Eatdrink #44 November/December 2013

8 www.eatdrink.ca
№ 44 | November/December 2013
food writer at large
A Reminiscence of My Culinary Life
in 1,200 Words or Less
By Bryan Lavery
When I was a young teenager, our
friends and relatives reacted like
we were moving to Mars when
we left Toronto to move to our
cottage on Rice Lake. Our parents fulfilled a
long-held dream when they purchased the
hilltop cottage with an acre of cedar forest
backing on to the Ouse River. The site had previously
been part of much larger farm acreage.
The cottage was a prefabricated shell
with no amenities, in my unformed
mind a zeitgeist in the back-tothe-earth
spirit of the times, a
handyman’s special that we
idealized and that had the
potential to be transformed
into our dream home.
At first, I thought we had
landed in paradise, taking a cue
from my parents who behaved
like we had inherited heaven
on earth. It was a convincing gambit that
betrayed no hint of the hardships and
sacrifices ahead. We briefly emulated the
type of television family that enjoyed the
solidarity of breaking bread together and
took deep satisfaction from cooking meals
over an open-fire in the moonlight.
Our parents purchased an old cast iron,
wood-burning stove at a farm sale auction that
had to be moved on a flatbed pulled by a tractor.
The stove was connected by a stove pipe to
a temperamental flue that vented the smoke
outside. The stove was both a heat source
and cooker and would rarely burn
unattended for more than a couple of
hours. Gathering and chopping wood
became a necessity that seemed to
dominate our lives. If the embers
were allowed to extinguish no amount of
stoking, bellows work or fanning with a newspaper
would resuscitate the fire. It was on this
volatile stove that I became a fledgling cook.
I was most in my element in the kitchen, or
hunting and pecking on an ancient typewriter
in my bedroom with a thesaurus by my side.
The experience of moving to our cottage
was like going camping for an extended period
of time. Like any make-believe, reality often
crushes expectations. When the honeymoon
ended, practicality took over, and after several
months our pioneering spirit was replaced by
the “everything is awful” phase. For a teenager
accustomed to the independence of urban
life and navigating a large city on transit, the
realization that we were isolated
came as a culture shock, the effects
delayed but inevitable.
At fourteen, I proved myself equal
to stand a full day’s work. My first
job was pumping gas and clerking
at Heffernan’s, which was the only
general store and one of few gas
stations along a stretch of Highway
7 between Peterborough and the
village of Norwood. Heffernan’s
served a captive audience of hardworking
farmers who purchased their
weekly foodstuffs and farming supplies as
well as other passersby en route to small
towns or the near north. It was as a sidekick
in the kitchen at the back of the store that I
was indoctrinated into the art and science of
baking and those experiences contributed to
my life-long interest in cooking.
My formative years were spent managing
the kitchens of the Keg and the Corkscrew
chains, learning the business side of the industry
when salad bars and steak and lobster
were the very definition of middlebrow
cuisine. Despite the lack of innovation
in these kitchens I became an avid
reader of cookbooks; the recipes were
precise and I attempted to follow them
to the letter.
In my early twenties I was fortunate
to have several mentors with a dedicated
interest in gastronomy and was given the
opportunity to work with talented chefs and
restaurateurs, all with difficult temperaments
and strong skill sets that helped me develop
a culinary backbone. My real education and