If Canada must have a national dish, wild salmon it is

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If we must have a national dish in Canada - and people ask all the time, in all the talking we do about food - we could do worse than wild salmon. Fresh-caught pickerel, cooked in the woods, is a contender; bison should be runner-up, given what a perfect meat it is and how the woolly chested weirdos restore the natural prairie simply by grazing on it (did you know that?). But salmon has the edge.

This is the only conclusion your correspondent is willing to park himself in front of, after a summer (81 days, precisely) of driving and eating his way across the country. It's a big country, after all.

There are a lot of also-rans: Did I mention Newfoundland halibut? Sausage in Manitoba? Ground-cherry jam? The Asian spare ribs at Jade in Richmond, B.C., or the samosas (three for $2) at Doaba Sweets in the Charolais mall in Brampton, Ont.? Do you have any idea how many cuisines there are in this country?

I'm more than willing to nominate heartburn as the national ailment. But as for a national dish, wild salmon is as far as I'm willing to go.

And if I can actually climb out of the car on my own any longer, I'll tell you why: We're not afraid of it. Aboriginal cooks have been preparing salmon for a millennium, and they've taught the rest of us a thing or two. I devoured the Atlantic model, caught in New Brunswick and cold-smoked by Fumoir St-Antoine in the Charlevoix region of Quebec. I ate the sweeter, paler, wild Pacific version - grilled, smoked, jerked, candied, tandooried, baked, even deep-fried - up and down the B.C. coast and almost everywhere in between.

I wasn't even that fond of salmon when I set out. But this is the strange thing: I remember each one I ate driving across the country, in detail. I thought I'd tell you about a few of them, to figure out why.

SALMON FOR A STRANGER

The sockeye salmon I ate in Metchosin, at the tip of Vancouver Island, at the outset of what may be the sockeye run of a century, had been caught in the Juan de Fuca Strait by Pete Pauwels, a B.C. conservation officer. Pete's mother, Germaine, his wife, Charlene, and his sister, Sue, had invited me to dinner, something people did a lot. Apparently, when food is involved, it's okay to invite a complete stranger into your house.

Germaine Pauwels's house was a small, precise one on a rocky hill, with a view of the strait across green sheep pastures. Germaine had lived there for 48 years, most of them with her late husband, Bob, a teacher, raising two kids. Before that, she was a copywriter in Winnipeg.

She remembers her mother making pierogies, with dough drying in sheets on all the bedspreads in the house. Her mother had been slightly ashamed of being Ukrainian, which in Winnipeg in those days put you behind the English and the French, but ahead of the Jews: That made her feel bad both ways.

The meal Germaine, Charlene and Sue made was ready when I got there, just after 7 in the evening. Germaine had wanted to stuff the salmon, but the girls said no, you couldn't do that to sockeye. Sockeye is the pinkest Pacific salmon (I didn't know that), the one British Columbians prize most for its sweet taste (ditto). Sockeye eat plankton and shrimp, whereas other salmon prefer herring and anchovies.

We sat out on the patio in the Pacific gloaming while the salmon rested. We drank B.C. wine and ate homemade puff-pastry tarts of leeks, zucchini, feta, thyme and "tons of butter," alongside plates of tiny bright-red-and-yellow tomatoes with bocconcini and a homemade vinaigrette.

The herbs in the vinaigrette and most of the vegetables came from the Comox Valley up the island, where Sue and her husband, Ron Brown, live. A lot of people now refer to Comox as "the new Provence."

It sounds a little grand, but the beets and the beans tasted like royalty, like they had a long and noble family tree. Dinner ended with blackberry pie Germaine had made with her lard crust, and some sublime homemade oat cakes, which I adore, though they didn't know that.

It was not the fanciest meal I've ever had, but it might have been the kindest. Every time I think of the Pauwels family's generosity, of the astonishing attention and time and effort they bestowed on a meal for a person they had never met, I have to stand still for a bit. They could proffer this beneficence because there was an offering involved - theirs of a meal, mine of close attention.

In that exchange lay an excuse to be friendly. For some reason, we feel we need an excuse. Salmon is handy that way.

Ian Brown eats Canada

BLUEBERRY PIE? YEP

I discovered that in a lot of towns and cities in Canada, you can walk out of a restaurant and instantly smell pine or cedar in the air, which seems to act as a natural palate cleanser. You can have or hear the following conversation just about everywhere as well:

"Dessert?"

"I guess I will."

"Blueberry pie?"

"Yep."

"Warmed up?"

"Yep."

"Ice cream?"

"Yep."

I don't know how many times I had that conversation. I do know how it ends - with 20 pounds sitting up on top of your hips like a couple of no-good, layabout cousins. Twenty pounds is also the answer to the second-most-common question people ask someone who has gorged his way across the land.

