Notes from Cape Breton

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved

Today is another food story. I figured you’d want something yummy to go with Andrea Beaton’s coffee, so why not one of her talented mom Betty’s oatcakes?

One of the first things I learned to make when I came here was oatcakes. Bob loves them. We bought many different ones at the Co-op and I always picked up a bag whenever I found them. I relentlessly compared them, looking for that Cape Breton “je ne sais quoi” but no store-bought were ever as good as the homemade version. Luckily I had already made some friends here and Betty gave me her recipe for oatcakes. Bob no longer has to make do with grocery-store oatcakes. Hooray!

What are oatcakes, anyway? Well, they’re not a cake, they’re a cookie but they are made with half oats, half flour, and they can definitely sustain life. They are something like oatmeal shortbread, with no eggs and very little leavening. The hobbits could easily have survived a trek on this way-bread. Like shortbread is in Scotland, oatcakes in Cape Breton are a staple of life. Some folks use brown sugar, some don’t. I also sneak in a few non-traditional ingredients like a teaspoon of cinnamon or some minced pecans. This recipe is delicious in it’s basic form and with additions.

Betty rolls hers out and cuts them into rounds. I confess that unlike Betty, my hand with a rolling pin is pretty dang heavy and they came out tough as nails. I wanted that buttery crispness that dissolves in your mouth and not a tough cookie!

The secret for me was DON’T ROLL IT OUT FLAT. Instead, when the dough comes together, I form it into a long roll inside of plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge – sometimes overnight. It can also be frozen at this stage. Cut the log in half, make half a batch and freeze the rest for later when you need them in a hurry. Before COVID, when Bob and I would be separated for up to a month sometimes, I’d send him back to the island with a log of oatcake dough.

When I take them out of the fridge, I just slice rounds (or whatever shape they decide to be in), put them on a cookie sheet and bake them. The recipe below is Betty’s, with my variations noted. I include a gluten-free option as well. I’ve tested it and it’s downright delicious and doesn’t taste ‘healthy’ at all!

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved. 

Coffee. It starts many people’s day. If you live in a big city or a suburb, it’s easy to find on the way to work. In rural Cape Breton, however, that good cuppa joe is much more elusive. There is no Tim’s on every corner, no Dunkin’ and for sure, no Starbucks. So far, I’ve identified four places with good coffee on the west side of the island. One is 10 miles NE, another is 11 miles south, a third is 30 miles north, but my new favorite coffee vendor is 25 miles south of us in Mabou. So, how far would YOU go for a really good cup of coffee?

After the Mull in Mabou, a local eatery, closed recently, world-renowned fiddler Andrea Beaton was touring in the states with Troy MacGillivray, bemoaning the lack of fun little coffee shops along Route 19 at home. She joked about buying the recently closed Mull and opening a coffee shop – but it started to become real in her mind. She’d already bought a used commercial espresso machine and a few years back had been researching tiny houses. Turns out that was perfect for selling coffee, so she modified a tiny house design for an 8×5 foot trailer and had a contractor build it to her specifications. “Make something like this,” she asked, “and he did…. the rest is what you see!”

Beaton’s Delight Espresso popped up last year next to the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou when Andrea returned to the island from Montréal with her family and bought the house where her grandfather had lived, right next door to the legendary Red Shoe. Seasonal, of course, like many services here, Beaton’s Delight provides (and I would expect no less) world-class coffee and certainly the best cafe mocha I’ve had anywhere and I’m an American coffee snob. The maple latte looked enticing but it will have to wait till next time.

Yes, I love the Dancing Goat in Northeast Margaree and they remain my favorite lunch place and I always order their cafe mocha latte when I go there. I am a loyal Goat lover and I had and enjoyed their latte earlier this week but I have to say, Beaton’s Delight edges them out just a bit with a richer, deeper, more chocolatey mouth feel. Try the mocha latte at both and decide for yourself!

The whole time we were there, the line kept forming and Andrea had already run out of mini cinnamon buns, “minnie cinnies,” a specialty. I think everyone in Mabou can smell it on the air, like when I come downstairs and Bob’s made coffee. The smell of good joe lures them to her stand – old, young, in-between. Hot, cold, sweet, straight up, fancy, whatever flavor, they all want their coffee. Two young guys wait, jonesing for their espresso hits, while my latte is almost gone. The line never stopped, so I couldn’t grab a photo of Andrea. I ponder the wisdom of a refill while I wonder how many of her customers know her music.

