Lindsay Anderson is inviting her hometown to a feast.
Some feasts are several courses; hers will be laid out before you in 296 pages.
And what luxurious pages they are. Anderson spent five months in a car with her friend Dana VanVeller travelling to every jurisdiction in the nation, picking up recipes and food facts all along the way. They wrapped it into the sumptuous hardcover book Feast published by Penguin RandomHouse Canada.
Anderson will unveil the book and have public discussions about the journey - the one across Canada and the one to authorhood - on Monday at 7 p.m. at Artspace (upstairs at Books & Company).
Anderson was already a veteran writer in the food field, to say nothing of her kitchen capabilities. Her education has included everything from cooking at a forestry camp in northern B.C. to a masters of food culture and communications degree from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy.
Her culinary and communication skills got her the position of year-long food blogger for Tourism Richmond, one of Canada's most restaurant-endowed cities. Each day she had to eat at different Richmond eateries then write about the experience.
Something in that process tumbled the next mental domino. With one of her best friends, VanVeller, they hatched the idea to travel the nation and sift out some choice recipes and ingredients.
VanVeller was the appetite behind the food blog Spoon! (she's enrolled in Ryerson Polytechnic University en route to a certificate in food security) so she was a natural blend for this roadshow. Their forte was blogging, so that is how they framed this set of adventures. They didn't know, at the beginning, that it would become a nationally distributed book, said Anderson.
"We spent eight or nine months planning it, so that was like a whole beast unto itself. Then there was the trip itself. Then finishing up, writing all the content. That was all for a blog, the book was just a pipe dream. We won a couple of (blogging) awards and that's what switched it for us."
Feast is just as much travel story as food story. It is loaded with recipes and food preparation information, but it is just as loaded in anecdotes and photos about the cities, towns, villages and individuals they encountered along the way.
Almost as a byproduct, an accidental subplot, they told the story of Canada.
"I discovered I really love telling stories that ultimately surround food," said Anderson. "I discovered I tend to like talking to a farmer on a farm outside than a chef in a restaurant inside. That's not to say chefs don't have really interesting stories, but there's a heckuva lot more that goes into Canadian food, the food scene and our food identity than just what chefs are doing in professional kitchens. You might be talking to a grandmother or an immigrant, telling their story, and how food ties into that, so the food might not even be the starting point for that story but it manages to make its way in there somewhere."
So what is Canadian food? What is definitively Canada's cuisine? It's all those things that make up Canada. Anderson said Canada is just as much the Maritimes as it is the Arctic as it is southern urbanity as it is prairie rurality, and all that connects them. So it is with our food. We are just as much Atlantic cod as we are Okanagan fruit, no matter where in this vast confederation we may live.
And Prince George managed to dribble a little influence into the food of Feast, not just the bubbles of Anderson's personality.
"The first time I had birch syrup was at the Prince George Farmers' Market," she said. "Birch syrup isn't crazy popular yet but a lot of chefs are discovering it, it's this new interesting thing, it's getting a little bit trendy, but this was years ago that I bought a tiny bottle at the Prince George Farmers' Market from somebody who had a farm between Prince George and Quesnel and it really blew my mind. And it tastes different than the Yukon birch syrup I got to try later, which makes sense, because depending on what the soil is like and the sunshine's like and the water's like will affect what the syrup is like."
Birch syrup finds its way into two recipes in the book.
Anderson was making total discoveries and having eureka moments only a couple of hours outside of her new home location of Vancouver, during the writing of the book. If she could offer any encouragement to those who like to create their own feasts it's don't look at the far side of the map for exotic delights. Your own region has plenty of bounty, and so does the next one down the highway, and the next. She and VanVeller just happened to travel 37,000 kilometres in their search.
The public event with Anderson on Monday night is free of charge. Copies of Feast will be available for purchase, or bring one from home to get signed.
