Sirloin Tip Roast

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. (more…)

Grandma’s spaghetti sauce

Family recipes are funny things. Some come with impeccable provenance. Ours comes with rumours. Everyone credits my grandmother, but nobody seems to know where she got it. Since then, every generation has quietly “improved” the recipe until the finished product bears only a passing resemblance to whatever she was actually making in the first place.

Our spaghetti sauce has been in the family for generations. It is almost certainly pushing one hundred years old.

According to family lore, someone in my family, perhaps my grandparents, perhaps my great grandparents, lived above an Italian restaurant in Montreal. The owner supposedly shared the recipe. At least that’s what my mom always told me.

Naturally, I assumed I’d uncover some wonderful story about an old neighbourhood trattoria, a generous Italian cook and a treasured handwritten recipe.

Instead, I found absolutely nothing.

I spent countless hours digging through census records, city directories, birth certificates, immigration records, newspaper archives and old Montreal addresses trying to identify this mysterious restaurant. I uncovered plenty about my family.

The restaurant? (more…)