Andrea Beaton is a truly amazing fiddler from Cape Breton who blew me away the first time I saw her perform. I loved her music but even more, I loved her style. She made me laugh. Years later, I was lucky enough to play music with her. It’s pure joy playing with others who give their all, nothing held back. Andrea is one of those people. That same sense of commitment is evident in what she’s done with Beaton’s Delight Espresso. I can only guess what the mini cinnies taste like because they sold out. But I know Andrea and only the best will do. Guess I will have that refill!

Beaton’s Delight Espresso
Andrea Beaton CD orders

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

As a child, one of my favorite activities was treasure-hunting all alone in the woods. I loved August, when I could find those elusive blue pearls hiding under a leaf on the ground cover. I often ate as much as I picked, coming home blue-handed to my mother. She froze them and made pies but it wasn’t until I became an adult that I discovered blueberry JAM.

My first summer here was 2017 and my blueberry obsession had finally hit the mother-lode. Nova Scotia and northern Maine are the blueberry capitals of the world and rightly so. The soil is perfect – sandy, acidic, rocky. Professional growers even burn the fields every few years to keep the forest from encroaching. That first year, I bought fifteen pounds of local berries in five pound boxes. You can freeze the berries right in the box – as long as you DON’T wash them! Then you get a five pound block of blueberry ice!

After several years of upsizing recipes unsuccessfully, I’ve finally succumbed to the logic of small batches. My earlier attempts were quite tasty but were closer to blueberry drool. It was awesome on pancakes but I couldn’t call it jam.

It’s another August and today is blueberry jam day. We’re freezing one five pound box and making jam with the other. Last year I combined five pounds each of blueberries and cranberries for a tasty chutney and used another box to add to a batch of our homemade applesauce. There is nothing like the flavor of little blueberries bursting in your mouth in January. Summer in a jar!

We’ve reached the point where we don’t buy many jars, just lids. Mason jars have become our go-to water glasses and desktop pen holders. Occasionally I think “hey, we should buy some glasses,” and then I remember we have several cases in the garage. Right now, Bob is immersing a dozen half-pint jars in boiling water, so I have to go do my duty. I’m the stirrer and bringer back to the boil, so I’ll be gone for awhile. Before I go, my recipe and the order of assembly are cribbed from Kraft Canada but of course, I’ve played with it, adding a whole grated Granny Smith apple, the grated rind of a half lemon. Some honey, maple syrup, who knows? I’m not done yet!

Blueberry Jam

In a large soup pot, assemble

• 7 cups whole blueberries – crush down to 4 cups approx. (If you don’t crush them, they’ll all float to the top of each jar.)
• Juice and zest of ½ large lemon
• 1 Granny Smith apple, grated (peel and all) (I think the lemon and apple bring out the full blueberry flavor.)
• 1 box Certo dry crystals – pectin (and here’s where I got lazy and let them all sit in a cold pot mixed up together for about fifteen minutes while I enjoyed a cup of tea – that really did the trick. It gelled from the start.)

Mix everything well, stirring all the time, and bring to a full bubbling/rolling boil.

• Add 5 cups sugar, mix well, add ¼ cup honey OR maple syrup (but not both!), stir that in. The mixture will begin to look glossy. That’s the sugar melting.

Bring back to a full boil (takes 4-5 mins on high), let boil for one minute. Remove from heat, stir a few times and let it rest for five minutes, stirring occasionally. Skim any foam if it appears. I filled 9 half pint jars with the first batch, made with honey, another 9 plus a half cup with the second, made with maple syrup. (photo on the porch, sunflowers from Miller Farms in Northeast Margaree). The blueberries are from Blue Pearl Farms in Strathlorne.

I close with a foraging memory from my young adulthood. My folks lived in Leominster, Massachusetts and we drove up to New Hampshire to buy cigarettes one Labor Day in the early 1970s . Driving back, I called out, “BLUEBERRY BOG” and my dad screeched to a halt. We all piled out of the car. Sure enough, bush after high bush of berries beckoned. Huge, beautiful, easy to find, the grape-like clusters just reached out for our hands to grab them, and we did. Turns out the only containers in the car were the cartons of bootleg NH ciggies, so we emptied them and filled those carton boxes with berries. We came back the next day with two five gallon Charles Chips cans, which we also filled. Good times!

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

Today is our last day of quarantine. For me, quarantine hasn’t been that different from the past five and a half months of lockdown. Bob was our designated shopper and I rarely left the house/yard in Massachusetts. Here, we’re both sequestered for two weeks but there’s almost three acres and it’s a full time job just to pull things together both in and out of the house when you’ve been gone this long.

