100 Percent Cowichan
In "Canada's Provence," the five major food groups are fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic
Westworld B.C. Summer 2008
Sighs of contentment rise and fall in steady waves as one score and ten fortunate souls tuck into the fruits of the Cowichan Valley. A collection of leading chefs from this rapidly emerging culinary region have pooled their talents to raise funds for Providence Farm, a historic 400-acre spread in the Vancouver Island countryside east of Duncan. For a century the farm was run as a boarding school by the Sisters of St. Ann. Today it serves as a therapeutic retreat for individuals with physical and mental disabilities. A central part of community life focuses on horticultural therapy, and the result of willing hands sunk deep into healing soil is the organic produce sold at the Duncan Farmer’s Market and in Providence’s on-site farm store. In fact, the crisp heap of greens that follows the appetizer platters of Denman Island oysters was plucked from the ground minutes earlier. As one wag at our convivial table puts it, the salad is a classic example of the 100-meter diet.
Master of Ceremonies Bill Jones, the chef and cookbook author, interrupts the luncheon early on to raise a toast to the farm’s worthy activities and applaud the largesse of the paying customers. He then turns his attention to the half dozen chefs in their starched white uniforms arrayed beside him. Brad Boisvert of Amusé Bistro in Cobble Hill takes a bow for the rabbit terrine now being served. The roasted butternut squash soup in the on-deck circle is courtesy of Matt Horn, chef at Cowichan Bay landmark The Masthead. Fatima Da Silva from Bistro 161 in Duncan smiles briefly at the mention of her name, then vanishes back into the kitchen to continue preparing her contribution – seared duck breast with blackberry demi glaze. Welcome, in other words, to a definitive high-end slow-food Cowichan feast. All the ingredients are locally harvested from land and sea. And all are paired with wines from such fine valley vineyards as Averill Creek and Blue Grouse. Glasses are clinked and laughter bubbles up freely, but everyone’s attention is squarely on the white china plates in front of them.
In the burgeoning world of culinary and agritourism, the Cowichan – located between Victoria and Nanaimo in the fertile agricultural lands on either side of the Trans-Canada – is an upstart newcomer coming on like gangbusters. While retaining its blue-collar, dirt-under-fingernail roots, the area has undergone a shift in the last 20 years as the forestry and fishing industries flounder and a new wave of farmers, restaurateurs, vintners and foodies of all sorts begin reinventing what has traditionally been a pitstop for fast food and gasoline. A generation of daytrippers weaned on The Food Channel and equipped with discriminating palettes are detouring off the highway to track down fresh-from-the-field veggies, artisan baked goods, free-range meats and top-notch wine and cider in such pocket-sized communities as Cobble Hill, Cowichan Bay, Chemainus and Glenora.
“Bring your own shopping bags and an empty car trunk,” advises Kathy McAree, who organized B.C.’s first culinary tourism conference early this year and has been a driving force in marketing food and wine locally. Her Victoria-based company Travel With Taste offers behind-the-scene epicurean tours of the Cowichan. “I can’t offer any hard statistics other than to say we’re all busy and getting more so. People in B.C. are beginning to realize how lucky they are. Rather than travelling to France or Italy, they’ve got some amazing food scenes right in their own backyard.”
Fresh farmgate eggs and seasonal produce are available around many Cowichan corners, if not quite every one just yet. In the north of the valley near Ladysmith, herb-laced jellies can be purchased at Hazelwood Herb Farm and berry laiden marmalade at Yellow Point Cranberries. At the Victoria end of the Cowichan, the tasting bar at Merridale Cider is routinely jammed with tipplers and antibiotic-free turkey is on the takeaway menu from Mill Bay’s Stonefield Farm. The hub of the region is Duncan, and there’s nowhere better to take the region’s pulse than at the town’s award-winning farmer’s market, fractured by petty politics but thriving nonetheless on Saturday mornings in two locations – one in Duncan’s revitalized downtown core, the other up the highway at the Forestry Discovery Museum.
