Elora author Jan Feduck on how she fell in love with food history
Feduck talks with Craig Norris about her book — Dining out with History
It's part travel guide, part recipe book, part history book.
Author Jan Feduck says she fell in love with food history years ago and got the idea for a book while doing travel writing.
As part of a CBC Kitchener-Waterloo summer series of speaking to local authors, Feduck joined The Morning Edition with host Craig Norris to talk about her book — Dining out with History.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Craig Norris: What is Dining out with History all about?
Jan Feduck: Recently I heard a term which describes my book perfectly called a genre mash-up, which means that it is neither a guidebook, a recipe book, nor a book of short stories, but it's all three combined in one.
I had this idea when I was doing a lot of travel writing at one point and I wanted to make the Toronto Star. So, I headed into Fortress Lewisburg and I asked them would you please put me in costume and let me act as interpretive staff for the day, thinking that they would put me in a gorgeous hoop skirt, I would walk the streets like the royalty of Fortress Lewisburg. And they didn't. They put me in a kitchen maid's costume and stuck me in the engineer's kitchen on a hot summer day in front of the open-hearth fire.
However, what happened that day was I fell in love with food history. So that became my new focus for my travel writing, which was travel writing [and] food history. And I do travel extensively. So everywhere I went, I started to look into food history. I watched bread being made under the volcanic ash in Iceland. I searched for food history ideas, but I spend my summers on the East Coast. I have my roots on the East Coast, and I thought this would be a perfect focus for a book — to travel around to the historic sites of the entire East Coast and write about them.
Nova Scotia and all of the Atlantic provinces they're quiet. You listen, you listen to the ocean. The ocean is the attraction. They don't have big billboards taking you to these historic sites. And when I travel to those sites and learned how fantastic they were and how unique each one was, I thought people need to know about this. So I decided to write my book.
CN: The word favourite gets thrown around too much, but give us a sense of one of those stories that maybe stands out to you.
JF: I'm going to pick Eskasoni, which is on Cape Breton Island. It's an Indigenous site, and the whole site is based on a two-kilometre walk through the forest. And in the forest are clearings, and in the clearings they have interpretive staff talking about different aspects of their culture. And when we got to food, my favourite topic, we all sat down and mixed in a little bowl, bread dough. So we mixed flour, salt and water. How can you make bread from that? But we did. We rolled it into a little coil, wrapped it around a stick and held it over the fire while we all chatted and learned about how they cooked in the past.
When it was done, we dipped it in molasses, probably would have been maple syrup many years ago, and had a cup of tea, probably from the forest. And I thought that was a very, very special way to learn about the history of Nova Scotia and all of our Indigenous peoples, actually.
CN: If someone wanted to stick closer to home, where do you think in and around Ontario offers that sort of thing?
JF: I've had lots of experiences around Ontario. Probably my favourite is Upper Canada Village. Now, when I was young and even when I was an adult and I was inexperienced, I used to think that all Pioneer Village, they called them Pioneer Villages, were the same thing. I pictured Holly Hobby hats and they cooked in little cast iron pots and so on. And, honestly, when I started to learn about this, I found out how different they each were and how much work goes into portraying the times food wise, culture wise, agriculturally. So Upper Canada Village, I had the very unusual opportunity, my husband and I, of staying actually in the village for two days. We were put in costume, we were given characters and we stayed overnight in the village. I spent, of course, a lot of time in my kitchen because that's what I had become interested in and my husband in the forgery. But I found that was an amazing experience in terms of the work that goes into the food. We're picking the food from the garden, cooking it from scratch, working alongside the other interpretive staff. I thought it was very, very rich.
But there's lots of other places. There's places in Hamilton on Dundurn Castle does incredible cooking courses and displays of special food at Christmas time. Montgomery's Inn in Toronto also, they're like a living history museum of what an inn used to be in the past, and they do an excellent job.
CN: What do you think we miss now that we don't have that sort of intimate connection with real farm-to-fork living?
JF: I'm so glad you brought that up because honestly, we go to the grocery store, we grab something off the shelf and that's it. We cook with it. We don't even think about where that food came from. Even visiting a grist mill in Nova Scotia taught me how precious flour is. At one historic site I was siding the wheat, making the grain, grinding the grain by hand, making the bread by hand. And I never looked at bread the same after that.
I think we're missing, and our children especially are missing the knowledge of where does our food come from that we put on the plate. And now that there's so much fast food and pre-prepared food, it's becoming even worse, and I think these historic sites are important for that reason.
CN: Are you going to be doing some more travelling and or eating this summer?
JF: I'm heading back down to the East Coast. I will be visiting a lot of the sites that I visited to do talks and so on, but I am always on the lookout for historic places. I'll probably stop in Quebec. There are excellent stories there, excellent sites there, so I will probably try to find new sites and also explore more sites in Ontario when I get the time.
CN: What about your writing, what's next for you?
JF: Two things I hope to do. I thought Dining out with History in Ontario might be a fun topic to do. And also I would love to do Dining out with History for children because I think that our children need to know how food was made. And I've seen the fascinated faces of children and adults when I've been on the other side of the table cooking the food. I've seen how fascinated they are to learn these things and I think it would be great to put a book together to help children understand where our food that's on our table came from originally and historically.
LISTEN | Author chat with Jan Feduck:
Throughout the summer, CBC K-W will be speaking with local authors. If you're a local author who has a new book or event you'd like to speak to us about, let us know by emailing the newsroom at yournewskw@cbc.ca.
With files from The Morning Edition