Edible Vancouver Island March/April 2024

L I S T I C L E

B.C. STORIES WORTH SAVOURING

These must-read food memoirs from B.C. authors delve into the West Coast’s deep connections to food WORDS GABRIELLE PLONKA

B efore discovering the genre of culinary non-fiction, I frequently read cookbooks cover-to-cover. I loved drinking in the artfully lit photographs and cheerful recipe introductions. Food memoirs advanced this obsession, as they step back from ingredient lists to look at the deeper gifts food can provide: connection to culture, family and community. These four food memoirs are some of my most recently published favourites. They traverse B.C.’s culinary reaches: from traditional food practices on the Island’s west coast to clam digging on Gabriola Island. Each author invites you into their homes and histories, recounting the ways that food can connect us to those places.

I bought this book on a B.C. ferry over the summer and devoured it from a series of oceanside patios–a fitting setting for Coté’s beautiful, intimate descriptions of Island life. This book is perfect for anyone looking to decolonize their understanding of the Island’s history.

2 Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives: An Island Memoir by Margot Fedoruk (Heritage House, 2022)

Margot Fedoruk’s poetic prose will immerse you in a quintessential West Coast adventure: since her arrival in 1989, she has planted trees, made soap, kept chickens–and survived motherhood. In this darkly humorous memoir, Fedoruk recounts

1 A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast by Charlotte Coté (University of Washington Press, 2022)

coming west from Winnipeg at 23 years old and falling in love with a sea urchin diver. Soon, she finds herself pregnant and cooking meals for divers on his vessel, The Buckaroo, as it navigates the rocky coastline. Eventually settling on Gabriola Island, Fedoruk speaks candidly about loneliness, motherhood and finding community while her husband spends weeks at sea. Fedoruk interlaces her story with a collection of recipes ranging from inherited eastern European dishes to modern coastal meals. These favourite meals establish an intimacy with the author, lending a multidimensional context in which to absorb her life and experiences. This is a great beach or armchair book. I appreciated its candidacy about motherhood, and laughed out loud at some parts.

Reporting from the Tseshaht First Nation on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Charlotte Coté paints a vivid picture of her community’s deep connection to traditional food. She describes com munal fishing days where the work and bounty is shared and generously recounts the kernels of wisdom garnered from aunties while picking blackberries every summer. Woven within the context of her own story, Coté presents food sovereignty as an answer to the ongoing inequality that Indigenous people face. She provides an engrossing history of food I bought this book on a B.C. ferry over the summer and devoured it from a series of oceanside patios–a fitting setting for Coté’s beautiful, intimate descriptions of Island life. traditions pre-colonialism, explaining that a strong hereditary chiefdom once divided the rights and responsibilities of caring for Vancouver Island’s lands and waterways, and argues convincingly in favour of a return to these traditional values.

3 Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Café and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants by Anne Hui (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019) In this cozy and insightful culinary memoir, journalist Anne Hui drives across the country in pursuit of answering the question, "why is there a Chinese restaurant in every Canadian town?" The story begins in Victoria, a partial homage to the first Chinese-Canadian immigrants who

arrived in search of gold in the 1850s. She introduces Chinese Canadian history through the lens of Victoria’s Chinatown; then

32 MAR/APR 2024 EDIBLE VANCOUVER ISLAND