Bob has been tidying up the homestead and I’ve been taking expired canned goods out of the pantry for review. Bob taste-tested a six year old can of Del Monte peaches yesterday and lived to tell the tale, so we may check the others out as well. I have a feeling there will be some real estate available in that cupboard when we’re done.

What is markedly different here is the landscape, the beauty outside my window, every window, for that matter. Yesterday in the glorious afternoon sun, we watched from the deck as a battle between a hawk and an eagle played out in the sky above us. First they yelled at each other, raising their voices louder and louder and then the hawk flew higher and stooped, diving at the eagle, which met the hawk with talons up. There was some short infighting till the hawk put a little distance between them. Not done yet, they continued their challenge for about five minutes as we watched them fly in tandem to the northeast, still cussing each other out! Mesmerized, we couldn’t look away.

Besides the two itinerant moose last fall and resident canid Mr/Ms Fox, there are the ravens who roost in the trees and sometimes on the roof. I appreciate their noisy intelligence and their voices are among the only birdsong we hear up here. I’d love to be able to translate their conversations. Ravens, crows, robins, nuthatches, jays, maybe one woodpecker, the raptors, and fresh and salt-water birds are all I’ve seen in our travels and at home here. We hear or see no finches, sparrows, starlings (which I don’t miss). But there are also no bluebirds, no thrushes, no wrens, no liquid oriole song, no mockingbirds or catbirds (which nested in the hemlock next to our Athol porch). There’s very little song, which makes the caw of crows or the “keeROOONK” of ravens, or the aural battle between eagle and hawk, an event rather than a morning and evening backdrop.

Bob has, over the years, done battle with the local critters to keep what he grows for his family. I wandered into a skirmish the first time he brought me to Cape Breton. Maybe my third morning here, I looked out the window and told Bob I saw two rabbits in the garden. A few minutes later, he walked by me with a shotgun and said, matter-of-factly, “I’ll be right back.” Standing on the back porch, he took aim and popped that snowshoe hare. One shot. Total sang-froid. A few days later, he got the other one. I think there might be some MacGregor in his line. Whatever it is, hares have never returned and we don’t fence the garden.

I hesitate to bring the garden demons down on me by saying I haven’t seen a dead woodchuck by the road in Cape Breton. I believe in diversity but woodchucks are the devil. At least deer are cute and you can eat them. I’ve spotted roadkill skunks, raccoons, and deer, of course, but no whistle-pigs. Maybe they got et when they tried living here. Good! I hear they are tough eating, though, as my daughter Molly Hebert-Wilson told me when her boyfriend Alex shot one at work, dressed it out and had it cooked when she got home. Yeah, at work. So it seems she, like me, will survive the zombie apocalypse.

Living so close to the woods, though, you really have to watch out for the flora. Nature stalks you. You don’t want a spruce tree within falling distance of your house or outbuildings. And right now, just outside my window, we have evidence of a floral takeover. One year you have a paved walkway and the next year you have Rudbeckia squatters. What walkway, lady? I don’t see no walkway here!

 

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

Today it’s all about food. What does Cape Breton have that other places don’t have as much of? Lobster and mussels (more about mussels another day). A friend wanted my recipe for Lobster Bisque, so here it is . . . I love the ‘waste not, want not’ aspect of this recipe, boiling up the lobster leavings. Just add a cup and a half of heavy cream and a splash of dry sherry, et voila! La bisque d’homard!

Lobster Bisque

Take all your leavings – shells, even the legs after you sucked the meat out. You’re gonna boil it all up anyway. Do this in the big pot you cooked the lobsters in, using the same liquid. Do not add salt but do add a cup or two of water to almost cover the shells. You may not need to add much salt (if any at all) to this and should wait until the final seasoning to add any. Simmer the shells, everything, for about 30-45 minutes. Strain the liquid carefully (shells can break a tooth). You can refrigerate the stock after this step and make the bisque the next day. Save about a half cup of lobster meat for the bisque.

For four cups of strained stock, saute 3/4 cup of minced onion, then skin and mince two Roma tomatoes (best flavor) and saute until they break down, then add the stock to both. You can use a tablespoon of tomato paste but I don’t like that flavor as much. I use crab boil for the original lobsters, adding other savory seasonings to the stock like a dash of dry mustard and paprika and a bit of cayenne. Add seasonings as you saute the onion so they have time to flavor everything. I love Penzey’s Ozark seasoning and use that, which does have salt in it. If I add it, it goes in here. Keep tasting after the flavors bloom so you don’t over-season it. Add salt only if necessary at the very end, after adding the cream. 

