Canadians at Table. Dorothy Duncan
winter to Montreal, there was the Beaver Club’s fellowship and feasting to look forward to. The club was founded in February 1785 with nineteen members, all of whom had explored the Northwest. The object of the club was “to bring together at stated periods during the winter season, a set of men highly respectable in society who had passed their best days in a savage country and had encountered the difficulties and dangers incident to a pursuit peculiar to the fur trade of Canada.” Despite this restriction, an additional nineteen members were accepted by 1803.[15]
The club did not have its own headquarters but met every fortnight from December to April in one of Montreal’s famous eating establishments. It did have its own china, crystal, and plate, marked with the club’s insignia. At the meetings the members themselves had to wear their insignia if they wanted to avoid a fine. This medal was gold and bore the words “Beaver Club of Montreal instituted in 1785,” with a beaver gnawing the foot of a tree and the inscription “Industry and Perseverance.” The reverse side carried the name of the member, the date of his first voyage of exploration, and a bas-relief with the motto Fortitude in Distress and a canoe with three passengers in top hats being guided through rapids by canoe men.[16]
Colonel Landman, a guest of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and William McGillivray in the early nineteenth century, gives us a vivid description of one of the Beaver Club dinners that lasted twelve hours:
At this time, dinner was at four o’clock and after having lowered a reasonable quantity of wine, say a bottle each, the married men withdrew, leaving a dozen of us to drink to their health. Accordingly, we were able to behave like real Scottish Highlanders and by four in the morning we had all attained such a degree of perfection that we could utter a war cry as well as Mackenzie and McGillivray. We were all drunk like fish, and all of us thought we could dance on the table without disarranging a single one of the decanters, glasses or plates with which it was covered.
But on attempting this experiment, we found that we were suffering from a delusion and wound up by breaking all the plates, glasses and bottles and demolishing the table itself; worse than that, there were bruises and scratches, more or less serious on the heads and hands of everyone in the group…. It was told to me later that during our carouse 120 bottles of wine had been drunk, but I think a good part of it had been spilled.[17]
Other guests at the Beaver Club confirmed that description:
They served bear meat, beaver, pemmican and venison in the same way as in trading posts to the accompaniment of songs and dances during the events; and when wine had produced the sought-for degree of gaiety in the wee hours of the morning, the trading partners, dealers and merchants re-enacted the “grand voyage” to the Rendezvous in full sight of the waiters or voyageurs who had obtained permission to attend. For this purpose, they sat one behind another on a rich carpet, each equipping himself with a poker, tongs, a sword or walking stick in place of a paddle and roared out such voyageurs’ songs as Malbrouck or A la Claire Fontaine, meanwhile paddling with as much steadiness as their strained nerves would permit.[18]
The last Beaver Club dinner was held in 1827, but the event was resurrected in the twentieth century. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal brought it back to life in 1959, and it now has nine hundred members around the world. Once a year club members dine on a five-course dinner with appropriate wines. Each course is paraded through the club, led by costumed coureurs de bois, voyageurs, musicians, and a representative from the Kahnawake First Nation. Now, as then, five toasts are proposed to the Mother of All Saints, the queen, the fur trade in all its branches, the women and children of the fur trade (Heaven preserve them!), and absent brethren.
Beaver hats have been forgotten by the fashion world, fur-trading empires are a thing of the past, but once a year hundreds of men and women still gather to pay tribute to an unlikely team of men and women who ruthlessly pursued a small animal across this continent. Their success depended on their food supplies and the strength, skill, and stamina of a chain of men stretched across the continent. They came from different classes, languages, cultures, and standards, but they found a common cause, and until 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company merged, they were legends in their own time.
CHAPTER SIX
Bread Was the Foundation of Every Meal
AS THE FISHERMEN, FUR TRADERS, MISSIONARIES, SOLDIERS, surveyors, and eventually settlers began to arrive in the land now called Canada, they were often astonished by its incredible bounty, beauty, and harshness. They came from every walk of life, from a multitude of cultural and religious backgrounds, and they had scores of reasons for leaving their homelands, either as sojourners or settlers. Many had come to barter for furs, work on the fishing vessels, or serve in the garrisons and either chose to stay or to return later (often with their families) to take up land and make a new home in what had once been a hostile and alien environment. In addition, there were compelling reasons for many religious and cultural groups in the Old World to make the voyage to the New World. There were also the inducements of free passage and free land grants, as well as the lure of adventure or a need to break with the past.
Whatever their reasons, food was of primary concern to everyone, individual or family: finding it, preserving it, and storing it so that it was readily available to serve their specific needs, at the precise time and place they needed it. These newcomers brought with them memories of the ingredients, recipes, and foods they had known and enjoyed at home. Often they soon realized that their culinary heritage could not be transplanted to the new environment, for the challenges were simply too formidable. Confronted by a harsh (and often wildly varying) climate, new and unknown vegetation, lack of transportation except by water, and the necessity of usually having to clear virgin forest to develop gardens and fields, the new arrivals acquired an appreciation of the skills and knowledge of the First Nations in utilizing the native plants, trees, and other vegetation for food, beverages, and medicines. Eventually, for those who stayed and prospered, they attributed their success, at least in part, to their ability to combine the knowledge and skill they acquired in their homelands with that of the Native people, and to use the best of both cultures to survive the daily challenges they faced in this, their New World.[1]
Each individual family, cultural, or religious group solved these challenges in different ways, and their histories are varied and compelling. We have here just a sampling of the perseverance and ingenuity that those early settlers demonstrated as they cleared fields, planted orchards and gardens, and attempted to ensure there would be food in the larder not only for today, but for the weeks and months ahead.
The island of Newfoundland was to become Britain’s oldest colony, and along with the mainland of Labrador, Canada’s newest province. For a long time, settlement and agriculture were not only discouraged but actually outlawed in Newfoundland as Britain attempted to protect its fishing interests. Because of this prohibition, the interior valleys were not explored for over a century. Despite such challenges, early English and Irish settlers persevered and began to prosper by the eighteenth century.
Early Newfoundland settlers cleared land by burning the forests in winter, but the townspeople had to pay to have them cut down for firewood: They built themselves Cabins, and burnt up all that part of the Woods where they sat down. The following Winter they did the same in another Place, and so cleared the Woods as they went. The People of St. John’s Town, who did not remove, were put to great Streights for Firing.[2]
Hundreds of scattered communities called outports developed around the coast, making contact with larger centres almost impossible. As a result, obtaining fresh food in winter was difficult and
traditional Newfoundland food used dried or salted fish and meat as a basic ingredient. Women baked a great deal…. A small acre or two of stony soil, cleared from the forest by back-breaking labour, was farmed mostly for root crops such as potatoes and turnips. A cow and a few sheep were kept, with the enviable half dozen chickens running around the house. Children helped with the chores — berry picking for pies, tarts and jam, and when the boys were old enough, joined their fathers on the boats, for most outports survived by virtue of the excellent cod fishing around the coast.[3]
The Habitation at Port Royal, first founded by Champlain, was the catalyst for the arrival of