It’s damp and chilly outside, but it’s toasty in Wendie Poitras’ kitchen, where rendered pork skins sizzle and pop in a cast-iron pan. Poitras—a teacher and artist who has become a vocal advocate along with scholars and activists to help define and commemorate African Nova Scotian culture—is cooking traditional dishes for a few friends and relatives. She’ll eventually add the pork to boiled potatoes and flaked salt cod. Yellow-eyed beans bake for hours to a deep brown, the ham hock in the center of the pot falling softly apart. Oxtails swim in a rich sauce next to a pot of rice and beans and a pan of cornbread.

This is Nova Scotia, a vaguely lobster-shaped peninsula that juts, with its surrounding islands, east out into the Atlantic, one time zone farther than the rest of Canada’s east coast. We’re in Dartmouth, just across the harbor from Halifax, and in the windows, the fog is thick like milk. Evergreens stand out like emerald-robed figures in the gray-white mist.

I’ve come with my mother and daughter—my first time here since I was a teenager—in search of a connection to my ancestors, my roots. I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s capital, but my grandmother’s family had lived in the region until moving to Montreal in 1955. My mother returned at age 21, when she was a private in the Navy. It was then that she met my father, a Quebecois, in the forces, and after I was born, we left permanently for Quebec. My parents took us back to visit Nova Scotia every few years, a 12-hour road trip backward into my heritage.

In my grandmother’s adopted city, people spoke a different language and ate different foods, so many of the ingredients she was accustomed to were not available. Rather than cling to the past, she chose to adapt to her new life and encouraged her five children to do the same. They left behind many of the African Nova Scotian recipes she was raised on. Every now and then, she would crave something from home—fish cakes, or “boiled dinner” (an old Irish staple of corned beef and cabbage adopted throughout Nova Scotia), or the salt cod and pork scraps she was practically raised on—and seek out what was needed to cook up the memories.

Blacks have lived in Nova Scotia since the early 1600s, but Canada’s black history is unknown to most Canadians—even to many black Canadians themselves. “We’re in the process of documenting and collecting information about our history,” says Poitras, who likens culture to an iceberg: Food, music, and language are among the parts visible above the water’s surface, but the vast, deep bulk of it—values, beliefs, shared experiences—can be hidden beneath. In the case of African Nova Scotians, even much of what’s traditionally above the surface has been lost or obscured over the years. It can feel like we’re still, as Poitras puts it, “trying to legitimize the culture. We’re figuring out the food piece. We’re still working on the other pieces.”

I met Poitras after I’d read about her efforts to promote African Nova Scotian culture by sharing her family’s recipes. She has cooked for her third-grade class and helped design menus for African Heritage Month events. “There is no one dish that’s particularly African Nova Scotian,” she explains. “It’s the collection of recipes from all these different places that make up the cuisine.” Indeed, African Nova Scotian food is heavily influenced by the places black settlers came from, the landscape and climate of the province, even the cuisine of British colonialists and Irish settlers.

According to the Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia, the province has been home to 52 black communities. But over the generations, migration to cities such as Winnipeg, Montreal, and Toronto since the Great Depression has left only about a dozen intact today. These areas, mostly rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods, were settled in waves: slaves brought by colonialists, and eventually the black Loyalists who fled the U.S. at the close of the American Revolution. (In exchange for their service, the British had promised the Loyalists freedom and land in the northern colonies, which included “New Scotland”—or in Latin, Nova Scotia.) In 1796, a small contingent of Jamaican warriors, called Maroons, were exiled to the province after an uprising. Most left a few years later for Sierra Leone, where a group of African Nova Scotians founded Freetown. More blacks came as refugees following the War of 1812, and after slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833, Nova Scotia saw an influx of escaped slaves from the U.S.

As a child, I’d see 60-second ads depicting snippets of Canadian history air on CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In one, I remember a young black man hidden in the base of a church pew was reunited with his family: an escaped slave who had fled safely across the border. The message was that Canada was a place of compassion and refuge, which reflects how many Canadians view their country to this day. What the PSA didn’t reveal was how poorly the man was likely treated upon his arrival. Slavery had been abolished, but racism remained. The land promised to black Loyalists, when that promise was even kept, was the least hospitable, least arable. Early black settlers relied on fishing, foraging, and what meager farming the barren land would allow, such as keeping chickens and pigs, or growing root vegetables. They salted their meat and fish to preserve them, canned wild fruits and berries for winter, and picked dried dulse—a pungent purplish edible seaweed that grows in northern climates—from the shore to survive.