Certainly the Cowichan isn’t the only foodcentric region in B.C., not with emerging slow-food scenes in Pemberton, Vanderhoof, Nelson, the Gulf Islands and other pockets of Van Isle (notably the Comox Valley and Saanich Peninsula). But this fertile green valley, protected by a horseshoe of mountains from the furious weather that batters the far west coast, is both easily accessible to the province’s largest population centres and unique in its concentration of producers, chefs and culinary visionaries. “The Cowichan has the most disproportionate number of food-aware people as anywhere in Canada,” states Heidi Noble, one of the new-breed cooks and vintners making an international name for herself in the southern Okanagan. “We’ve got some amazing gems out here, but everyone’s spread out across the great divide between Osoyoos and the Shushwap. By comparison, the Cowichan is incredibly compact. It’s a great place to vacation if you want to sample amazing food and wine right from the source without piling on the mileage.”
Wineries have been a key part of the Cowichan’s character since Zanatta bottled its first harvests in 1990. And with ten vineyards now in production, the valley has been dubbed “the new Napa” by excitable tourism reps and headline writers – just like the Okanagan, Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, Quebec’s Eastern Townships and practically every other emergent grape-growing region north of California. Yet the Cowichan stands alone as “Canada’s Provence,” a widely quoted epithet coined by the late James Barber, the beloved food writer and ebullient host of television’s The Urban Peasant who passed away last December at his local farm with a pot of chicken stock bubbling on the stove. Like chefs Mara Jernigan and Bill Jones before him and writer/CBC broadcaster Don Genova shortly after, Barber was part of an influx of influential food mavens drawn to the Cowichan by its charm, upside potential and the fact that a small farm holding could be purchased for not much more than a two-bedroom Vancouver condo. Shortly after planting his first garlic bulbs in 2001, Barber made his pronouncement in a newspaper column and its stuck as the area grapples for a marketable identity.
“It’s the only region in Canada with what the meteorologists call a ‘maritime Mediterranean climate,” explains Jones, a French-trained gourmet chef with a quick wit who leads cooking workshops at his own Deerholme Farm. Like the fabled southeast region of France, the Cowichan enjoys the dry summers and mild, wet winters that promote a year-round growing season. Cowichan itself is a coast salish word meaning “the warm land” or “land warmed by the sun.” Lavender, sage, rosemary and basil winter nicely here, notes Jones, just like Provence.
Not everyone is fond of the comparison. Jernigan, a pioneer in the west coast slow-food movement and a key figure in Cowichan’s rise since her arrival here in 1992, feels it creates unduly high expectations. “I don’t think we need to be imitative,” she says from her kitchen at Engler Farm, where she teaches her “field to table” cooking philosophy (read: fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic) during popular culinary boot camps that range from a few hours to five days. “Besides,” Jernigan adds with a laugh, “I haven’t noticed any olive trees around here lately.” Sinclair Philip, a champion of culinary tourism locally and co-owner of the internationally celebrated Sooke Harbour House hotel, doesn’t like playing the comparison game either. “We live in a beautiful part of the world with its own character and charm. We don’t have the history or culture of Provence, but then again we’re not overrun with tourists either. We need to develop our own reputation and personality. Every new farmgate and restaurant is testament to the fact that it’s happening.”
*****
Postcard-perfect Cowichan Bay is a good starting point for the valley both historically and in terms of what rates by my rather proletarian, non-foodie standards as superior comfort food – chewy ciabatta, otherworldly ginger cookies, cheese so runny that it “gallops” (again citing the words of James Barber) and real-deal homemade ice cream. A rainbow arches above wind-lashed waves as the cheesemaking Abbotts hold court in their waterfront lunch spot renowned for its homemade soup and rich assortment of creamy, blue-veined cheeses. “Not long ago this town was in major decline,” says Patty Abbott, a former banker and landscaper who was pulled irresistibly into the cheese business when her husband Hilary mastered the fine art of transforming goat and cow’s milk into thick rounds of aromatic fromage. Storefronts were boarded up. The hotel at the top of the hill was closed. And the marina was in a state of disrepair. “Now the challenge is to retain the charm of this place without being overrun with cars and parking issues.”
