http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/world/canada/favorite-thanksgiving-recipes-from-across-canada.html 2016-10-07 22:47:48 Favorite Thanksgiving Recipes From Across Canada Canada’s Thanksgiving, which takes place on the second Monday of October, features turkey, stuffing and televised football — and its own regional dishes. === It’s quieter. It’s earlier. And it’s locally grown. (Sort of.) Canada Some Canadians argue that their Thanksgiving honors the fateful 1578 voyage of the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who was seeking a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Separated from his fleet in a July storm, Frobisher and his crew despaired for their lives, only to be reunited weeks later north of Labrador. They held a service to give thanks, and tucked into the standard fare on 16th-century English ships: salt beef, ship biscuits and peas, according to Dorothy Duncan, Nova Scotia appears to have taken the idea of a harvest festival from the pre-revolutionary American Colonies during the 1750s. Loyalists who went north after the American Revolution also brought the celebration with them. In 1859, the colony of Canada proclaimed its first day of thanksgiving. Parliament passed legislation in 1957 making Thanksgiving Day an annual holiday, celebrated on the second Monday of October. Below are examples of dishes from each of Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories. For Thanksgiving recipes from across the United States, Autumn brings glorious sunny days and bursts of rain to British Columbia, setting off an eruption of mushrooms along the coast: pine or matsutake, lobster, porcini, cauliflower mushrooms and delicate golden fungi known as hen of the woods. In Vancouver, a city known for its farmers’ markets, Andrea Carlson, the chef and owner of Burdock & Co., takes members of her staff on mushroom-foraging parties for Thanksgiving weekend. Over the last few decades, the prairies of Saskatchewan have undergone a major agricultural transformation. Once known primarily for wheat and canola crops, Canada now grows 65 percent of the world’s lentils, mainly in Saskatchewan, and helps to satisfy India’s insatiable demand. CJ Katz, author of the cookbook “Taste: Seasonal Dishes from a Prairie Table” and the host of “Wheatland Cafe,” a Saskatchewan cooking show, uses lentils in soups and veggie burgers and ground for flour in a gluten-free chocolate cake. Her This year is the 125th anniversary of the first Ukrainian immigration to Canada. In the prairie province of Alberta, one of Canada’s breadbaskets, more than 345,000 people can trace their roots to Ukraine. Their ancestors brought the Ukrainian language, culture and, of course, cuisine to Canada. Julie Van Rosendaal, a cookbook author based in Calgary, married into a Ukrainian family. She learned to make pirogi from a friend whose grandmother churned out heaps of them for church suppers and fund-raisers. Pirogi are traditionally stuffed with mashed potatoes, cheese or caramelized onions. After the main Thanksgiving meal, Ms. Van Rosendaal enjoys rounding up her guests to make Not long after the cookbook writer Michele Genest first arrived in the Yukon Territory from downtown Toronto 22 years ago, she discovered a fall ritual that became a favorite of indigenous peoples as well as relative newcomers in this cold land of mountains and forests: foraging for Known as lingonberries in Sweden and as partridgeberries in Newfoundland, lowbush cranberries have been foraged by indigenous peoples in the Yukon for thousands of years, as well as by European explorers and Gold Rush stampeders who learned that wild berries kept scurvy at bay. Today, many residents of the Yukon’s capital, Whitehorse, use the berry in sauces, chutney and desserts for Thanksgiving. Ms. Genest, author of “The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking,” drizzles the results of Vast forests surround Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, which lies about 250 miles from the Arctic Circle. Many residents begin to tap birch sap in the spring, when the winter snows melt and the gushing liquid is clear and sweet. Traditionally consumed as a refreshing tonic or boiled over an open fire by the indigenous Dene people, the syrup, locals say, is darker and stronger than that of maple, perfect as a meat glaze or drizzled over ice cream. Richard McIntosh, a Yellowknife municipal employee, and his partner, Christine Wenman, made The chef Gordon Bailey moved back to his hometown, Winnipeg, last year after spending nearly two decades on Prince Edward Island, where he was known for one of Canada’s top restaurants. Since returning, he has been cooking up multicourse meals at a series of pop-up dinners celebrating the history and mythology of Canada, including a feast inspired by the country’s 20th-century “ There are a number of contenders for the title of all-Canadian baked good, and the multicolored “Everyone who grew up in Ontario, as I did, takes butter tarts for granted,” wrote The dessert has a passionate following. There’s an While they certainly contain butter, butter tarts are closer to a pecan pie without the nuts. What distinguishes them from desserts like the sugar pie of Quebec are the size and the addition, traditionally, of raisins or currants to the filling. The inside of the tart is either runny, making for messy eating, or firm, depending on the baker’s preference. In her As anyone who has heard “ At most homes in Canada during Thanksgiving, potatoes end up mashed or scalloped. But Michael Smith, who owns The Inn at Bay Fortune on the island, and who has written cookbooks and hosted television cooking shows, For many in Newfoundland, Thanksgiving is the day for the seafaring province’s traditional Zita Cobb, a philanthropist from Fogo Island, proposes starting the day with a traditional Newfoundland fisherman’s breakfast — a thick slice of bread, seasonal partridgeberry preserves and flakes of salt cod — but Of all the provinces, Quebec is the one where Thanksgiving is celebrated the least, and where the holiday is known as L’Action de grâce to the French-speaking majority. The big annual feast among Francophones in the province is The French-speaking portions of New Brunswick share many recipes with Quebec. But the province is also one of Canada’s centers for cranberries. Many of the berries end up, of course, as a sweet sauce to accompany turkey. But By the 19th century, trade patterns between Nova Scotia, the Caribbean and Britain made molasses a staple of cooking in the Canadian province. Nova Scotia’s provincial archive has gone through traditional recipes, converted them to modern measurements and tested them to make sure they work with contemporary ingredients. They include a recipe for Even if cold weather is moving in quickly, Thanksgiving is still celebrated in Nunavut. The astoundingly high cost of bringing in food from southern Canada by air, or by barge in the summer, is a major economic and health issue in the north. As a result, the Inuit, the indigenous people of the north, rely as much as possible on what they call “country food,” the products of fishing and hunting. The Inuit Cultural Online Resource, a site intended primarily for schoolchildren, has recipes for