By the early 20th century, institutions and businesses in Canada had adopted Jim Crow–style practices, and legislation to prevent racial discrimination didn’t appear until after World War II (and wouldn’t be enforced until even later). Early in 2018, when a new $10 bill was unveiled bearing the likeness of Viola Desmond, many Canadians had never heard of her. Several years before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Desmond had taken a stand against entrenched segregation in Nova Scotia, refusing to move from the whites-only section of a movie theater in New Glasgow. But her story didn’t make its way across the nation the way Parks’ did, so she never attained status as a civil-rights icon. It was heard in enlightened circles on both sides of the border, even capturing the attention of W.E.B. Dubois, but for the most part, it remained a local legend—until now. In recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars and grass-roots organizations, the stories of black Canadians—­particularly African Nova Scotians—are emerging. Last year, the United Nations released a report on Canada’s relationship with its black populations. Despite the country’s image as a multicultural haven, the report cited the country’s history of black slavery and disenfranchisement, as well as its failure to recognize those black communities that have existed since the country’s earliest days. Such revelations are a rude awakening for most Canadians. For the blacks in Canada, it is a pivotal time.

In Poitras’ kitchen in Dartmouth, stories from the past are reflected in the steaming pots of braised meat, in the bubbling tin of ham-hock baked beans. Peeling potatoes for the salt cod and pork scraps always puts Poitras in mind of her mother, who would expertly pare the skins off her spuds in one long, magical spiral. Poitras’ father—who worked the dockyards and held a pastoral role within the community—would cook oxtail and other special-occasion dishes; her mother did the everyday cooking. Poitras remembers the vegetable man passing through the neighborhood to sell his fresh produce; her mother would buy 50 pounds of potatoes at a time and store them outside the back door. The mackerel man also passed through, calling out: “Maaaaack-erel! Mackerel-mackerel-mackerel!” She can hear it when she closes her eyes.

The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking In Nova Scotia

My daughter is talkative, happily plying a piece of lacquered oxtail meat from a bone. My mother has grown quiet, savoring the pungent salt of the cod fish tempered by the fluffy, peppery potatoes. She’s elsewhere now: her mother’s kitchen, her childhood. “We had baked beans every Saturday. I hated the routine of it,” she says in a small voice, mostly to herself. “But they were so good.” Poitras, too, wouldn’t fully appreciate her parents’ cooking until later. At one of her first jobs, she often traded her home-cooked meals for a co-worker’s fast food, thinking she was getting the better end of the deal. It wasn’t until she became a mother herself that she understood just how valuable her family’s recipes were.

As guests cram into Poitras’ kitchen, a few of us find seats in the living room, plates balanced in laps, glasses of cold Scotian rosé and bottles of Alexander Keith lager, the ubiquitous local beer, leaving wet rings on the coffee table.

Talk turns to identity. “Remember that when we came from Africa, through the Middle Passage to the southern United States, our language was taken from us. Our names were taken. We don’t really know why we eat certain things or speak certain ways,” says Poitras, a thick mop of tight curls framing her face. “As a people, we collected recipes from Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South, and put our own spin on them.” Baked beans might get a dose of maple syrup. Instead of hot sauce, the main condiment on the table is often chow-chow, a tangy green tomato relish. Boiled dinner is sometimes made with pig’s tails instead of beef in black homes. Oxtails have Jamaican roots, but with Canada not being a land of hot peppers, the Caribbean spices became muted. For other dishes you might find across the Maritime provinces, such as fish cakes, typically made with potatoes and salt cod or haddock, the flavors are revved up. “We tend to like a little more spice than our fellow Scotians,” says Poitras. “And probably a little too much salt.”

On one damp, foggy morning, my mother, daughter, and I set out for a place that no longer exists. Africville, on the outskirts of Halifax, overlooking the Bedford Basin, was home to a tightknit group of families who kept a few animals, fished and swam in the basin, and performed their baptisms in its cold, brackish waters. Kids even played ice hockey on it when it froze, although few alive today remember winters that cold. Life in Africville, which existed roughly from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th, could be difficult. Despite paying municipal taxes, residents weren’t provided with plumbing, garbage pickup, or paved roads. In the 1950s, the city dump was moved nearby. A decade later, after years of threats to seize the valuable waterfront property Africville occupied, the settlement, at its peak 400 strong, was razed to the ground. Its residents were forcibly relocated, and most ended up in public housing. The city used dump trucks to remove people’s belongings, a painful humiliation still fresh in the minds of former residents. Only a few families were compensated for the full value of their home. The rest were given a paltry sum and expected to start their lives anew.