The town’s colorful main street bustles with life and retail activity as visitors and locals browse the shops and stroll the boardwalk. The renaissance can be credited in large part to Hilary’s Cheese Co., True Grain Breads and the Udder Guys Ice Cream Parlour. “I think we’re giving people in the Cowichan and beyond good reason to visit on a regular and even daily basis,” says True Grain’s Jonathan Knight as he expertly shapes raw dough into plump rolls ready for the ovens of his natural organic bakery. After clocking his apprenticeship in North Vancouver, Knight, 33, cycled across Canada and ran a bakery on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island before setting up shop here in May, 2004. Most mornings he and a trio of fellow bakers are submerged in fragrant heat and clouds of flour by 5 a.m. And the first baguettes are steaming fresh when his doors open three hours later. Knight grinds heirloom Red Fife wheat imported from Saskatchewan. In keeping with his dedication to locally sourced ingredients, however, he’s encouraging island farmers like Metchosin’s Tom Henry to experiment with crops of their own. A house special called the 30 Mile Loaf uses Henry’s first batch of wheat from last summer, and a 3 Mile Loaf will be a blackboard favorite if Providence Farm follows through on its plans to grow wheat.
True Grain is on the site of what was Cow Bay’s general store at the close of the Victorian era. The deep-water port was one of the first landfalls in the area for European settlers in the 1850s, reports Kathryn Gagnon, curator of the Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives. One of the earliest farmers, William Chalmers Duncan, arrived on the H.M.S. Hecate in August 1862. He was part of a group of men who came to the valley in hopes of taming the wilderness, but the task of clearing the thickly forested land proved too arduous for most. A few pioneering families with names like Dougan, Drinkwater, Chisholm, Bell and Alexander did build cabins and planted crops to feed themselves and their cattle. The population began to grow in earnest with the arrival of the Esquimalt & Nanaimo rail line in the 1880s. Experiments with tobacco crops failed, but diary farming took hold. The Cowichan Creamery was producing award-winning butter by the turn of the century. And the milk shipped from Duncan’s Station (as Duncan was then known) to Victoria and Nanaimo was seen to be superior because of the quality of local grass and the mild climate, according to Gagnon.
A handful of pioneering farms remain pillars in the slow-food scene. Jernigan’s culinary guesthouse is located on the 130-acre Fairburn Farm, a circa 1884 spread where owners Darryl and Anthea Archer continue to operate Canada’s only water-buffalo diary despite a rough early ride from Canadian Food Inspection Agency (which dicated that the couple’s first 18 head be destroyed for fear of mad-cow disease). It’s also possible to step back into history while driving down the rutted road into Cowichan Bay Farm. Poultry farmer Lyle Young’s grandparents first settled the acreage in the 1920s, and the past is visible in the vintage barns and farmhouse, the rusted tools nailed to the sides of outbuildings and the classic automobiles housed in their open-door garages. Sheep browse in the close-cropped fields and mud-spackled geese honk loudly as visitors pull up to the self-serve farm store to purchase frozen chickens and homemade sausages.
Young’s pasture-raised meat is routinely served in the valley’s finer restaurants, most of which have hung out their shingles in recent years. Bill Jones isn’t kidding when he says burgers and below-par Chinese food were effectively the only dine-out options locally back in the 1990s. Now, in addition to the charmingly relaxed yet upscale bistros showcased at Providence Farm, there’s a consistently packed brewpub in downtown Duncan (the Craig Street Brew Pub) and such further-afield gems as the waterfront Genoa Bay Café, the elegant Steeples Restaurant (in the former home of the Shawnigan Lake United Church) and the little-known Old Road Inn, a B&B on the road to Cowichan Lake that serves splendid, market-fresh meals according to Hilary Abbott.
The Cowichan’s one Relais & Châteaux hotel, The Aerie, has long utilized local food under its former executive chef Christope Letard. His successor, Castro Boateng, is equally committed to all things fresh and seasonal. “Food is an art and an adventure for chefs, but we are indebted to our suppliers – they are the real heroes,” Boateng tells me one evening in the hotel’s restaurant before serving a six-course repast that begins with a crab salad topped with basil foam and ends several dazzling hours later with a slow-poached apple from Hummingbird Haven Farm. The latter, a few minutes south on the Malahat from the hotel, was once a hobby for former auto mechanic Dick Clement and his wife Georgie. Now, like other ambitious retirees in the region, the couple are busier than ever with a two-acre garden in which they grow spinach, chard, parsnips, beans, onions and heirloom tomatoes. For his part, Boateng particularly enjoys trekking into the forest with Brother Michael, a Benedictine monk at the nearby Sole Dao Monastery with an uncanny nose for chanterelle, pine, hedgehog and lobster mushrooms. Hotel guests can forage alongside them, then learn how to prepare the fungi with lessons from the chef back at the Aerie.
