family recipe

Everybody Swears This Is Grandma’s Sauce. They Can’t All Be Right.
Grandma's spaghetti sauce

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…)

Family Recipes: Tourtière

I’ve come to realize that many of us have been bequeathed a cherished family recipe—a dish so delicious that we instinctively know it would be universally beloved. It may be elaborate and require the skills of a culinary savant to assemble it, or so simple, so unfussy, that even the most hardened of hacks can prepare it with ease. But when it is served, it is the unmistakable, reliable star of the meal, whether celebrating triumphs, comforting woes, or keeping family memories and traditions alive. It seems almost cruel to withhold such heirloom recipes from the world at large. Hence, I am championing the cause of the family recipe. I will entice the people in my universe to share favourite, nostalgia-infused family recipes, and I will give one of them centre stage in this very space on a monthly basis. In the end, we are all family, and these recipes represent the legacies of our shared passions. First up, the recipe for my mom’s tourtière. Enjoy!

A tourtière is a very traditional French-Canadian dish served by generations of French-Canadian families throughout Canada. As a child, I remember the smell emanating from the kitchen—that smell was a sure sign that the holidays were near. Not near like next week near, but near-ish like next month. Or the month after that. You see, tourtières are generally prepared early, weeks, even months before the holidays. And, then they’re frozen so that they can be enjoyed well into the new year. Also, they’re prepared in bulk. To muddy things further, my mom, the holder of the recipe, is not beholden to an actual written recipe. Thankfully, she has committed one to memory, just like her mother before her. But, that’s where the lineage ends. There is a faint recollection of the recipe belonging to this or that aunt, or perhaps, her great-great-great grandmother. But, since everyone aforementioned has departed this earth, origin cannot be verified.

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