Susan Musgrave on food and foraging on Haida Gwaii
Susan Musgrave is a writer and poet who owns The Copper Beech House on Haida Gwaii, an island off the coast of northern British Columbia. The Copper Beech House has hosted writers, politicians and adventurers for decades. Her latest book, A Taste of Haida Gwaii, is a collection of stories and recipes from her lifetime of cooking and hospitality.
WHAT THE BOOK IS REALLY ABOUT
The book is really about stories, the people who live on Haida Gwaii, their eccentricities and our lives, which centres around food. Everybody's life centres around food, but especially there, because there is so much of it.
HOW LIVING REMOTELY FORCES CREATIVITY IN THE KITCHEN
When I first lived on Haida Gwaii, what you could buy in the store in the way of condiments was ketchup and mayonnaise. You had to be inventive when it came to cooking, and that's how a lot of us learned how to make unusual things, because you have to. Otherwise, you're going to be eating a lot of ketchup and mayonnaise. So I have some recipes in the book that say, "Do not attempt to make these at home, whatever you do."
HOW HAIDA GWAII PUTS THINGS INTO PERSPECTIVE
It's a place you can be yourself. It's nice and quiet. The light is pretty amazing, and so are the rocks and the trees. It's the natural world and you recognize your insignificance. When I go out to Rose Spit, I feel as important as a grain of sand. It puts your life in perspective, but you don't feel scared. It makes you feel, "I belong in the scheme of things. In the world of things as they are, I have a place. It's small, but it's here."
MUSSELS TRUDEAU
In the mid 1970s Pierre and Maggie Trudeau came to Haida Gwaii for a holiday. David Phillips organized their visit; he fixed up an old homestead farmhouse for them to stay in, leaving a copy of my slim volume, The Impstone, on a table beside their bed, along with the journals he'd written during his respites at Riverview mental hospital.
David cooked for the Trudeaus and I had wondered if this recipe for mussels, gathered on their visit to Lepas Bay on the northwest coast of Graham Island, was his recipe, though I found it reproduced by Jenny Nelson in the G. M. Dawson High School's A Cookbook with a Difference. No book, and certainly no cookbook, is written by one person alone: Jenny, when asked about the origin of the recipe, passed on a list of people who could have been responsible for the dish. She believes it originated in a magazine called All Alone Stone, and credits Huckleberry (a.k.a. Thom Henley, who started the wilderness-heritage cultural Rediscovery Programme on Haida Gwaii in 1978). I have decided to credit Jenny.
Serves 4
- ½ cup (120 mL) mustard
- ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, melted
- 2 Tbsp (30 mL) lemon juice
- Half a bucket full of bladderwrack (fresh, gathered from the rocks at low tide)
- 2 lb (1 kg) mussels, or however many you can pick
What you do
1. Mix mustard, butter and lemon juice and heat until the butter has melted. Set aside.
2. Make a bed of bladderwrack in a large pot or Dutch oven.
3. Fill your pot with mussels and cover with more seaweed. "Bladderwrack makes the steam and it's good eatin'!" Jenny says, in the G. M. Dawson cookbook.
4. Serve the mussels HOT with the mustard sauce.
5. Mussels, of course, are also delicious steamed in white wine with a little garlic sautéed in butter first, and finished with a bit of cream.