August/september 2010 issue no. 24 www.eatdrink.ca 37 Cookbooks

The Boreal Gourmet

Adventures in Northern Cooking

by Michele Genest Review and Recipe Selections by Jennifer Gagel Who would have guessed that the Yukon is Canada's slowfood mecca? This is an area where everyone forages, pickles, hunts, preserves and loves to eat the indigenous and unique ingredients. It's a place that boasts a Slow Food chapter since the '70s. And it's a cuisine that Michele Genest is perfectly suited to take us on a culinary tour of via her book, The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking (Harbour Publishing Co., 2010, $26.95) Genest was practically trained since birth to appreciate great food - her mother was a gourmet cook who served lamb chops in a wine reduction as a matter of course. As a teen, Genest's first jobs were mainly in restaurants. Then she spent some formative years on a Greek island, where cooking from the land was commonplace and often the only source of entertainment. Upon returning to her home and native land, she wrote on food and dining, and later became dining editor for enRoute magazine. Then, just as it happened for many other transplanted Northerners, she went to visit in the Yukon and never looked back. As she discovered, Yukoners "were mad hunters, fishers and foragers, supplementing a store-bought diet with the indigenous food First Nations people have subsisted on for thousands of years. Here was the approach I had first encountered in Greece, transposed to a northern landscape. I fell in, with enthusiasm." She sought out the unique ingredients, such as spruce tips and wild rose petals, and blended them creatively with a lifetime of cultural influences. The result is a northernsouthern fusion, which is about "moose cooked with spinach, dried fruit, coriander and cinnamon..., roasted spruce grouse with a sour cream and Madeira sauce..., caribou, ginger, Portobello mushrooms and red pepper sautéed in butter and finished with red wine, or salmon steaks marinated in soya sauce, maple syrup, garlic and sesame oil." From the strong, acquired taste of highbush cranberries (which stand up perfectly to all sorts of game), to the delicate, almost citrus note of young spruce tips, she takes the reader on a traveling adventure that traipses through flavours as varied as the landscape and the people who contributed ideas and recipes. Tales of gathering the ingredients along with colourful, anecdotal stories give us insight

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