The Three Fs - #3 Food

It is not ironic that one of Newfoundland's chicken fast food chains is called Mary Browns

That is the prevailing colour of food here - brown.

that's a lot of brown food

First among equals is cod. Fishing for cod is an indelible part of Newfoundland's history as is eating cod. You would think that the overfishing and collapse of cod stocks a few decades ago would lead to less cod. Well, cod may not be back in a big commercial way, but it is still the vast part of the culinary landscape. Every menu has cod, sometimes in multiple dishes. Sometimes not a lot else, so we ate a lot of cod.

We had cod eleven ways - deep fried, baked, pan fried, au gratin, in chowder, in pie, cod bites, cod tongues, cod burger, cod cakes, and fish and brewis. The twelfth way - cod cheeks - eluded us. A reason to return, perhaps?

Everyplace said they had the best fish and chips, famous fish and chips, world-acclaimed fish and chips. 'We'll be the judge of that' we said. Hands down the best fish and chips (in our opinion) in the entire province was in a small immaculate diner in tiny St. Bride's called Da Bird's Eye, on the way to Cape St. Mary's Ecological Reserve where we had to wait a bit because the owner's husband had just brought the cod in from the boat. That's not what made it the best (all the cod we ate everywhere was fresh). What made it the best was a light batter and perfectly cooked - not heavy, not fatty - beautiful. 

Beyond cod, we have sampled moose, lobster, crab, oysters, scallops, squid, atlantic salmon, perch, sole, trout, shrimp, prawns, mussels, and are now hankering for more of everything as long as it is not deep fried. We are getting to our saturation point of deep fried.

snow crab AND lobster in one meal!

We had classic Newfoundland fare such as seal flipper pie, jiggs dinner, and the aforementioned fish and brewis topped with scruncheons. Seal flipper pie is what it sounds like, although we had a gourmet version at the Happy Adventure Inn, which was actually very good. Jiggs dinner is a big plate full of salt beef, boiled potatoes, carrots, turnip, cabbage, and pease pudding. 

Fish and brewis is salt cod, soaked overnight, hard tack bread, also soaked overnight, cooked together and topped with fatback that has been fried. Both fatback and drippings (scruncheons) are poured on top the the cod and bread dish. Not to be ordered by anyone on a low salt or low fat diet.

fish and brewis (top left)
with cod cake, bread and baked beans

One day Martin ordered "fin and feather" because he liked the sound of it. It which turned out to be deep fried cod and a tiny deep fried wing of chicken. Plus potato of course.

Soups are excellent - they are more like stews than soups, but all were truly excellent. Of course our go-to were the seafood chowders. So good!

There is no large-scale agriculture here, so people have little plots for growing vegetables, sometimes miles away from their homes, wherever they can scratch out a level 5 metre by 5 metre plot and cultivate decent soil. Based on everything we have seen the vegetables are primarily root: potatoes, carrots, turnips predominate. Onions, but no garlic. Green is not a colour found on Newfoundlander's plates.

Scurvy was a real problem in the old days, until it was discovered that turnips are a good source of vitamin C and can be grown here quite easily. We were never fans of turnips, but they are really delicious here. 

For seasoning, salt is your friend. Or not. Or you could slather your food in gravy (which can be bought in a 1.36 litre can), or ketchup, or vinegar - malt or white. 

note the size of this can!

Getting a salad is like finding gold, but it won't be much more than iceberg lettuce and grated carrot.  Jenny had one good salad, at the Rooms Museum in St. John's, that was such an anomaly she took a photo of it. 

salad! (with cod cakes, sigh, again)

Oddly enough, coleslaw (cabbage and carrot) is generally excellent and can be found anywhere that fish and chips is served, which is everywhere. Only a tiny serving is provided, but it is good.

Pease pudding and baked beans are common. Adding more brown food to your brown food seems to be a thing.

Dessert is predictable - cheesecake. Newfoundlanders love their cheesecakes, perhaps because there is so little dairy (we have seen only 1 cow in this whole trip thus far, 1 goat, one field of sheep and 3 chickens). The cheesecake is almost always topped with one of the three local berries (partridge, blue, bakeapple) and is very good.

cheesecake with bakeapple sauce

Soft scoop ice cream is popular too, no doubt because it has no dairy and the flavours come from bottles of syrup. It never got really warm enough for us to contemplate ice cream in any form, and most of the places were still closed, so we will have to reserve judgement. 

Blueberries taste better here than at home, being smaller, wild, and a bit like a blueberry crossed with a blackcurrant. We have had the local partridge berries and bakeapples (cloudberries) in multiple forms (jam, tart, pie, crisp, sauce). Rhubarb can be grown here and is very popular. We are seeing it mixed with strawberries in jam and crumbles.

We discovered an excellent local chocolate manufacturer and loaded up the car for the journey. There are four branches in the provinces, and we found three of them. Thank you Aunt Sarah. 

The Newfoundland Chocolate Company was likewise excellent, although their specialty is a single bar, wrapped with Newfoundlandish sayings, backed by the old flag of independence (more on that in another post)

We were hoping to eat capelin (often also spelled caplin, but pronounced "cayplin"), a member of the smelt family, that runs ashore for a few frenzied weeks in June usually. People can scoop them up on the beach in buckets, as they spawn. There are less of them now, due to overfishing it seems, and they are later and later, probably due to climate change. it was only in the last few days that we saw they had come in, as we watched gannets plunging into the the ocean to grab them, and our sole humpback whale sighting was at the same beach. They are amazing little fish, an engine of Newfoundland's economy, feeding birds, whales and humans alike and excellent bait, but the only one we saw in person was this little guy, lying in the road. We assume a bird had dropped him. No doubt a local cat will enjoy the free snack.

We drank a lot of beer, always local craft offerings, of which there are many. We probably had more beer over our five weeks than in the five years before. Water was sometimes not drinkable, although Martin found Coke or Pepsi everywhere. 

Despite the hiking we have put on pounds due to our diet, and we don't even want to think about our blood pressure readings these days!