Podcast
Transcript of the Podcast:
Leylaan: Good afternoon everybody, my name is Leylaan Los and welcome back to Culinary Masterminds. Before we get into it, I would like to thank our sponsors over at Audiable.com for supporting this channel, head to the link in our description start your 30-day free trial of all the latest audiobooks and podcasts.
Leylaan: In today’s episode will be discussing the award-winning Canadian journalist and cookbook author Julian Armstrong. We will delve into how Armstrong transformed her career as a food reporter into educating Canadians on the rich history of Quebec cuisine. Her cookbooks ‘A Taste of Quebec’ and ‘Made In Quebec’ provide insight on how food was influenced by the historical evolution of Canada and shares recipes from food producers across the province. We will discuss how Julian Armstrong contributed to our knowledge of food history today and why she is considered such an influential person in culinary history. I hope you enjoy and let’s get into it.
Leylaan: Firstly, I would like to start off with a question for our audience: When was the last time you eat poutine? Did you know this Canadian food staple is believed to have been in our diets since the late nineteen fifties and is thought to originate from a restaurant in Warwick, Quebec. This famous dish is just one example of how traditional Canadian foods are still a significant part of our culture, and eating habits to this day.
Leylaan: Julian Armstrong was born in Toronto, Canada and received a history degree at the University of Toronto before moving east to Montreal. While working for the Montreal Gazette, Armstrong took a local cooking class and begun writing about food once a week in the newspaper. To deepen her understanding of regional cuisines, she traveled across Quebec on a quest to speak with local chefs, home cooks and food producers.
After living in Quebec for 34 years, Julian Armstrong published her first cookbook ‘A Taste of Quebec’ in 1990 before it was revised in 2001. Since then, she has received various journalism awards and is a member of the Association of Food Journalists and Taste Canada. Her most recent cookbook ‘Made in Quebec’ was published in 2014 and features additional traditional Quebec recipes. Both cookbooks have been distributed internationally and are sources of reference for non-Canadian chefs and homemakers.
Leylaan: The cookbook ‘A taste of Quebec’ written by Julian Armstrong discusses how the history of Quebec shaped the way food was prepared and shares a total of 114 recipes. She discusses the arrival of French settlers into an undeveloped Quebec where fresh foods such as meat, fish and vegetables were not always easily obtained, imported goods such as grains, spices, sugars and oil were also often hard to come by. Ingredients that were commonly used in these recipes were sustainably grown and suited to the climate. This resulted in recipes containing fewer ingredients and having shorter preparation times. Armstrong stated that the predominant goal when making food during this time was to create meals that would provide substantial nourishment to hardworking settlers. She also discovered that different regions in Quebec had their own culinary specialities that were unique to their area. The recipes that she shares are all accompanied by anecdotal information about the relevance of each meal in the history of Quebec cuisine. Her second cookbook ‘Made In Quebec’ features 135 different dishes that are divided by the four seasons. In traditional Julian Armstrong style, each recipe is accompanied by a short story of historical context. Both cookbooks provide us with great insight into what Quebec food is really all about and how you can reproduce these famous recipes in your own kitchen.
Leylaan: Julian Armstrong is an influential figure in culinary history because she deepened our understanding of how traditional cooking methods are captured in the type of meals we eat today. Her background in journalism and eagerness to learn about Quebec’s cuisine led her to sharing the stories behind hundreds of traditional Quebec recipes. She did this by visiting a variety of places such as sugar shacks, farms, bakeries and fish processing plants while observing from those who produce the ingredients that are later used in Quebec kitchens. Her cookbooks are unique in the sense that the recipes come from cooks all over the province of Quebec.
Leylaan: But what can Julian Armstrong teach us about the culinary world today? Well Quebec cuisines to this day still feature many traditional recipes that have been tweaked over the years. When the average person sits down to eat dinner, they don’t think about where each ingredient on their plate came from. Julian Armstrong however, did seek to answer this question for us. Her cookbooks exemplify the great lengths she went to, to understand where Quebec food comes from and why Quebecers eat the kind of foods that they do to this day. Her contribution gives Canadians a reference to authentic Canadian cuisine because it demonstrates original recipes that were made with local products that were precured from local sources.
Leylaan: We all know what Italian food is, and what Chinese food is, but what do we know about Canadian food? Julian Armstrong has given us a basis towards formulating ideas around our own unique culture and in this world of multiculturalism. These references are significant because they helped to answer the question: what is authentic Canadian food culture? Bare in mind that early immigrants to Quebec were stepping back in time to a neolithic stone-age era. The inhabitants needed to spend more time on the procurement of food stuffs than the actual preparation. For an example, local sources of fruit and sugar lead to the emphasis on dishes that were flavoured with blueberries and maple syrup. More famous dishes such as Montreal smoked meat and poutine originated from later waves of immigration to Quebec. These are just a couple of examples that you might be familiar with. For a deeper dive, I recommended acquiring the cookbooks and practicing some of the techniques that accomplished home cooks and chefs practice to this day.
Leylaan: So the next time you indulge in a tasty bowl of French onion soup, think about how that dish relates to the history of Quebec cuisine. Thank you again, to audible.com for sponsoring this video and thank you to allow of our listeners for tuning it. We will see you next week for another episode of Culinary Masterminds.
Music by Bensound.
Bibliography
“About.” Julian Armstrong, June 3, 2021. https://www.julianarmstrong.com/about/.
“Archival Collections Catalogue.” Julian Armstrong Fonds. Accessed October 29, 2023. https://archivalcollections.library.mcgill.ca/index.php/julian-armstrong-fonds.
Boucher, Claude. “A Brief History of Poutine.” Franco-American Centre, July 2, 2019. https://facnh.com/11587-2/.
Press, Lois Abraham The Canadian. “Made in Quebec - the Taste of Tradition.” The Record, January 13, 2015. https://www.therecord.com/life/made-in-quebec---the-taste-of-tradition/article_a5458d22-be01-5a4c-9f73-9f538f8bb618.html.