The other hotel on southern Vancouver Island routinely cited in the pages of Condé Nast Traveler is located just outside the Cowichan. Yet all those interviewed for this article cite the Sooke Harbour House’s Sinclair Philip as the regional scene’s prime mover for the past quarter century. “Sinclair and (wife) Frederique have supported local producers from the get-go, purchased local wines in volume and generally brought credence and an international profile to the region,” notes Mara Jernigan.
Seated beside a crackling fireplace in the hotel’s art-strewn restaurant, the B.C. Restaurant Hall of Famer with a PhD in political science and an omnivore’s passion for everything from fine wine to karate serves up an hour of rapidfire home truths. “Good things are happening here, no question, but there are growing pains,” says Philip, wrapped snug in a jacket he picked up at a Feast of Fields slow-food event a few years back. “The salmon runs are diminished. The dairy industry is in serious decline. Farmers are wondering why they should keep working 70-hour weeks when they can sell their land to a developer and become overnight millionaires. Ten years ago we produced 10 percent of the food we ate on Vancouver Island. Today it’s six percent. So I’m both optimistic and pessimistic about the future. I’d be a lot more positive if the government stopped focusing on the commodification of monocrop, genetically modified organisms and began to genuinely support independent. small-scale farmers.”
When the conversation shifts to food, Philip waxes poetic about what’s emerging from the Cowichan, Salt Spring Island and southern Vancouver Island as a whole. “The difference between 15 years ago and today is that you’ll find local food served and promoted in many top-end restaurants like Zambri’s and Brasserie L’École in Victoria,” he says. “There’s a growing cachet about the word ‘Cowichan.’ And the reputation is solid because a large, enthusiastic group of dedicated people are working incredibly hard to establish slow-food as a way of life in this province.”
As True Grain’s Jonathan Knight testified while hefting large sacks of grain, the craft of the baker, like that of a farmer or winemaker or any other artisan who works with their hands, is hard and physical. Slicing open one of his crusty dinner rolls back at Providence Farm chef’s fundraiser, however, is no sweat. We’re having the kind of grand, bubbly time that is commonplace when the epicurean set gathers in one place. And as plates and glasses appear and vanish in seamless succession, a warm glow suffuses the table. Local food served with skill and love from field to table: Now that’s a recipe for a green and leafy organic future.
In "Canada's Provence," the five major food groups are fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic
Westworld B.C. Summer 2008
Sighs of contentment rise and fall in steady waves as one score and ten fortunate souls tuck into the fruits of the Cowichan Valley. A collection of leading chefs from this rapidly emerging culinary region have pooled their talents to raise funds for Providence Farm, a historic 400-acre spread in the Vancouver Island countryside east of Duncan. For a century the farm was run as a boarding school by the Sisters of St. Ann. Today it serves as a therapeutic retreat for individuals with physical and mental disabilities. A central part of community life focuses on horticultural therapy, and the result of willing hands sunk deep into healing soil is the organic produce sold at the Duncan Farmer’s Market and in Providence’s on-site farm store. In fact, the crisp heap of greens that follows the appetizer platters of Denman Island oysters was plucked from the ground minutes earlier. As one wag at our convivial table puts it, the salad is a classic example of the 100-meter diet.
Master of Ceremonies Bill Jones, the chef and cookbook author, interrupts the luncheon early on to raise a toast to the farm’s worthy activities and applaud the largesse of the paying customers. He then turns his attention to the half dozen chefs in their starched white uniforms arrayed beside him. Brad Boisvert of Amusé Bistro in Cobble Hill takes a bow for the rabbit terrine now being served. The roasted butternut squash soup in the on-deck circle is courtesy of Matt Horn, chef at Cowichan Bay landmark The Masthead. Fatima Da Silva from Bistro 161 in Duncan smiles briefly at the mention of her name, then vanishes back into the kitchen to continue preparing her contribution – seared duck breast with blackberry demi glaze. Welcome, in other words, to a definitive high-end slow-food Cowichan feast. All the ingredients are locally harvested from land and sea. And all are paired with wines from such fine valley vineyards as Averill Creek and Blue Grouse. Glasses are clinked and laughter bubbles up freely, but everyone’s attention is squarely on the white china plates in front of them.
