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CANADIAN FOOD WORDS
Gold Medal
Culinary Book of the Year Award
1999 from Cuisine Canada
published by McArthur & Company
"A glorious, informative, and funny collection of food-related definitions and stories!"
Marion Kane, food editor, Toronto Star
"Even readers who are unlikely to fry a doughnut in seal blubber oil will enjoy this latest romp by writer and broadcaster Bill Casselman. . .he mixes in so much entertaining information and curious Canadian lore."
Books, Globe & Mail
“…The word poutine itself derives from pudding. According to Bill Casselman’s outstanding compendium—Canadian Food Words—the English word “pudding” became “la poutina” in a local dialect of Southern France. Loosely translated, it meant stuff stuck in a mess of something else.”
from Gourmet Poutine by Barry Lazar, Montreal Gazette writer and boulevardier, who has written books about Montreal and its inhabitants. Visit him at http://www.montrealfood.com/poutine.html
Index of Samples from Canadian Food Words
Click on word to see its origin.
Bill Casselman, bluenose among schooners on the sea of popular etymology, moors his mighty vessel, nets a-teeming with Canadian words. The impressive catch is collected in Casselman's Food Words, which picks up where chapter nine (Fressing Dulse and Slurping Gooeyducks) of the much broader, and much naughtier, Casselman's Canadian Words left off.
Some word books have left me with the same hollow feeling I got when I spent an afternoon reading Trivial Pursuit cards. Not this one: after stogging my metaphorical gob with Casselman's enormous sampler of regional fare, from Newfoundland's Figgy Duff (boiled pudding with raisins) and Quebec's Gaspé steak (fried bologna) to Manitoba's Prairie Oysters (skinned and fried calves' testicles) and Yukon's Hootch (a low-grade whisky popular during the gold rush), I was happy and sated.
from the Indigo book review at www.indigo.ca
Author Bill Casselman chronicles the fare our ancestors ate. As I foraged through this fascinating book, I was particularly intrigued by the colourful descriptions of early Canadian sweets and desserts.
Wendi Hiebert, The K-W Record
Did you know that Son-of-a-Bitch-in-a-Sack is a real Canadian dish?
Yep, it's an Alberta chuck wagon pudding. In this fully illustrated, 304-page romp, Bill tells the amusing stories behind such hearty Canadian fare as gooeyducks and hurt pie.
The juicy lore and tangy tales of foods that founded a nation are all here: from scrunchins to rubbaboo, from bangbelly to poutine, from Winnipeg jambusters to Nanaimo bars, from Malpeque oysters to nun's farts!
If you think foods of Canadian origin are limited to pemmican and pea soup, you need to dip your ladle into the bubbling kettle of Canadian Food Words.
Canadian
Food Words
The Juicy Lore and Tasty Origins of
Foods that Founded a Nation
ISBN 1-55278-018-X
304 pages, illustrated, published
by McArthur & Company
or
Try My Own Recipe: Silly Chili By Billy
or
Watch a CBC TV interview about Canadian Food Words
available at http://archives.cbc.ca/IDCC-1-69-1371-8430/life_society/canadian_food/
Read a Sept. 2004 review from Halifax's Weekly
The Coast
September 23 – October 7 2004 Volume 12
Canada ’s food guides
Two new books take a look at distinctly Canadian foods. Liz Feltham cracks them open.
Nanaimo bars, bannock, rappie pie, Figgy Duff—some familiar, some not so much, but all are entries in a new booklet accompanying the 2004 edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary ($59.95). This little book celebrates our culinary heritage and provides recipes for the listings, and gives readers just a small taste of the broad base of food words that are uniquely ours. The 16 recipes are all basic and easy to prepare, reprinted from other sources.
If your curiosity about our foodie words has been piqued, have a look at Bill Casselman’s Canadian Food Words ($19.95). Poutine, fricot, bakeapples, scrunchions—all are inside this comprehensive lexicon. Well-researched and entertainingly written, this definitive source will tell you everything you want to know about moose muffle-soup, ragged robin, buffalo grease, toutons and Winnipeg jambusters.
It’s divided into provincial chapters, going from east to west, with entries placed in their province of origin. Some words, such as poutine and Nanaimo bar, are known across the country; others are very region specific and some are so obscure that even denizens of a particular province may not have heard of them.
And don’t think of this as your typical dry reference book—Casselman’s descriptions are as lively as many of the words. (When defining the Newfoundland term “blow the Christmas pudding,” he starts by saying “nor is it a bizarre sexual practice in which a person might wish to interfere with baked goods in an untoward manner,” and who knew “pets de soeur” dessert pastries translated into “nun’s farts”?)
Canadians struggle with a sense of identity, of what makes us Canadian. I suggest that we sit down to nibble on finan haddie, followed by a bowl of rubbaboo, muktuk and prairie turnip. Finish up with a slice of Victoria sandwich, and wash the lot down with spruce tea or singin’ Johnny. We’ll soon figure out who we are.© 2004 The Coast
Liz Feltham writes a lively regular column called Food Fetish in “The Coast.”
a mention from . . .
Dernier article: Queues de castor Le mardi 28 juin 2005
“Ne rigolez pas: Canadian Food Words nous apprend qu’on a déjà bel et bien mangé la queue de ce rongeur canadien!”
