Article featured in the Guelph Mercury.
In the small, warm kitchen where she has written a pile of cookbooks, Anita Stewart pours a second cup of mint tea made from leaves that came from the University of Guelph.
“It’s hellishly good for you,” says the personable Canadian culinary expert, laughing as she speaks.
The mint tea, containing high levels of a naturally occurring compound called rosmarinic acid, was produced as part of a research program at the university.
And Stewart, the newly named “food laureate” at the school, will soon be finding out more about this tea and about other food-related research and development going on there.
Then she’ll make sure you can find out about it, too.
The Elora woman already knows more than most people about how the University of Guelph is developing and enhancing Canadian foods, ingredients and culinary knowledge. More than 10 years ago, she created the school’s “food inventory,” which highlights the work of its researchers and their affiliates.
The inventory includes her chatty descriptions of “jumbo” raspberries, of bees bred for mite resistance, a new cherry variety, the famous Yukon Gold potato and barley that “revolutionized” Canada’s barley industry.
As “food laureate” — it’s a paid position which the university believes is a world first — Stewart will update the food inventory. She wants you know, for example, about the research program to grow food in outer space.
And don’t get her started talking about the university’s massive collection of Canadian cookbooks. It’s the largest such collection on the planet, says Stewart, who has a master of arts degree in gastronomy from the University of Adelaide in Australia.
In her new post she will be a tour guide for visitors looking for information about, say, organic farming in Canada.
She plans to tell people about her Canadian chef heroes (chef Roger Dufau of Elora is one), about our world-class restaurants (Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island, for example), and about top cheesemakers who graduated from the University of Guelph.
She will also hold workshops exposing students to the best food innovators.
Her new role will strengthen the school’s reputation as “Canada’s food university,” president Alastair Summerlee said in a recent statement.
Stewart believes passionately that Canada is a culinary nation with not one, but hundreds of cuisines, “depending upon ethnicity, climate and history.”
“We’re a diverse, colourful nation with all sorts of culinary superstars who can stand on any world stage,” she says.
Stewart’s “food laureate” title, which she will hold for two years, is the latest of many titles she has accumulated since she began touring Canada in the early 1980s, visiting lighthouses, inns, farm kitchens and First Nations communities to write about the country’s diversity of regional foods.
With Elora as her home base since 1973, she has hunted mushrooms in B.C. forests, fished for pike in northern Manitoba and eaten side-by-side with Newfoundlanders aboard the oil rig Hibernia. She has sailed on icebreakers to see what B.C. lightkeepers are cooking; watched Cree in northern Quebec roast wild geese and devoured smoked pork chops and homemade sauerkraut in a Mennonite kitchen in Waterloo Region.
“I travel with an eye to the ingredients,” she says.
Stewart has been called “Canada’s coolest food intellectual,” the “patron saint of Canadian cuisine” and the “Wonder Woman of Canadian cuisine.” The last accolade, especially, makes her laugh.
But while she may not own Wonder Woman’s magic lasso, Stewart, an unpretentious woman who injects a sense of fun in her discussions about food, does have a gift for finding Canadians with unique food stories and writing about them.
Earlier this year, she was appointed to the Order of Canada. She is also the author or co-author of 14 books on Canadian foods and wines. And she founded Cuisine Canada, an organization that annually presents cookbook awards to Canadian authors.
These days, she’s working on the annual “Food Day Canada” event, a day in August each year when Canadians create a feast or a simple dinner with only Canadian ingredients — or head to a restaurant that does it for them. Then they post menus and stories about their celebrations on a website.
Food Day Canada grew out of the World’s Longest BBQ event, which Stewart created in 2003 to support beef farmers during that year’s “mad cow” crisis.
Upstairs in the house where she has lived more than 30 years and raised four sons — three of them are chefs — Stewart’s honorary degrees, diplomas and awards fight for space with cookbooks, agriculture books, reference books about Canadian cooking and culinary histories.
Carol Ferguson’s A Century of Canadian Home Cooking and Barbara Santich’s Looking for Flavour are on a shelf reserved for favourites.
If she were to be marooned on an island, she says, she’d want to have with her The Earth’s Blanket, a bookby ethno-botanist Nancy Turner. It describes the native plant foods which sustained First Nations communities for centuries.
Stewart’s home is a culinary island of sorts and she surrounds herself there with produce, spices, books, canned goods, paintings and other items that remind her of the importance of local foods, and of family.
In the kitchen, a plate of moist bran muffins (a recipe for The Best Bran Muffins is featured in Stewart’s The Flavours of Canada cookbook) with chopped apple and cranberries sits beside a jar of golden-coloured peaches.
When a visitor asks about the root drying on her front walk, she cuts a piece of Jerusalem artichoke and offers a taste.
She’s proud of her heirloom dining-room table, with her grandmother’s grinder marks etched into the wood. There’s a painting of a blueback salmon she caught off B.C.’s Quadra Island and a poster describing a fun venture by her son Jeff, an exotic menu featuring bugs. Paintings by her mother, Anne MacDonald, are on the walls upstairs.
Stewart figures that her love of food and cooking began when she was a child.
She and her mother had moved to Mount Forest after the death of her father and her mother got a job teaching high school there.
“She said, ‘I’ll make you a deal. You cook and I’ll clean up,’” recalls Stewart, who was about 12 then.
“I really enjoyed it.” Back then, “pork chops and mushroom soup was exciting,” a recipe that “I still don’t mind at all,” she says, laughing.
Then she discovered Gourmet magazine and “a world opened up.”
THE BEST BRAN MUFFINS
From the book The Flavours of Canada, by Anita Stewart. Stewart says you can omit the apples and raisins and add all sorts of other fruits and nuts. Her favourite is a healthy addition of chopped dates with a few walnuts.
Ingredients
1 cup (250 mL) brown sugar
½ cup (125 mL) canola oil
1 egg
1 cup (250 mL) natural bran
1 cup (250 mL) sour milk or buttermilk
¼ cup (50 mL) fancy molasses (optional)
1 tsp. (5 mL) vanilla
1 cup (250 mL) whole-wheat flour
1 tsp. (5 mL) baking soda
½ tsp. (2mL) baking powder
½ - ¾ cup (125 – 175 mL) chopped nuts
½ cup (125 mL) golden raisins
1 cup (250 mL) chopped unpeeled apple
Directions
In a large mixing bowl, whisk sugar, oil and egg about 2 minutes or until light in colour. Stir in bran, sour milk, molasses and vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift or stir together flour, baking soda and baking powder. Stir into the bran mixture, combining well. Fold in nuts, raisins and apple or whatever other addition you’ve chosen.
Spoon into 12 paper-lined or well-greased muffin tins. Bake in a preheated 400 F (200 C) oven 20 to 22 minutes or until dark brown. Let cool 5 minutes before removing from pan. Makes 12 muffins.