If a good, memorable meal - a careful, contemplated meal - is an offering, an ante into the stakes of a conversation, it is also a bill of lading, proof of the place it came from. It doesn't have to be fancy. It merely must possess what Norman Hardie, the Prince Edward County winemaker, once described to me as "potential."

At the farmers' market in Vernon, in the Okanagan Valley, in the parking lot of the town arena, I bought a bag of red and yellow plums. I ate them all morning through Kelowna, where I tasted a brilliantly reinvented bannock at the Kekuli Café, and all afternoon through Penticton and the Naramata Bench, where I bought a bottle of JoieFarm rosé in the general store.

I still had half a bag of plums left when I hit the Crow's Nest highway that runs along the Similkameen River from Penticton to Vancouver. The valley there is narrow and lined with yellow ranches, pink cliffs and steeply treed green mountains: It opens up unexpectedly, and I suddenly found myself on one of the most beautiful roads I have ever driven. I couldn't stop gasping.

I was so excited, I picked up hitchhikers, two college kids from Quebec who had spent the entire summer picking cherries for less than minimum wage. They had been waiting six hours for a ride, and two months for a city adventure.

We had finished the plums by the time we arrived in Vancouver, 3.5 hours later, but we were still talking about how they hoped to make a living doing something they loved, and how fortunate but rare that circumstance is. Now, the fresh, sour juice of the plums and the grave, crooked light of the valley and the hopefulness of the French-Canadian cherry-pickers are linked in my mind. They were a lucky meal, those plums.

IN AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

Foodies who heard about my plan to eat my way across the country asked if I had been to this or that restaurant, and most of the time I hadn't. A lot of them seemed disappointed in me. There were all kinds of places I never had time to get to - anywhere in the North; Joe Beef in Montreal; Henry's Fish Restaurant in Parry Sound, Ont.; the Fleur de Sel in Lunenburg, N.S.; and Fogo Island off Newfoundland for cod-trap cod, to name a few.

But "it's very isolating to eat in restaurants all the time," as a woman named Lillooet Fox said to me one evening in Vancouver. We were at NFA (for No Fixed Address), one of the roving secret at-home restaurants that are popular these days in Vancouver. In this case, the restaurant was the apartment of the chef, whose name was Steve. I'm not allowed to tell you his last name. I am allowed to tell you he's dating Sophie Lui, the Global TV anchor in Vancouver - she was there too.

The meal was incredibly sophisticated: At one point, I was dipping a scallop in almond gazpacho; at another, someone said, "The duck is fabulous," and I wasn't even aware we had eaten duck.

But the food was secondary, eddying as it did around the conversation, which was mainly about the swelling entrepreneurial food culture more and more Vancouverites inhabit.

Ms. Fox gave cooking lessons, and wanted to start a reality show about teaching men to cook, at least when she wasn't singing backup in a blues band. Mark Busse, a branding expert, had founded foodist.ca, a thoughtful and well-written food blog. Ann Kirsebom, a chef and caterer, was developing a line of gourmet sauces.

She in turn had invited a friend, a Chinese-Canadian woman who was worried that Canadian high-school life was erasing any trace of her son's Asian heritage. So she enrolled him in a Chinese-language high school in Vancouver.

"Why would I want to go to a Chinese school?" the boy said to his mother when she informed him of her plan.

"Because you're Chinese," she said.

"What?" he shouted. "You never told me I was Chinese!"

You could say the same about Canadian food. We have a cuisine - its local staples include maple syrup, salmon, pickerel, trout, apples, honey, game, fish, bread, berries, corn and wine - but until recently we never thought to call it Canadian.

IN VINATARTA, VERITAS

Instead of going to a restaurant in Gimli, Man., I was invited to Senator Janis Johnson's house for supper. She was a friend of a friend. Ms. Johnson was once married to Frank Moores, the letter-writing premier of Newfoundland; she helped to mastermind Brian Mulroney's first landslide as prime minister.

She is tall, charming, attractive, amusing, massively accomplished, and from a legendary Manitoba family - her father helped to put together Canada's national health-care system - so it was a surprise to find her in an apron in the kitchen, happily frying four pounds of pale-pink pickerel fillets she had purchased that afternoon. On the counter was a perfect vinatarta, the famous Icelandic cake layered with prune and cardamom filling and coated in almond icing, baked by the senator's aunt, Viola.

The senator and her family are Icelandic Canadians. It was like having dinner with a grove of very tall, handsome trees. We spent most of the meal talking about the history of the Prairies, and their Icelandic forefathers. More than 20,000 of them emigrated to the frozen stretch of North America between Manitoba and Minnesota beginning in the 1860s, after a volcano once again rendered Iceland unlivable. There, they became famously hard-working farming and fishing Canadians who drank endless cups of coffee and slightly fewer glasses of spirits.

