Fresh and Local: Straight from Canadian Farms to Your Table.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

This is one of many current cookbooks recommending that we source the food we consume only, or for the most part, from the seasonal offerings produced by growers resident in the regions we inhabit. The author owns Chives, a Halifax restaurant, whose tables are supplied by some 100 producers in the surrounding area. One assumes that Craig Flinn intends his recipes to inspire as much as to be replicated, since the seafood he employs with such imagination in so many of his recipes is not indigenous to the regions occupied by most Canadians. Fiddleheads, though associated with the Maritime provinces, do grow elsewhere, and his Fiddlehead Soup with Smoked-Gouda Cheese Soufflés may be replicated, perhaps with a different, locally made smoked cheese. In the salad department he approves the use of locally grown greenhouse greens, without engaging us in the tendentious process of measuring their “carbon footprint” against that of imported lettuces. Dietary puritans can, of course, plant their front yards to cabbages, and devote space in their backyards to root cellars (while crossing themselves before a vintage copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue prominently displayed in the domestic grotto). Quebec Foie Gras Smeared on a Cheddar Chive Biscuit with Balsamic Glazed Plums makes an impressive appetizer, but unless one lives in Edmunston, N.B., and the engorged liver comes from a Quebec duck in Riviere du Loup, one is scarcely eating locally.

Much of the aspirational heavy breathing apparent in the title and the text may be forgiven, as may the windy, precious, and promotional descriptions of the recipes on offer (though chefs need to rediscover the merits of humility). The recipes do have culinary merit. Most of them are imaginative in their combination of ingredients, but still manageable in the home kitchen. Sensible people will buy his chosen ingredients from the best suppliers on the basis of value (broadly understood) for money, regardless of origin. They are sufficiently experienced to have met growers at farmers markets who didn’t know one potato from another, and many others who plant only the commercial varieties of vegetables that their industrial counterparts harvest by the ton. Furthermore, they have often eaten green beans in February, grown in Honduras, that had far better flavour and texture than those presented at the height of the local season down at Saturday’s market.