When the stock is hot, almost to the boil, add 1-1/2 cups of heavy cream and turn down the heat. When it comes back to a boil, take it off the heat, stir in about 2 tablespoons dry sherry, put it in bowls and garnish with lobster meat. Personally I like the bisque as much or more than the actual lobster. Makes it worth all the shell-picking.

We live in the woods, so Bob takes the shell leavings into the forest for the fox and the other critters. One of the joys of living up here is we don’t throw food garbage in the landfill and a compost pile anywhere near the house is an advertisement to bears and coyotes. Instead, Bob takes all our food garbage into the woods for the wild things. Mr/Ms Fox stops by to say thanks occasionally.

© 2020 Donna Hébert. All rights reserved.

Today is National Acadian Day in Canada, marking the 1755 date when the British forcibly and brutally deported French Acadian settlers from Nova Scotia, some 11,500 of the 14,000 living there at the time. As history, this had essentially intellectual meaning for me until last year, when I learned that my 4th great grandfather had been deported from Grand Pré in 1755 at the age of 19. I pictured his family reacting to this outrage, pictured his mother weeping. He took 20 years to do it, but Etienne Hébert not only reunited his family, he brought hundreds of others from his Grand Pré community to Becancour, just south of Trois Rivières in Québec.

There was nothing dry any more about these real people who were my ancestors. Almost all my Québecois ancestors originally settled in and were driven from Acadie. Some of them still rest in the cemetery at Fort Anne in downtown Annapolis Royal. None of this was known to us until 2019, when one of the genealogists at the Annapolis Heritage Society took on my search.

As a very closeted Franco-American, I grew up in a family where our French-ness wasn’t important or even mentioned much. My parents didn’t bring their heritage into daily life. French-Canadian was the common term in the 1950s and Franco-American as an identity came into use in the 1970s. As it was, only one of my three French-Canadian grandparents spoke the language daily. She was my father’s mother, Clara Hébert Hinds . She chattered away with her friend Josée from across the street but when I asked her why she didn’t teach us to speak French, Nana replied, “Little pitchers have big ears.” As an adult, I saw that French was her private language where she didn’t have to watch what she said, a sanctuary. She attended Mass in French almost every day, said her rosary in French but, born in Franklin NH, she still considered herself American, not French-Canadian, and I never once heard her call herself Acadian.

Nana was highly skilled with a needle. Women and men sought her out. She altered and repaired clothing, made new dresses and wedding party outfits and also repaired the zippers in old men’s woolen trousers, not a task I would have enjoyed. She taught me how to position patterns to cover every scrap of fabric when cutting out material. She often inherited the leftovers from her custom work and would find an artful way to use them.

Nana would turn on the radio to listen to the station in Québec late at night and sew while Papa worked the night shift at the woolen mill. The Singer sewing machine and ironing board were in her bedroom. When I was little, I’d sleep in the big double bed behind the machine, letting the motion of the treadle and the sound of music in French lull me to sleep.

For all that, my family was so thoroughly assimilated that I wasn’t aware of my own French-ness at the gut level, as an actual birthright that I already carried within me, until I met Josée Vachon in the early 1990s. Sitting around Martha Pellerin’s dinner table with her and other French women, I realized that our busy conversational rhythm was comfortable, breaking up into duets and jumping back in with comments about what someone else just said. There was a give and take there that has never been part of Yankee conversational etiquette. I felt at home. Even if I didn’t speak French much (and that, badly), these were my people. I belonged. For several decades, every time I cross into Quebec, and now, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, my eyes fill with tears and there’s a sense of homecoming. 

I still feel that way. I understand myself better knowing that many things about me are French, in the blood, can’t be removed even if I tried (and why would I do that?). I understand that the music of my French-Canadian ancestors, Acadian and Québecois, flows like their DNA through my veins and down my arms. Speaking French may still be tough, but my fiddle speaks it fluently for me and now I know who I am . . . and I think Nana knows, too.

Here’s her song, called “Nana Danced.” I wrote it back in the ’90s, when I was singing in Chanterelle with Josee Vachon, Liza Howe Constable and Alan Bradbury.

© 1994 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved. Recorded on “Soirée Chez Nous” in 1996 with Chanterelle. Written for her French-Canadian Nana, who really did die of a heart attack while playing sixteen cards at Bingo.