In the burgeoning world of culinary and agritourism, the Cowichan – located between Victoria and Nanaimo in the fertile agricultural lands on either side of the Trans-Canada – is an upstart newcomer coming on like gangbusters. While retaining its blue-collar, dirt-under-fingernail roots, the area has undergone a shift in the last 20 years as the forestry and fishing industries flounder and a new wave of farmers, restaurateurs, vintners and foodies of all sorts begin reinventing what has traditionally been a pitstop for fast food and gasoline. A generation of daytrippers weaned on The Food Channel and equipped with discriminating palettes are detouring off the highway to track down fresh-from-the-field veggies, artisan baked goods, free-range meats and top-notch wine and cider in such pocket-sized communities as Cobble Hill, Cowichan Bay, Chemainus and Glenora.
“Bring your own shopping bags and an empty car trunk,” advises Kathy McAree, who organized B.C.’s first culinary tourism conference early this year and has been a driving force in marketing food and wine locally. Her Victoria-based company Travel With Taste offers behind-the-scene epicurean tours of the Cowichan. “I can’t offer any hard statistics other than to say we’re all busy and getting more so. People in B.C. are beginning to realize how lucky they are. Rather than travelling to France or Italy, they’ve got some amazing food scenes right in their own backyard.”
Fresh farmgate eggs and seasonal produce are available around many Cowichan corners, if not quite every one just yet. In the north of the valley near Ladysmith, herb-laced jellies can be purchased at Hazelwood Herb Farm and berry laiden marmalade at Yellow Point Cranberries. At the Victoria end of the Cowichan, the tasting bar at Merridale Cider is routinely jammed with tipplers and antibiotic-free turkey is on the takeaway menu from Mill Bay’s Stonefield Farm. The hub of the region is Duncan, and there’s nowhere better to take the region’s pulse than at the town’s award-winning farmer’s market, fractured by petty politics but thriving nonetheless on Saturday mornings in two locations – one in Duncan’s revitalized downtown core, the other up the highway at the Forestry Discovery Museum.
Certainly the Cowichan isn’t the only foodcentric region in B.C., not with emerging slow-food scenes in Pemberton, Vanderhoof, Nelson, the Gulf Islands and other pockets of Van Isle (notably the Comox Valley and Saanich Peninsula). But this fertile green valley, protected by a horseshoe of mountains from the furious weather that batters the far west coast, is both easily accessible to the province’s largest population centres and unique in its concentration of producers, chefs and culinary visionaries. “The Cowichan has the most disproportionate number of food-aware people as anywhere in Canada,” states Heidi Noble, one of the new-breed cooks and vintners making an international name for herself in the southern Okanagan. “We’ve got some amazing gems out here, but everyone’s spread out across the great divide between Osoyoos and the Shushwap. By comparison, the Cowichan is incredibly compact. It’s a great place to vacation if you want to sample amazing food and wine right from the source without piling on the mileage.”
Wineries have been a key part of the Cowichan’s character since Zanatta bottled its first harvests in 1990. And with ten vineyards now in production, the valley has been dubbed “the new Napa” by excitable tourism reps and headline writers – just like the Okanagan, Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, Quebec’s Eastern Townships and practically every other emergent grape-growing region north of California. Yet the Cowichan stands alone as “Canada’s Provence,” a widely quoted epithet coined by the late James Barber, the beloved food writer and ebullient host of television’s The Urban Peasant who passed away last December at his local farm with a pot of chicken stock bubbling on the stove. Like chefs Mara Jernigan and Bill Jones before him and writer/CBC broadcaster Don Genova shortly after, Barber was part of an influx of influential food mavens drawn to the Cowichan by its charm, upside potential and the fact that a small farm holding could be purchased for not much more than a two-bedroom Vancouver condo. Shortly after planting his first garlic bulbs in 2001, Barber made his pronouncement in a newspaper column and its stuck as the area grapples for a marketable identity.
“It’s the only region in Canada with what the meteorologists call a ‘maritime Mediterranean climate,” explains Jones, a French-trained gourmet chef with a quick wit who leads cooking workshops at his own Deerholme Farm. Like the fabled southeast region of France, the Cowichan enjoys the dry summers and mild, wet winters that promote a year-round growing season. Cowichan itself is a coast salish word meaning “the warm land” or “land warmed by the sun.” Lavender, sage, rosemary and basil winter nicely here, notes Jones, just like Provence.
