Walk on the wild side: Montrealers trade convenience for connecting with their food
From seal meat to dandelion wine, 4 Montrealers skip the grocery aisle and head outdoors to fill larder
Feeding Montreal is a series that explores the political, economic, social and personal relationships Montrealers have with their food. It's a collaboration between Concordia University's journalism department and CBC Montreal.
This story is the work of a team of student journalists.
On an autumn afternoon when she was just 13, Meggy Courchaine stood silently beside her dad amid the red maple trees near their home in Sainte-Thérèse-de-la-Gatineau, a small town four hours north of Montreal.
Buzzing with the excitement of skipping class for the day, it took Meggy some effort to steady her gun and take a shot.
But she did, bringing down a 90-kilogram white-tailed deer — more than 20 kilos of meat, after butchering, and enough to feed her family for six months.
MORE IN THIS SERIES:
- Getting to zero waste: Montreal café shows you how it's done
- Kahnawake garden grows culture and community along with vegetables
- Would you like your eggs Instrammable? How social media can make a menu item a star
Now 18, Courchaine is studying social sciences at Collège André-Grasset in Montreal, but whenever she has the opportunity, she still gets out of the city to hunt for her supper.
It may come as a surprise that some Montrealers are choosing to wade into brush and bramble, sometimes for hours on end, to collect their own food. Why not just order in?
The answer to why she hunts comes to Courchaine easily.
"You become serene, and it helps me to relax," she says. "I take time for myself and enjoy the present."
"Basically, it's meditation for me. It's a family reunion, also."
During the mid-semester break in March, Courchaine went home to hunt, returning with the ingredients needed to make one of her favourite dishes: black partridge in a white wine and cream sauce.
Relieved of their glossy black plumage by Courchaine's grandfather, the pink cutlets are breaded, pan-seared and then garnished with fresh basil.
"This is the way we make it in my family," she says.
Black partridge is a white meat, similar to turkey. It requires a bit more effort to chew and has a slightly earthy taste.
"Watch out for bullets," she advises.
It is not uncommon to miss the odd pellet or two when the birds are plucked and cleaned. It's a small risk that comes with the territory.
For Courchaine, hunting is about sustenance, not sport. She and the other two hunters in her family only take what they need.
"If my father or sister kills, I won't, because it's really about feeding our family. Then we prepare the meat ourselves," she says. "That way, there is no wasting."
The forager
While Courchaine travels several hours by car to collect her wild supper, Monica Giacomin finds an array of edible eats closer to home.
"You don't have to travel up to Tremblant," she says. "You can do it anywhere."
Giacomin counts burdock-root pickles, dandelion wine, stinging-nettle chips and hawthorne jelly among the culinary creations she's made from wild plants gathered in the city.
Backyards, parks and cemeteries are all fair game.
Several years ago, Giacomin replaced what she calls the "useless grass" on her property with a variety of plants native to Montreal.
Giacomin says she takes stock of the plants that are ready for harvest in her garden at home and then heads out to her favourite picking spots in the city where the plants grow wild.
"It's sort of therapeutic in its own little Zen way," she says.
"If you have somebody in your life to do it with, there's nothing better than going out into a field of red clover and picking the tops off."
"I think of it as food, even though we're drinking it," she says. "I think it's similar to having a serving of vegetables."
Giacomin dries some of her herbs by placing each individual stem into holes in a large wicker tabletop. Once completely dry, she carefully places them into paper bags to be stored and organized alphabetically in a closet-turned-pantry in her home in Montreal's Saint-Laurent borough.
While foraging is time-consuming and yields an unpredictable supply of food, Giacomin says grocery stores have nothing on the "primo product" she finds growing wild in the city.
"Protecting the plants is important, too," she says. "If people can identify them and appreciate them, they might be a little bit more willing to step forward and say, 'Hey, this is a green space, let it be.'"
The fisherman
The unpredictability of relying on wild foods is something ice-fisherman Michaël Gauthier knows well.
While most Montrealers are still sleeping, Gauthier, an electric drill slung over his shoulder and dragging a toboggan filled with equipment, carefully makes his way onto the frozen river.
He will spend hours on the ice without a catch today. But for him, the day is about more than pike and walleye.
"You learn to reconnect with nature," he says. "The water, the birds, the fresh air: it changes your ideas."
In a couple of hours, his tranquility will be interrupted by the arrival of a group of children eager to learn about ice fishing. From Monday to Friday, Gauthier works as a guide at the park and shares the knowledge that his grandfather passed down to him.
"My grandpa invited me to go ice fishing when I was just five years old," he says. "He was the one who taught me everything. He was also the one warming my feet in minus-25-degree weather."
From his spot on the river, Gauthier can see a steady stream of cars crossing the Gédéon-Ouimet Bridge as he sets up for his afternoon lesson.
"We still live off nature, but we're disconnected from it," he says."You show up at the grocery store, you hand over your money, and that's it. It's easy to forget where it comes from."
For Gauthier, ice fishing provides an opportunity to change that, to reconnect with nature and people.
"Every outing is an adventure — the stories told on the ice, the people you meet, the fish that you get to eat, if you're lucky," he says. "It's about the experience and the community."
The chef
At Manitoba restaurant, chef Simon Mathys prepares a menu for Montrealers who aren't willing to take wilderness-wrangling into their own hands.
He prepares the seal, caught in northern Quebec, in a seasoning of seaweed and sumac, topped with smoked butter and winter radish.
"We decided to work around Quebec's pantry and serve local ingredients," says the restaurant's owner, Simon Cantin. "The only things that aren't from our pantry are salt, pepper and sugar."
Cantin says the restaurant buys from several different hunters, at least three fishermen and around 20 foragers.
"They drop in with what they harvested," says Cantin. "Sometimes they call us from the forest to ask if we'd be interested in stuff they find there."
Featuring local and wild ingredients means that the restaurant's menu has to change frequently — depending on what's in season and available.
It also presents a challenge for dealing with classic cocktails, like the Old Fashioned, since citrus trees don't grow wild in Quebec.
Instead, bartenders make cocktails using wild apples, algae, berries, pine and mushrooms.
"The aim of the restaurant is to be part of nature on a larger scale," says Cantin.
"It is to be part of an ecology and to do so ethically," he says.
"We are part of a whole."
MORE IN THIS SERIES:
- Getting to zero waste: Montreal café shows you how it's done
- Kahnawake garden grows culture and community along with vegetables
- Would you like your eggs Instrammable? How social media can make a menu item a star
Working in small teams, students in the department's graduate diploma program found and produced original stories about the political, economic, social and personal relationships Montrealers have with their food.
The students spent the winter semester developing their stories in text, audio, video, photography, infographics and maps.