Canadians at Table. Dorothy Duncan

wore a gold chain around his neck and was responsible for all three meals on his appointed day. He had to hunt and fish in advance to augment the provisions of the ship and the fort, as well as instruct the cook in the preparation of the dishes.

      The ship’s provisions probably included peas, beans, rice, prunes, raisins, dried cod, salted meat, oil, and butter. There were hogs and sheep at the habitation, as well as hens and pigeons, so we can assume there were eggs, as well. The First Nations near the fort were the hunter-gatherer Mi’kmaqs (also spelled Micmacs), who would have been trapping and hunting beaver, otter, moose, bear, and caribou; fishing for smelt, herring, sturgeon, and salmon; and bartering seal oil. Vines, wild onions, wild peas, walnuts (butternuts?), acorns, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, cranberries, and maple sap were also available.[6]

      Lescarbot gives us an account of some of the ingredients and the dishes that were prepared from them: “good dishes of meat as in the cook’s shops that be in La Rue aux Ours [a street in Paris specializing in food]; colice, a hearty broth made from a cock, white sausages made from the flesh and innards of cod with lard and spice, good pastries made of moose and turtle doves.”[7] Could that last dish have been an early Canadian version of the traditional tourtière so well-known and loved in Quebec (and other regions of Canada) today?

      Great ceremony attended the evening meal, as the steward

      did march with his napkin on his shoulder and his staff of office in his hand, with the collar of the order about his neck, which was worth above four crowns, and all of them of the order following of him, bearing every one a dish. The like was also at the bringing in of the fruit, but not with so great a train. And at night after grace was said, he resigned the collar of the order, with a cup of wine to his successor in that charge, and they drank one to another.[8]

      Despite the ravages of scurvy, Port Royal survived and became not only the site of the first successful colony on the mainland, but also the site of Canada’s inaugural gourmands’ club. There were other firsts that were to have an effect on agriculture and food, for it was here at Port Royal that the first grain was grown and a sample sent back to Europe to confirm the richness of the soil. It was to this colony that Louis Hébert, a Paris apothecary, first came. He was known to have a green thumb, and in 1617 he returned to Stadacona to become known as “Canada’s first farmer.”[9] In reality, this assertion was incorrect, for many of the First Nations had been farmers for centuries. Their well-established trade routes up and down the continent had brought the seeds for many crops to Canada. These included maize (corn), beans, squash, pumpkin, tomatoes, potatoes, sunflowers, and numerous others. Their tools and techniques may have been primitive by the standards of the newcomers, but as we have seen, their fields had been supporting their families and communities for generations and provided important items to barter with other tribes and nations.

      The Order of Good Cheer, as imaginatively sketched by C.W. Jeffreys in 1925, attempted to boost morale in Samuel de Champlain’s precarious colony in what is now Nova Scotia. Library and Archives Canada

      When Hébert did return with his wife, Marie, and their family, they became the first true colonists who came to till the soil and establish a home. Marie would have used her memories of medieval cooking traditions and utensils brought from her home in France to preserve and prepare for the table the harvest from the garden and fields and the meats, fish, and game from the river and the forest.

      Champlain had already established a habitation at Stadacona in 1608 and planted a garden in which European plants such as cabbages, beets, radishes, lettuce, and other necessary vegetables and herbs flourished. Quebec, the trading post and struggling colony, was at a turning point when Hébert returned, for Cardinal Richelieu, the king’s chief minister and the most powerful man in France, suddenly became interested in it. The Company of New France, or Company of One Hundred Associates, was formed in 1627, pledging to send out large numbers of colonists and to support them for three years.[10]

      In addition, devoted men and women arrived to found missions, churches, schools, and hospitals. There had been Jesuit missionaries at Port Royal, and in 1615, three Récollet brothers came to Quebec. Soon after they went out as missionaries to the Mi’kmaqs of Acadia, the Abenaki of the Saint John Valley, and to the Hurons. A decade later the Jesuits were invited to share this work. Unfortunately, there were many occasions when the two cultures — the First Nations and the newly arrived clergy — clashed over the concept of right and wrong, life after death, God and worship, superstitions, belief in magic, feasts and ceremonials. It is thanks to the letters, diaries, and writings of the Jesuits and Récollets, and of the sisters of the Ursuline Order who arrived in 1639, that many descriptions of the people, customs, dangers, and problems in seventeenth-century Quebec survived.

      In addition to the spiritual benefits, there were many unexpected financial benefits to the new colony because of the arrival of the clergy. Just one example was the discovery in 1716 by Joseph-François Lafitau, who was serving as a missionary in Sault Saint-Louis (Kahnawake), south of Hochelaga (present-day Montreal), that ginseng was a local plant. He knew this plant had been considered a medical wonder in China for thousands of years, but that it was in short supply where his fellow missionaries also served, and thus its export from Canada to China began. Natives as well as newcomers started to gather the plant and sell it to the French merchants on the Montreal market. From there it was shipped to France, then to Canton, where it was purchased by Chinese merchants. They in turn sold it to doctors and pharmacists in the Empire of China. It took thirty-six weeks for this cumbersome system to move ginseng root bought in Montreal to where it would sell for sixty times its price in Canton.[11]

      Meanwhile, Champlain, fur trader, explorer, geographer, cartographer, administrator, became known as the Father of New France and went on to explore the St. Lawrence Basin and the Great Lakes, the Ottawa River, and the country of the Hurons, often guided by members of the First Nations. He has left us an invaluable record in his journals of the plants, animals, soil, foods, beverages, and medicines that were important to both the First Nations and the newcomers.[12]

      CHAPTER FIVE

      A Chain of Men Stretched Across the Continent

      25 being Christmas, wee made merry remembering our Friends in England having for Liquor Brandy and strong beer and for Food plenty of Partridges and Venson besides what ye shipps provisions afforded.

      THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION OF A CHRISTMAS DINNER in Canada was fortunately recorded by a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, Thomas Gorst, in his journal in 1670. The guests seated at the table in the newly constructed Charles Fort (later called Rupert’s House and still later Fort Rupert) included Hudson’s Bay Company governor Charles Bayley, Médard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers, his brother-in-law, Pierre-Ésprit Radisson, and Captain Zachariah Gillam. The ships Wivenhoe and Prince Rupert were anchored nearby in James Bay.

      The two Frenchmen, Radisson and Groseilliers, had a great deal to celebrate that day. They had both come to New France as young men and had worked and travelled in the St. Lawrence region and beyond as explorers, coureurs de bois, and fur traders among the Huron, Cree, and Sioux nations. They realized the untold wealth in furs to be found in the forests surrounding the “Bay of the North” (Hudson Bay) and lobbied both in the New World and in the Old World for permission to trade in the region. Finally, a few months before, on May 2, 1670, King Charles II of England had granted his cousin, Prince Rupert, a royal charter that gave trading rights to the area known as Rupert’s Land to the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” No one at that time knew the size of the land mass involved (it was actually 40 percent of present-day Canada, plus some territory that is now part of the United States of America), but the coveted “trading rights” were for furs, particularly beaver pelts.

      At that time the demand for prime beaver pelts was at its height, with ready markets in Britain and the rest of Europe. The nobility was demanding fine furs for robes, jackets, capes, and muffs, and gentlemen who could afford a fine felt hat insisted that it be made of the soft downy undercoat of the beaver. As European beavers had been trapped out, it was imperative