Linda Mantley, a former Africville resident who cofounded the Africville Genealogy Society, gives tours of the Africville Museum, housed in a faithful replica of the Baptist church that was once the beating heart of the settlement. It was established as part of the apology and compensation package issued by the city of Halifax in 2010 for Africville’s destruction. Former residents are still fighting for personal compensation for their homes. “Our parents kept all that from us,” Mantley says of the cruel evictions. Instead, she recalls an idyllic childhood in the rustic settlement many outsiders would have thought of as a slum. She and the other children would pluck the periwinkles that clung to the rocks by the sea, left behind when the tide went out, and cook them in a pot or a can over a fire right on the beach. A pin or needle served as the utensil to dig the tiny snail out from its shell. They also picked apples, wild pears, and blueberries from brambly bushes to take home for their mothers to make blueberry duff, a steamed dumpling that would be served as dessert, or maybe tossed into a pot of boiled dinner.

At 72, Mantley is wiry, high-cheekboned, with a terse manner that belies her warmth. “We were a self-sufficient community,” she says curtly, walking us through the one-room museum, pointing out black-and-white photographs of the community, naming the people she knew. Mantley’s tour of the exhibit—made up of text, images, and a few household artifacts—feels like sifting through a box of souvenirs. Afterward, she hugs me like we’re old friends.

Juanita Peters, the museum’s general manager and a filmmaker who has directed two documentaries on Africville, feels strongly about the importance of telling the stories of African Nova Scotians. She recently moved back to Weymouth Falls, a historically black community by the Bay of Fundy, about 160 miles from Halifax, where her people have lived for nine generations, and where she would spend summers with her grandparents (she herself grew up in Toronto). Those summer meals consisted mainly of salted fish—herring, haddock, halibut head, or the dried smelts her grandmother strung up herself behind the wood stove. “She would sear them right on the stove, not in a pan,” says Peters. “Then she’d peel and eat them with toast and applesauce. And that was breakfast.” When they weren’t eating fish, it was blood pudding, cow’s liver, tongue, or lights (lungs). Most people had their own smokehouses. Today, many of the homes in Weymouth Falls are vacant, and most of the farms abandoned. With little need to smoke or salt foods now that people have refrigeration, many of the old recipes risk being lost to time.

“My cousins say they won’t come down because it’s like visiting ghosts. But I love it because it’s like visiting ghosts!” says Peters. She still cooks some of the foods from her childhood—such as smelts, fried, with a side of potato and chow-chow. “Food is about nostalgia,” Saje Mathieu—a historian and author of North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955—tells me. “Migrant communities often stay stuck in the moment of the initial departure.” In such communities, food acts as a tether to a place of familiarity, of comfort. Food can be home. For African Nova Scotians, whose original home might be too far gone for them to remember, their foods can serve as a record, a map of the arduous journey of their ancestors. Mine came to Canada with little more than the traditions that fed and sustained them. But amid the emerald pines and damp, wet cold, a world away from their ancestral origins, they endured.

The post The Underexplored Roots of Black Cooking in Nova Scotia appeared first on Saveur.

I like to think my Spanish is pretty decent, considering I’ve never taken a single lesson. But I was at a loss when the round, rosy-cheeked woman manning the empanada stall in Santiago’s Mercado Central barked repeatedly at me: “Cachay? Cachay?” as she explained the various salsas that might accompany the large seafood pockets she was frying up. Cachay is one of the many anglicisms in Chilean Spanish; it means “did you catch that?” Clearly, I had not.

A wave of British immigration to Chile in the 19th century is responsible for the English influence on the language. Chilean Spanish is also littered with Italian and German inflections thanks to mass influxes from those countries, as well. Foreigners have not only influenced the language, but also the food of Chile—you might find machas a la parmesana (Parmesan-slathered baked razor clams) next to maize, pumpkin and potato dishes on a traditional menu, with kuchen or strudel for dessert. This past fall, while packing for my third visit to the country, I looked forward to tasting the fresh seafood, tangy Patagonian lamb, stacked churrasco-style meat sandwiches, a plethora of empanadas, and plenty of pristine avocado. I wasn’t as excited about the fine-dining scene. Perhaps because of the strange convergence of foreign influences, and because the country’s most iconic traditional dishes are rustic comfort foods likechariquican, a homey Mapuche dish made with dried beef, fancy restaurants in Chile have relied on an innocuous style of cooking that can only be described as “international.” But on this trip, I was pleased and surprised to find the latest crop of young Chilean chefs embracing indigenous ingredients such as quinoa, merken (the traditional smoked-chili spice of the Mapuche tribe) and other ancient native foodstuffs, as the new building blocks of the country’s modern gastronomy.

