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Pablum

As the centre of food manufacturing in Canada, Ontario has coined many commercial brand names for various nutriments, and perhaps the most famous belonged to a baby food. Pablum! To think that a food so bland was invented by Canadians! Gosh, it's just not like us.

Doctors Drake, Brown, and Tisdall, searching for a simple, nutritious breakfast for infants, spent many hours at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children stirring vile gruels and loathsome porridges. Did they, like Macbeth's three witches, utter little rhymes as they whipped up their alimentary goo? In any case, Pablum first went on sale in 1930. Insipid it may be, but so wholesome! It contains wheat germ, alfalfa, oatmeal, cornmeal, wheatmeal, and other treats.

1933 label of Canada's most famous baby food

When they came to christen their new product, the doctors or someone at the food company that was manufacturing the product did display a sense of humour. They found their name for the new cereal in Latin, where pabulum is the word for horse feed or animal fodder. I like to think that the good doctors, in all their nurturant beneficence and tireless scientific inquisitiveness, nevertheless like all parents now and then, occasionally just wanted to stuff some kind of stodge into all those hungry, wailing mouths, and probably did think of their peckish little charges as livestock to be fed—wisely and lovingly, of course.

 

 

 

 

Beaver Tail

The tail of Canada's largest and most symbolic rodent, Castor canadensis, is edible, in a dish called beavertail beans, for example, in which the tail is cut off and blistered over a fire until the skin loosens. After the skin is removed, the tai flesh is boiled in a large pot of beans.

But beaver tail also came to be applied to a recipe for quick-baked dough, especially in early 19th-century places where people might camp for one night and where there was no frying pan. The dough, with or without one of the "risings" was shaped into a long, narrow, flat loaf, vaguely resembling a beaver's tail, stuck on one or more sticks and baked over an open fire.

 

Ottawa's Beavertails

One particular form of this "bread," adapted from a recipe in Renfrew County in Ontario, has become very popular at Winterlude, Ottawa's annual cold weather festival. Indeed Pam and Grant Hooker's Beavertails are the culinary hit of every winter carnival in Canada's capital city. The Hookers adapted an old family recipe, from a grandmother who lived near Medicine Hat, based on a German dish called Küchl or Kökle ‘little cake.’

To make Hooker's Beavertails, a swatch of sweet, whole wheat pastry dough is put through a roller and stretched out to a vaguely beavertail-like shape, then it is fried for a minute or two in hot vegetable oil. The fried dough is then painted with melted butter and various savoury toppings are applied. Among the Hooker's best-selling Beavertails are those bedecked with cinnamon and sugar. They have many franchise operations across Canada. A popular Beavertail at the British Columbia skiing resort of Whistler is one slathered with cream cheese and smoked Pacific salmon.

But, to repeat, there was a 19th-century dough item called a beaver tail. Here is a reference in print from 1896 in a book called Explorations in the Far North by Frank Russell: "If the traveler has no frying pan the bread is baked in a beaver tail. Such a loaf is long and narrow and is exposed to the fire upon a stick, the lower end being set in the ground, two or three cross sticks, the size of an ordinary skewer, are required to prevent the loaf from breaking and falling as it breaks."

A few years earlier, a Canadian author of outdoor books, Egerton Ryerson Young published Stories from Indian Wigwams and Northern Campfires in which he wrote: "When one side was done brown, it was turned over, and soon the beavers' tails were ready for the hungry men."

 

Who Are Haw-Eaters?

Haw eaters are Ontarians born and raised on Manitoulin Island. Their local word for themselves comes in three forms: run together as haweater, with a hyphen as haw-eater, and primly discrete as haw eater. They like hawberries, the dark-red fruit of a species of hawthorn common in northern Ontario. Haws can be lovingly ovened in pies, tarts, and strudels. Visitors to Manitoulin buy tasty haw jams too. The word was brought to Canada by early immigrants from England and Scotland. One of the oldest berry names in English, haw pops up plump and ruddy in a glossary dated around A.D. 1000.

Hawthorn flowers, leaves, and the red haw fruit of autumn

 

 

 

Hawberry and hawthorn share an initial element which is cognate with Old High German hag ‘enclosure.’ The first meaning of haw in English was fence. Hawthorn bushes were early used to fence yards, hence hawthorn is fence-thorn. Our later word "hedge" is related to haw, and still hemming and hawing in some rural English dialects is church-haw for churchyard.

By the 14th century, enclosed yard and pen for domestic animals were common meanings for the word. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), the first great poet in English, used it that way in "The Pardoner's Tale" from his Canterbury Tales written in Middle English:

"Ther was a polcat in his hawe, That. . . hise capons hadde islawe."

There was a polecat in his yard that his castrated roosters had slain [by pecking it to death].

A polecat is a smelly European weasel. Charming vignette.

Chaucer used the word in its fruity sense too in The Former Age:

"They eten mast hawes and swyche pownage."

They ate acorns and chestnuts (mast), hawthorn berries, and such pannage (pig food).

A Dutch cousin of haw, Middle Dutch hage ‘ground enclosed by a fence’ gives both of the two names of the capital city of the Netherlands: 's Gravenhage ‘The Count's Haw, or Park.’

Modern English "The Hague" stems directly from the other name of the city in Dutch, Den Haag ‘the hedge.’ Both names refer to woods that were a royal hunting grounds surrounding a medieval palace. Such pleasant ripples in the pond of words waft us back to Manitoulin Island and thoughts of an Ontario summer.