The Chez Piggy Cookbook

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Chez Piggy is the most entertaining of restaurants. Located in downtown
Kingston, Ontario, and created in the late 1970s out of an old livery
stable, it boasts a handsome limestone structure and an inner courtyard
that blossoms with flowers and outdoor tables in the summer months. The
food very often, though not invariably, lives up to this delightful
setting. It is eclectic in style, with an emphasis on Mediterranean
cooking, both southern European and north African.

The new cookbook is a greatly enlarged version of its predecessor,
published in 1991: taller, broader, and more than twice as long, it
features color illustrations depicting cooks, servers, and patrons, as
well as many of the dishes that the recipes are designed to produce.
Many of the old recipes have been retained, but much has been added,
including a new section on breadmaking (a tribute, perhaps, to Pan
Chancho, the related bakery founded in 1994).

As for the recipes, there is a good deal of sensitivity about
ingredients, including an appreciation of getting fresh products in
season. The recipes range from doable to formidable. The task of
translating restaurant recipes for home cooks is itself daunting (like
“the miracle of the loaves and fishes in reverse, reducing recipes for
sixty people to six”), and not always easily solved. If a recipe calls
for nine egg yolks, then the home cook will have to be prepared to
accommodate quite a tableful of meringues to use up the whites;
conversely, nine leftover egg yolks will produce a small pail of
mayonnaise. The home kitchen will also have to make room for a battery
of seasonings that, if ground, will go stale if not used fairly fast.
Still, there are a great many appealing and practical recipes in this
collection. The formidable ones are an invitation to go and sample the
restaurant, not to mention Pan Chancho, for its bread.