Not everyone is fond of the comparison. Jernigan, a pioneer in the west coast slow-food movement and a key figure in Cowichan’s rise since her arrival here in 1992, feels it creates unduly high expectations. “I don’t think we need to be imitative,” she says from her kitchen at Engler Farm, where she teaches her “field to table” cooking philosophy (read: fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic) during popular culinary boot camps that range from a few hours to five days. “Besides,” Jernigan adds with a laugh, “I haven’t noticed any olive trees around here lately.” Sinclair Philip, a champion of culinary tourism locally and co-owner of the internationally celebrated Sooke Harbour House hotel, doesn’t like playing the comparison game either. “We live in a beautiful part of the world with its own character and charm. We don’t have the history or culture of Provence, but then again we’re not overrun with tourists either. We need to develop our own reputation and personality. Every new farmgate and restaurant is testament to the fact that it’s happening.”
*****
Postcard-perfect Cowichan Bay is a good starting point for the valley both historically and in terms of what rates by my rather proletarian, non-foodie standards as superior comfort food – chewy ciabatta, otherworldly ginger cookies, cheese so runny that it “gallops” (again citing the words of James Barber) and real-deal homemade ice cream. A rainbow arches above wind-lashed waves as the cheesemaking Abbotts hold court in their waterfront lunch spot renowned for its homemade soup and rich assortment of creamy, blue-veined cheeses. “Not long ago this town was in major decline,” says Patty Abbott, a former banker and landscaper who was pulled irresistibly into the cheese business when her husband Hilary mastered the fine art of transforming goat and cow’s milk into thick rounds of aromatic fromage. Storefronts were boarded up. The hotel at the top of the hill was closed. And the marina was in a state of disrepair. “Now the challenge is to retain the charm of this place without being overrun with cars and parking issues.”
The town’s colorful main street bustles with life and retail activity as visitors and locals browse the shops and stroll the boardwalk. The renaissance can be credited in large part to Hilary’s Cheese Co., True Grain Breads and the Udder Guys Ice Cream Parlour. “I think we’re giving people in the Cowichan and beyond good reason to visit on a regular and even daily basis,” says True Grain’s Jonathan Knight as he expertly shapes raw dough into plump rolls ready for the ovens of his natural organic bakery. After clocking his apprenticeship in North Vancouver, Knight, 33, cycled across Canada and ran a bakery on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island before setting up shop here in May, 2004. Most mornings he and a trio of fellow bakers are submerged in fragrant heat and clouds of flour by 5 a.m. And the first baguettes are steaming fresh when his doors open three hours later. Knight grinds heirloom Red Fife wheat imported from Saskatchewan. In keeping with his dedication to locally sourced ingredients, however, he’s encouraging island farmers like Metchosin’s Tom Henry to experiment with crops of their own. A house special called the 30 Mile Loaf uses Henry’s first batch of wheat from last summer, and a 3 Mile Loaf will be a blackboard favorite if Providence Farm follows through on its plans to grow wheat.
True Grain is on the site of what was Cow Bay’s general store at the close of the Victorian era. The deep-water port was one of the first landfalls in the area for European settlers in the 1850s, reports Kathryn Gagnon, curator of the Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives. One of the earliest farmers, William Chalmers Duncan, arrived on the H.M.S. Hecate in August 1862. He was part of a group of men who came to the valley in hopes of taming the wilderness, but the task of clearing the thickly forested land proved too arduous for most. A few pioneering families with names like Dougan, Drinkwater, Chisholm, Bell and Alexander did build cabins and planted crops to feed themselves and their cattle. The population began to grow in earnest with the arrival of the Esquimalt & Nanaimo rail line in the 1880s. Experiments with tobacco crops failed, but diary farming took hold. The Cowichan Creamery was producing award-winning butter by the turn of the century. And the milk shipped from Duncan’s Station (as Duncan was then known) to Victoria and Nanaimo was seen to be superior because of the quality of local grass and the mild climate, according to Gagnon.
A handful of pioneering farms remain pillars in the slow-food scene. Jernigan’s culinary guesthouse is located on the 130-acre Fairburn Farm, a circa 1884 spread where owners Darryl and Anthea Archer continue to operate Canada’s only water-buffalo diary despite a rough early ride from Canadian Food Inspection Agency (which dicated that the couple’s first 18 head be destroyed for fear of mad-cow disease). It’s also possible to step back into history while driving down the rutted road into Cowichan Bay Farm. Poultry farmer Lyle Young’s grandparents first settled the acreage in the 1920s, and the past is visible in the vintage barns and farmhouse, the rusted tools nailed to the sides of outbuildings and the classic automobiles housed in their open-door garages. Sheep browse in the close-cropped fields and mud-spackled geese honk loudly as visitors pull up to the self-serve farm store to purchase frozen chickens and homemade sausages.
