Growing up, my parents’ house was dinner party central. Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays, anniversaries and the occasional “come on over for dinner” all seemed to end up in the same kitchen.

My mom’s food was always at the centre of it, which is probably why no one ever seemed in a hurry to leave. There was always room for one more, and somehow there always seemed to be someone who needed a place at the table.

After she passed, I found her dinner party notes. They were more like quiet dispatches from a life lived in courses: menus, ingredients, little reminders and glimpses of all the meals she had prepared for family and friends over the years.

In this series, I’m going back through those notes and recreating one dish from each dinner party. I’ll share the recipe along with her handwritten notes, part memory and part reconstruction, and the stories behind the food I grew up with.

It is also a way of understanding where my own passion for cooking came from.

Because long after the plates were cleared and the guests went home, her food memories never really left the table.

A Life Lived in Courses

September 16, 1995

It was Saturday, September 16, 1995, the beginning of fall. The new television season was getting underway. The days were getting shorter, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was everywhere, and the Expos were still giving Montreal baseball fans something to talk about, even if they weren’t giving us much to celebrate.

The Quebec referendum was six weeks away. We were living in Ontario, so my parents couldn’t vote, but they were very interested in what was happening. Bill Clinton was in the White House. Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister. The war in Bosnia was still dominating the international news, and Pope John Paul II was travelling in Africa.

The O.J. Simpson trial was still on television almost every day. And gas was about 55 cents a litre in Canada, or $1.11 a gallon in the United States.

Any of that might have come up over dinner that night. Or maybe not. There would have been plenty of other things to talk about: family news, neighbourhood gossip, work, television, sports, or whatever had happened that week.

Because this was dinner at my parents’ house.

The guests were my parents and their longtime friends Hélène and her husband, Jean-Marc. Hélène was my mother’s best friend. They had been close for years, and I honestly don’t remember a time when she wasn’t part of our family life.

There was no special occasion in my mother’s notes. No birthday. No anniversary. No holiday. Just dinner.

My guess is that this was one of those dinners that happened simply because my mother wanted to cook and it had been a while since she’d seen her friends. Come over for dinner. Catch up. Sit around the table for a few hours. That was enough.

The menu was simple. Buns and butter. Carrots. Condiments. Salad and croutons. The potatoes were supposed to be barbecue sliced potatoes, but somewhere along the way they became mashed potatoes. The turnip became cauliflower.

And then there was the sirloin tip roast.

One of the things I love about my mother’s notes is how practical they could be. She sometimes kept the little sticker from the butcher or grocery store with the weight and price of the meat. Presumably, she kept it so she could remember what she’d bought if she wanted to make it again.

I prefer to think of it as her version of food blogging analytics.

This one weighed 2.235 kilograms and cost $13.75.

Yes, really.

I bought the same roast today. Mine weighed 1.410 kilograms and cost $40.38.

It was smaller. It cost almost three times as much.

The sticker is such a small thing, but it tells me a lot about how my mother cooked. She kept track of things. She made notes. She was thinking about the next time she might make something, even though she had no idea that, thirty years later, I would be looking at that same little sticker and trying to reconstruct the dinner.

The notes contain other little reminders of the era, too. At some point in the 1990s, my mother switched from real whipped cream to NutriWhip. Mercifully, it was discontinued in 2019. For those who don’t remember it, it was Canada’s answer to Cool Whip: hydrogenated vegetable oils with zero dairy content, made to look like whipped cream.

It was never my favourite. But NutriWhip. The name certainly made it sound nutritious.

Oh, food marketing.

That’s the strange thing about going through these notes. The details that bring a dinner back to life aren’t necessarily the big ones. Sometimes it’s the price of a roast. A change from turnip to cauliflower. Potatoes that were supposed to be barbecued but ended up mashed. Or a reminder that, for a while, NutriWhip had somehow become the whipped cream of choice.

And sometimes it’s simply knowing who was sitting around the table.

My mother’s notes don’t tell me what they talked about. They don’t tell me what music was playing or what was on television that evening. They don’t tell me whether anyone lingered over coffee.

What they do tell me is who was there.

And now, thirty years later, everyone who sat around that table is gone.

There is something about that that catches me off guard. At the time, this was just another Saturday night. Nobody sitting around that table knew they were creating a memory. Nobody knew that one day a handwritten menu would be one of the things left behind.

That’s what makes these notes matter to me.

They preserve ordinary evenings.

I’ve recreated the sirloin tip roast as closely as I can from my mother’s notes. As with the rest of this series, it is part recipe and part detective work. Her notes were written for herself, not for someone who would eventually turn them into recipes for a food blog. There are gaps to fill and assumptions to make.

I’m not trying to pretend I can perfectly recreate a dinner from thirty years ago. I’m trying to get close enough that I can see the table again.

A Saturday night in September. Roast beef. Mashed potatoes that weren’t supposed to be mashed potatoes. Carrots. Hélène and Jean-Marc sitting around my parents’ table.

The referendum was looming. The fall television season was beginning.

And dinner was being served.

That sounds about right.

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Sirloin Tip Roast

My mother’s notes for this roast are remarkably brief: a list of ingredients for the marinade and one instruction to “cook for 2 hours.” That’s it.

So this is one of the recipes in the series where the reconstruction is necessarily part of the story. She recorded garlic, basil, canola oil, Dijon mustard and pepper, but not the quantities. For the recipe below, I’ve made my best estimates based on the size of the roast she bought and the way I imagine she would have put the marinade together.

Ingredients

• 1 sirloin tip roast, approximately 2 to 2.5 kg (4.9 lb)
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons dried basil
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• ¼ cup canola oil
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

Method

1. Combine the garlic, basil, Dijon mustard, canola oil, pepper and sea salt in a small bowl.
2. Rub the marinade generously over the roast. Cover and refrigerate for several hours, or overnight if possible. Bring the roast to room temperature before cooking.
3. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
4. Place the roast in a roasting pan and roast uncovered for approximately 2 hours. Since my mother’s notes don’t specify a cooking temperature or degree of doneness, use an instant read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the roast. Aim for 135°F (57°C) for medium rare or 145°F (63°C) for medium. The temperature will rise slightly as the roast rests.
5. Remove the roast from the oven and let it rest for 15 to 20 minutes before slicing.
6. Slice thinly against the grain and serve with the pan juices and the accompaniments from the original dinner, if desired.