Cuisine Canada Scene

Menus from an Orchard Table: Celebrating the Food and Wine of the Okanagan
Written by Heidi Noble
Reviewed by Christina Burridge

Hard to find a better time to re-read this silver medal winner from the 2008 Canadian Culinary Book Awards than the August long weekend when my own Vancouver Island garden is bursting with zucchini, tomatoes, eggplants, peas, beans and potatoes.

A summer visit to the Penticton Farmers Market ultimately led Heidi Noble and husband Michael Dinn to buy an orchard and country farmhouse on the Okanagan Valley’s Naramata Bench, home to some of the best boutique wineries in BC.  It was 2002, long before the 100-mile diet became famous, and the recently married pair, thrilled with the quality of local produce, had grand plans for an Italian-inspired, state of the art food and wine learning centre modeled on the (now defunct) Copia Center in the Napa Valley.  Big dreams hit bureaucratic reality and instead they launched a series of Gastronomic Getaways on weekends in the summer of 2003 all the while working four days a week a five-hour drive away in Vancouver and nurturing plans for a full time guesthouse, cooking classes and dinners that eventually evolved into the very successful Joie Farm Wines.

Menus from an Orchard Table (Whitecap 2007) charts the couple’s journey over the course of three hectic summers as they build an outdoor kitchen, cook dinners, teach classes, set up the guest house, and start making wine, helped by a parade of friends, relatives, neighbours, visiting chefs and itinerant cooks who collectively created Joie, a joyful celebration of Wendell Berry’s maxim that “eating is an agricultural act.”

The book is the story of Joie, illustrated by photos illuminating Noble’s culinary philosophy that all the great cuisines of the world are based on local ingredients, told first through a series of set menus from the summers of 2003, 2004 and 2005 (complete with BC and international wine pairings) and then a tribute to some of the producers of the glorious raw material that ultimately inspired the recipes that make up its final section.

While the story has lots of charm, it’s those recipes, especially the vegetable ones, that make the book a keeper, one worth returning to summer after summer.  Though Noble trained as a chef, most of the recipes are straightforward so long as you can get the first rate ingredients they need.  I’ll never make her Pheasant Ballotines but the simplicity of the Chilled Yellow Tomato Soup or the hot Zuppa di Zucchine is perfect when every day brings more bounty from the garden.

Menus from an Orchard Table brings people and place together in the birth of a new wine country cuisine, a “convergence of history” that neatly answers Noble’s question.  Why go to Tuscany for a vacation in wine country?

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Christina Burridge is a veteran of the seafood industry in BC who lives on an organic farm in Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley with four donkeys and 1,000 cookbooks.