When I say “Chilean chefs,” I use the term broadly. Top restaurants in Santiago and the coastal town of Valparaiso are attracting talent from outside the country. Take Sergio Barroso, a wide-eyed Spaniard who came to Valparaiso to head up the kitchen at Alegre, the restaurant in the newly opened Palacio Astoreca hotel. He cut his teeth at El Bulli back home, where he says he learned to value each and every ingredient he works with. Like the rest of the city, which is covered in graffiti and buzzes with a healthy angst and creative energy, the food at Alegre is colorful and playful. Barroso spent months researching Chilean dishes and products before getting to work on his menu.

Herb-Infused Pisco Sour

Credit: Maxime Iattoni

“Chile is a country with a wide range of geographical contrasts and climates, which poses a very interesting challenge for a chef,” he mused over slivers of llama prosciutto and his take on machas a la parmesana: Instead of baking the clams au gratin, he gently poaches them, and then shrouds them in an airy Parmesan foam. “The idea of haute Chilean cuisine has yet to be really established, but little by little this will happen. Chilean chefs are searching for something genuine, local and of high quality, and they are learning how to take advantage of their resources.”

The Mapuche were once considered to be the fiercest tribe in all the Americas. They may be a peaceful (and largely vegetarian) people now, but they were the only tribe to stave off the Incas and the Spanish, never to be conquered by either. Perhaps this explains how their ancient spice merken has survived, to be revived as a trendy ingredient in today’s Chile. Virtually unknown by urban Chileans a decade ago, it’s now rather common to see merken on modern menus. Even piñones, the enormous pine nut-like fruits of the prehistoric monkey puzzle tree (literally: the tree dates back to the Cretaceous period), part of the Mapuche diet for centuries, are being used by chefs in contemporary preparations. One of the most vocal champions of indigenous ingredients is the boyishly handsome TV chef Rodolfo Guzman, whose Santiago restaurant Borago features foods foraged from the top of the Atacama Desert to the tip of Patagonia.

During my visit to Borago, the meal unfolded like educational dinner theater, each dish accompanied by a geographical and cultural lesson. He explained a pretty composition of fresh sea urchin adorned with white blossoms on a bed of sea greens:”The seaweed is from Quintay, on the coast.” During dinner service, Guzman, who studied botany and biochemistry before deciding to become a chef, walked around the dining room chatting with guests and instructing them on the food’s nature and lineage. “This dish is inspired by the hot-stone cooking of the Mapuche people,” he said of a simple, slow-cooked egg sprinkled in black ash whose soft sunshine yolk turned muddy when I pierced it with my fork.

Chilean Vegetables Stew

Avant-garde chefs aren’t the only ones experimenting with native foods. There are also cooks like Maria Eugenia Terragno, once the executive chef at LAN Airlines, who now prefers to host strangers in her home (you can arrange to visit her for lunch through a company called Santiago Adventures). Guests are greeted by a simple spread of soft cheese, toasted bread and pisco sours served by the pitcher. Terragno likes to showcase native ingredients in a more familiar way, like in her “Andean paella”, made with quinoa instead of rice. The not-quite grain (quinoa is a seed) packed with a complete protein has been an Andean staple since at least 3000 B.C. The plant thrives at high, dry altitudes. Quinoa fell out of fashion for a time, but since being rediscovered as a “superfood” has been experiencing a renaissance in Chile and elsewhere. In addition to trying the grain in Terragno’s take on paella, I also tasted it in a riff on risotto, as well as in several side dishes and salads.

Even in the cracked caramel landscape of the Atacama Desert—the highest, driest desert on earth—I encountered chefs experimenting with ancient ingredients. At the Alto Atacama Desert Lodge, chef Daniel Molina scours the region for local herbs and rare fruits, and even grows some on the grounds (fertilized by the hotel’s pet llamas, of course). Molina infuses pisco with rica rica, a sweet minty-rosemary-like herb traditionally used for sore throats that you might find growing in the sand on a desert hike, for an aromatic pisco sour.

