sapsucker

I recently made a very pleasant discovery: birch syrup.

Indigenous people across northern Canada have tapped birch trees for generations, using the twigs, bark, and sap for medicinal purposes. But the sap can also be boiled down into a thick, dark amber-coloured syrup, realizing the birch sap's full potential.

Small, northern birch syrup operations have been popping up across the North over the past few years. Most recently, Sapsucker Birch Syrup has brought the delicious syrup, which tastes of molasses and burnt caramel, to family tables in Yellowknife.

The syrup is excellent on pancakes, waffles, and ice cream, but it also transforms savoury dishes like fish, wild meats, and root vegetables.

chow chow

Chow chow. I love the way it sounds.

For years, I heard members of my mother’s family refer to “chow chow”, with no idea what it meant. The name itself gives no hint, really. What could it be? And why did I only hear about it from them? Why wasn’t my father’s family talking about chow chow?

One clue lay in my mother’s maritime roots. She was a northern transplant, after all. She was born and raised in Saint John, New Brunswick, where food roots run deep. Living far away in Yellowknife, my mother often reminisced about steamed fiddleheads in butter, lobster rolls, scallops, matrimonial cake, salt water taffy, and Ganong’s chocolates.

When September rolled around this year and I realized that the heaps of green tomatoes I had growing in our garden were never going to ripen, I began searching for ideas on what to do with them. I turned to one of the oldest cookbooks I have on my shelf, a copy of The New Purity Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Canadian Cooking. In it, I found a recipe for green tomato relish which, I later learned, is also the recipe for Chow Chow.

I had enough green tomatoes to fill eight 500ml jars with chow chow. Sour and sweet, this relish took my huge bowl of unripe tomatoes and transformed them into something absolutely delicious and versatile.

Like my mother, my Nana also lives far away from the East Coast now, but her eyes and voice always brighten at the mention of the place she loves so dearly, and the food traditions she has always held close to her heart.

“You made chow chow? Good for you, my dear,” she says to me over the phone. The sound of her voice tells me she is smiling.

“I always love chow chow with pork, but your mother, she loves hers with scrambled eggs.”

Now it’s up to me to find my favourite thing to go with chow chow. That relish is so good, though, I think I might just like it on its own and by the spoonful.

from sachs harbour to table

In the high arctic islands of the Canadian North, muskoxen can be found in substantial numbers. These formidable creatures, horned and covered in long, shaggy hair, have roamed the far north for 90, 000 years, surviving the last ice age by steering clear of the glacier expansion in ice-free areas in the northern arctic islands. Though their numbers were under threat earlier in the 20th century after a long period of over-hunting, they have made a significant comeback following protectionist measures and have even expanded their geographical range.

An important food source for coastal Inuit, muskox meat has become more readily available to southern markets in recent years. Since 1967, muskoxen have been deemed a secure food source, and subsistence and commercial hunting quotas have risen as herd populations have increased.

Sachs Harbour is a tiny hamlet on Banks Island, NWT, which is home to the world’s largest population of muskoxen. Much of the local economy is based on hunting and trapping, with the annual muskox harvest playing a significant role in the hamlet’s overall economic viability.

Here in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (NWT), muskox meat from the commercial harvest on Banks Island, NWT, can be purchased from the local butcher. The meat is very lean and functions easily as a replacement for lean cuts of beef. The meat itself is also naturally organic, as the animals are wild and thus roam freely, eating a diet of lichens, mosses, grasses, and woody plants found on the tundra. The low fat content, combined with the plant-based diet of the animals, makes muskox meat anti-inflammatory.

In my home, we have been slowly making a transition from eating a strictly plant-based diet to one that includes some wild, organic meat and fish. Living in Yellowknife makes access to organic meat more difficult than in southern Canada, but conversely wild meat is very easy to find. Eating some meat again has encouraged me to rediscover favourite recipes of my childhood, such as the pot roast I recently made using a small muskox roast we purchased from Northern Fancy Meats.

When I was growing up here in Yellowknife, my grandmother would often travel up from Edmonton to visit us, sometimes stepping in to help my Dad look after us if my mother was on work travel. My grandmother was born in Canada, but her parents were English, and so she had been raised on traditional English food of pot roasts and stews. One of the most vivid food memories I associate with her is her beef pot roast. The smell of beef, potatoes, and carrots simmering away on the stove is one that, to this day, conjures up images of her puttering away in our family kitchen, reveling in the chance to cook the stick-to-your-ribs kind of food she grew up with for her grandchildren.

I knew a traditional pot roast would be the perfect way to prepare muskox which, due to its leanness, can be tough if not cooked properly. It needs to either be cooked minimally, or for a long time, in order to coax out the tender meat that it truly is. I followed the pot roast recipe from the beautiful, thoughtful cookbook Plenty by Diana Henry, a food writer for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine. I love her approach to food, and have found her ethics around meat consumption to be a trustworthy companion as we venture into new meat-eating territory.

Into the pot, I put the roast, which I seared on all sides, along with garlic, onion, sprigs of fresh thyme, and substantial chunks of carrot and potato, which were absolutely necessary in order to achieve the kind of pot roast my Grandma used to make. For two and a half hours the roast simmered in the oven on low heat, filling our home with the most delicious fragrance. Once finished, it was cooked perfectly, with the meat tender and moist with the broth in which it had been cooked. The meat itself was very flavorful and not much stronger in flavour than grass-fed beef.

In some ways, this pot roast was symbolic of my family. A family of immigrants from the UK and Denmark that managed to find its way to the Canadian North. A Sunday muskox pot roast seemed a fitting meal for an ancestry, and a geography, like that.