There was a three-inch-thick history of Icelanders in Manitoba sitting on a nearby sideboard, just in case anyone disputed the importance of Iceland in Canadian history. No one did. Did you know Icelandic Manitobans made up Canada's first gold-medal-winning Olympic hockey team? Did you know there are special pans for making vinatarta?

"They are fantastic," the senator said as she hauled her fetchingly shiny set out of a kitchen cupboard. "We got them in Iceland."

Is Manitoba pickerel and vinatarta an Icelandic dish, or a Canadian one? Does it matter? It was unspeakably delicious, in any event, and for a small consideration - I'm not talking Airbus money here, just a modest sum - I would be willing to nominate Aunt Viola's vinatarta as Canada's national dessert.

"I think there is a Canadian cuisine," Ms. Johnson said. "It's just never discussed."

ONE NATION UNDER SODIUM

On Canada Day, in a park in Saskatoon, I met a man named Sean Garibay, newly arrived from the Philippines. A former journalist, he had followed his wife, a nurse, to Saskatoon and a better life for their children. Now, he was working as a housekeeper. We were sitting at a picnic table under a tent to avoid a morning sun shower.

"I'm not sure there is Canadian food," he said when I asked if he had discovered such a thing. "I've had Canadian bacon - that's ham. I've had pierogies, pancakes, but we have those things in our countries." He paused, and thought, and then his face lit up. He had it: "Canadian food," he said, "has less salt."

"Canadian cuisine is coming along, isn't it?" Scott Pohorelic said when I asked him the same question, a week later, in Calgary. That was when Mr. Pohorelic was still the executive chef at Calgary's River Café. Two weeks later, he joined a national trend and retired - in his 40s - to become an instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, where he hopes to shape Alberta into a leader in the local-food movement.

There's a lot of ambition in the food world these days, and more and more of it is devoted to something other than frantic 80-hour weeks in a restaurant.

"Canadian cuisine is being invented, isn't it?," he continued. "In a way, it's anything goes."

Then he disappeared into the kitchen and prepared me a starter: freshly butchered Alberta-rabbit tenderloin on a cherry compote, garnished with edible flowers. A single, tiny rabbit kidney adorned the side of the plate. I had never eaten anything like that before.

DEEPER INTO PLEASURE

Here is what I think of most often when I imagine a Canadian meal: lunch with Bill and Rosemary Terry on the patio of their seaside home in Sechelt, a seaplane's hop up the coast from Vancouver. I didn't know them, either, but they had invited me to stay for a few days. All these stories are stories of kindness.

They had met at the CBC, where he had been second-in-command of CBC Radio, and where she was a crack producer. They fell in love, divorced their spouses, melded their families, started over, the usual. Unusually, it worked. Nowadays, Mr. Terry claims to be retired, but he recently published a book about his specialty, the Himalayan blue poppy - the notoriously difficult holy grail of the serious gardener, but which Mr. Terry grows the way other men grow ear hair.

I remember sitting outside in the sun and watching the Pacific Ocean flutter onto the beach, 40 metres from their house. Ms. Terry - a brilliant cook, a voracious reader, a secret food writer - brought out lunch on a pretty tray.

There were small hand-peeled B.C. shrimp, hot smoked salmon, smoked mackerel, maple-cured salmon candy, crème fraîche mixed with dill and horseradish, and on another platter three cheeses: a round of David Woods's goat cheese from Saltspring Island, a brie from Natural Pastures in Courtenay, B.C., and a wheel of Le Migneron from Quebec.

There was mustard and Rosemary's own sourdough bread, baked from a starter culture she has fed and maintained for 15 years. They have to find it a home whenever they go on holiday. Rosemary's starter is more trouble than Carlo, their poodle.

We sat in the sun by the sea and ate some of the finest Canadian versions of simple, ancient foods (fish, cheese, bread, wine) and talked about whatever came to mind. Something always did. They were the kind of people who cared as deeply about reading and conversation as they did about food.

The common ground between the three is pleasure, and a belief that pleasure can be as interesting, as revealing and as profound as anything else, even its opposite. How much does pleasure matter? Was I simply trying to justify my love of it by pompously calling it a national cuisine?

I thought about those questions every time I sat down to eat consciously and deliberately, with zest or with attention. It will always be cheaper to eat at McDonald's, to consume the standardized products of the industrialized food machine, and sometimes you have to. But it is never as satisfying or as interesting as eating more personally. These days, I discovered, there is no place in Canada you can't at least try. "Flavours of place" was how Scott Pohorelic defined Canadian cuisine. I just wish the places were closer together in this huge thing we call a country. That way, we could visit, eat and talk more often.

Editor's note: Mark Busse founded foodist.ca. Incorrect information originally appeared in this article.

Ian Brown is a feature writer and columnist for The Globe and Mail.

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