“It is very simple, the food here,” says Molina, who makes a habit of attending local religious ceremonies in order to gather more information about the herbs he cooks with. He may not use them medicinally like the natives do, but he aims to understand as much about these ingredients as possible—even if they’re just going into a cocktail, ice cream, or tart. “They try to use all the things that grow here,” he says, admiringly. “Cachay?” That, I caught.

_Restaurante Alegre
Palacio Astoreca hotel
Calle Montealegre 149
Cerro Alegre, Valparaiso, Chile
56/32/327/7700
**
Borago**
Av. Nueva Costanera 3467
Vitacura, Santiago, Chile
56/2/2953-8893

Santiago Adventures
56/802/904-6798_

Alto Atacama
Camino Pukara
Sector Suchor, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
56/2/912/3945

See the recipe for Charquican »
See the recipe for Andean Paella »
See the recipe for Herb-Infused Pisco Sour »

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Any city worth its salt has a signature sandwich. New York has pastrami on rye, Montreal is a mecca for smoked meat, and New Orleans is famous for its po’boy. In Santiago, the meat-on-bread of choice is the chacarero—a stout, round roll piled high with churrasco-style grilled meat, sliced tomatoes, a smear of avocado or dollop of mayo, a drizzle of aji verde (green chili sauce), and to top it all off, julienned green beans. The result is an orchestra of textures and flavors: soft bread, tender meat, creamy mayo or avocado mash, and bright, crisp legumes. Here are five great spots to pick up a chacarero in Chile’s capital:

Fuente Alemana

This no-frills German-themed lunch counter (and its second location in the Providencia neighborhood) is a mainstay for cheap food and draft beer. Best known for its lomito, the chacarero at this more than 50-year-old institution comes stuffed to the gills, making it hard to keep a handle on the sandwich, so don’t be ashamed if need a fork to get the job done.

Fuente Alemana
Av. Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins 58, Santiago
Tel: 562/639-3231

Bar Liguria

Don’t be surprised if one of the three Liguria locations is the first place your Santiago friends take you. A local favorite for everyone from artists to CEOs, the original is done up in a colorful pastiche of wallpapers, portraits, old posters and maps. The chacarero here can take on an Italian accent, like much of the menu.

Bar Liguria
Av. Providencia 1373, Providencia, Santiago
Tel: 562/235-7914

Taberna El Hoyo

For 100 years, this tavern has served up traditional fare, like blood sausage, cow tongue, rolled pork and boiled potatoes. It also does a mean chacarero. Wash it down with the house drink, a Terremoto (earthquake), made with white wine, pisco and pineapple ice cream—sweet enough to double as dessert.

Taberna El Hoyo
San Vicente 375, Central Station, Santiago
Tel: 562/689-0339

Fuente Chilena

With two locations, this minimalist sandwicheria specializes in fricandela—from the German frikadeller, akin to a flattened meatball—which, when slapped into a roll, is for all intents and purposes a burger. You can get it, as well as cow tongue, churrasco and several other fillings, in an array of sandwich formats, including the noble chacarero.

Fuente Chilena
Av. Apoquindo 4900, Las Condes, Santiago
Tel: 562/213-5524

La Superior

A hip sandwich joint that opened its doors earlier this year, La Superior’s brief menu of fresh takes on Chilean classics includes the pernil chacarero, a roasted pork sandwich with all the fixings. The country’s German influence shines through the extensive list of craft beers, and there are fresh juices and smoothies for the not-so-beer-happy.

La Superior
Av. Nueva De Lyon 105, Local 9, Providencia
Tel: 56/2/232-9045

The post On the Chacarero Trail: Where to Eat Santiago’s Favorite Sandwich appeared first on Saveur.

To make a zesty margarita or paloma, or just to sip neat as a smooth after-dinner drink, there’s nothing better than really, really good tequila. The great tequilas of Mexico are a world away from the harsh shots you may have done in college, which were likely not even tequila at all, but a hybrid of just 51% agave spirit, aptly called “mixto.” But 100 percent Blue Weber agave tequila — blue for the hue and Weber for the botanist who identified it; “true” tequila, if you will — is a spirit worth savoring and appreciating. Depending on what sort of drinker you are, find your true tequila here.

See the gallery »

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