Young’s pasture-raised meat is routinely served in the valley’s finer restaurants, most of which have hung out their shingles in recent years. Bill Jones isn’t kidding when he says burgers and below-par Chinese food were effectively the only dine-out options locally back in the 1990s. Now, in addition to the charmingly relaxed yet upscale bistros showcased at Providence Farm, there’s a consistently packed brewpub in downtown Duncan (the Craig Street Brew Pub) and such further-afield gems as the waterfront Genoa Bay Café, the elegant Steeples Restaurant (in the former home of the Shawnigan Lake United Church) and the little-known Old Road Inn, a B&B on the road to Cowichan Lake that serves splendid, market-fresh meals according to Hilary Abbott.
The Cowichan’s one Relais & Châteaux hotel, The Aerie, has long utilized local food under its former executive chef Christope Letard. His successor, Castro Boateng, is equally committed to all things fresh and seasonal. “Food is an art and an adventure for chefs, but we are indebted to our suppliers – they are the real heroes,” Boateng tells me one evening in the hotel’s restaurant before serving a six-course repast that begins with a crab salad topped with basil foam and ends several dazzling hours later with a slow-poached apple from Hummingbird Haven Farm. The latter, a few minutes south on the Malahat from the hotel, was once a hobby for former auto mechanic Dick Clement and his wife Georgie. Now, like other ambitious retirees in the region, the couple are busier than ever with a two-acre garden in which they grow spinach, chard, parsnips, beans, onions and heirloom tomatoes. For his part, Boateng particularly enjoys trekking into the forest with Brother Michael, a Benedictine monk at the nearby Sole Dao Monastery with an uncanny nose for chanterelle, pine, hedgehog and lobster mushrooms. Hotel guests can forage alongside them, then learn how to prepare the fungi with lessons from the chef back at the Aerie.
The other hotel on southern Vancouver Island routinely cited in the pages of Condé Nast Traveler is located just outside the Cowichan. Yet all those interviewed for this article cite the Sooke Harbour House’s Sinclair Philip as the regional scene’s prime mover for the past quarter century. “Sinclair and (wife) Frederique have supported local producers from the get-go, purchased local wines in volume and generally brought credence and an international profile to the region,” notes Mara Jernigan.
Seated beside a crackling fireplace in the hotel’s art-strewn restaurant, the B.C. Restaurant Hall of Famer with a PhD in political science and an omnivore’s passion for everything from fine wine to karate serves up an hour of rapidfire home truths. “Good things are happening here, no question, but there are growing pains,” says Philip, wrapped snug in a jacket he picked up at a Feast of Fields slow-food event a few years back. “The salmon runs are diminished. The dairy industry is in serious decline. Farmers are wondering why they should keep working 70-hour weeks when they can sell their land to a developer and become overnight millionaires. Ten years ago we produced 10 percent of the food we ate on Vancouver Island. Today it’s six percent. So I’m both optimistic and pessimistic about the future. I’d be a lot more positive if the government stopped focusing on the commodification of monocrop, genetically modified organisms and began to genuinely support independent. small-scale farmers.”
When the conversation shifts to food, Philip waxes poetic about what’s emerging from the Cowichan, Salt Spring Island and southern Vancouver Island as a whole. “The difference between 15 years ago and today is that you’ll find local food served and promoted in many top-end restaurants like Zambri’s and Brasserie L’École in Victoria,” he says. “There’s a growing cachet about the word ‘Cowichan.’ And the reputation is solid because a large, enthusiastic group of dedicated people are working incredibly hard to establish slow-food as a way of life in this province.”
As True Grain’s Jonathan Knight testified while hefting large sacks of grain, the craft of the baker, like that of a farmer or winemaker or any other artisan who works with their hands, is hard and physical. Slicing open one of his crusty dinner rolls back at Providence Farm chef’s fundraiser, however, is no sweat. We’re having the kind of grand, bubbly time that is commonplace when the epicurean set gathers in one place. And as plates and glasses appear and vanish in seamless succession, a warm glow suffuses the table. Local food served with skill and love from field to table: Now that’s a recipe for a green and leafy organic future.
