yeah, so I just I loved that. I just love that they sent it off to the butcher and comes back and the neat little packages and Agnes and her best was in a stew for long cooking, too. Yeah. To to detoughen. Is that a word? Detoughen?
Nathan [00:05:14] To soften.
Nancy [00:05:15] To less? Yes. To tenderise I should say tenderise the meat.
Nathan [00:05:19] To tenderise the meat.
Nancy [00:05:20] Yeah. And it's again, just a great example of how she could spin, you know, a really, really great story into a very... Just her homespun stuff. I just love that the way she would. Yeah, tell a story.
Nathan [00:05:38] Do you have a favourite recipe in it and why?
Nancy [00:05:42] Oh, a favourite.
Nathan [00:05:44] Because I noticed that your name is mentioned and it says Nancy's Lasagne.
Nancy [00:05:49] Oh, that's not me. I know it's not you. That's her friend Nancy.
Nathan [00:05:53] But I just thought it was funny. I was like, there are multiple.
Nancy [00:05:57] Bevy. Yeah, bevy. It's funny because after she starts talking over, after a while, so many recipes start. Showing up by the same person. It's like you start to know who they are, and then she gives you so much personal information about them, right? That's like you just start to identify. Favourite recipe. Well, I can tell you one that I still make today and that's dumplings. Her dumpling recipe chicken and dumplings. She maybe intentionally, I don't know, but unintentionally I learned how to cook using this book.
Nathan [00:06:33] Really?
Nancy [00:06:33] I learned how to think about cooking because recipes are so. If you change a quarter of a teaspoon of salt to an eighth of a teaspoon, you have changed the recipe, right? So you keep what you like, you add what you want. And she's she was so she was so kind of easygoing in that in that respect.
Nathan [00:06:56] If you were to describe the recipes in the book with one word, what word would you use?
Nancy [00:07:03] I'm looking at the headings of the chapters, and it's so unique how she breaks it down, because she's breaking down provinces where these things originally came from, from stories that she's heard and how she communicates. And so I would say. A lot of baked goods, like a lot of baked goods, a lot of bread, but a lot of vegetable dishes and meat and stews, just everything. There's nothing that's really embellished. It's meat, potatoes, a vegetable. But sometimes how that's presented that gets changed up but so don't know exactly how to.
Nathan [00:07:55] Yeah, it's hard to put into like one word synonymous I would say rustic like rustic, very simple, very rustic recipes. Yeah, they're simple enough that you can change certain aspects of it because that's what they like. They didn't cook with a cup they cooked with. This is how much my mom puts in, I think. Or you do it until this. Like this specific signifier that's incredibly difficult. So she had the job of not only translating the dimensions, the like, how you go about it, but also.
Nancy [00:08:33] The method.
Nathan [00:08:34] Yeah. The method.
Nancy [00:08:35] Well, she talked about Clara Mae, Clara Mae's pork buns. And I remember reading it and thinking it was such a charming story, but she couldn't give a temperature for the oven because Clara would just. Oh, yeah, that's not hot enough. It needs another couple sticks of wood. And there's. And it was an old wood stove. Right. And again, like you said Cup. What's a cup? Oh, it's the cup that I use for my coffee in the morning. Oh, that's not a cup.
Nathan [00:09:00] Do you have any final thoughts on the types of foods found in the book and the surrounding area?
Nancy [00:09:04] You know, I'm thinking. I'm thinking of. Uh, the Kitchener-Waterloo market being it used to be called. Now Kitchener used to be called Berlin. And that was the name before it was changed to Kitchener-Waterloo because mainly they were German Mennonites that settled there predominantly. That's what I think I know about the area. So sauerkraut, you know, all those wonderful things came from their homeland. The original recipes. And then I'm sure they morphed and changed over the years. But. People like to keep what they had in their childhood alive. They really do. They visit it and they revisit it. And yeah, that's where you get that.
Nathan [00:09:57] Oh, absolutely.
Nancy [00:09:58] Love that.
Nathan [00:09:59] I think that's why she. Yeah, I think that's why she named it Sauerkraut and Enterprise. Because it's it. Yeah. Sauerkraut is just an embodiment of the type of food, even though it's not really mentioned in the book. That's what it represents.
Nancy [00:10:14] That's what it represents.
Nathan [00:10:15] Yeah, yeah. The type of food that they do and the spirit of enterprise.
Nathan [00:10:21] And that's all for today, folks. Wish there was more time to discuss Edna with you all, but there's always next week. Thanks again to my lovely co-host, Nancy Davis, and we'll see you next time on The Podcast That Shmecks.
-Outro Music
