Nancy Hinton

Nancy Hinton, Chef de cuisine, works at Les Jardins Sauvages, a country restaurant specializing in wild edibles just outside Montreal, She works alongside her partner, François Brouillard, a long time forager by profession and lineage. Her business card also reads Consultant, but only to cover all the other culinary odds and ends she does on the side, such as writing, teaching, menus… She spends most of her time in the kitchen, especially during the growing season.

What’s your weakness? Dessert or mains?
Definitely savory, not sweet. But it is not the main dishes I have a weakness for as much as the sides, ie. vegetables and sauce. I’m a sauce girl. And a salad girl. And a cheese girl.

Who or what got you interested in food?
I always loved to eat, but it was working as a part time waitress while studying at McGill in Biochemistry that I spent a lot of time in restaurants with my nose always in the kitchen, at which point the wonderful world of food crept into my soul, slowly leading me astray.

What’s inspires you?
All that I have to work with: nature, the produce, the people, books. It is the engaging, multi-faceted nature of the job of cooking that feeds me– always so challenging and dynamic. I love that it is physical and hands on (blood, sweat and tears), yet creative and sensual, then drenched in history with so much science underlying it all. There is always so much to learn. Above all that, it is at the core simply about food, making things taste good, and making people happy.

What was your favourite dinner when you were a kid? Do you like it now?
Pizza, the only non home-cooked meal of the week. (My mom wasn’t the best cook, but bless her heart, she had ten screaming kids.) I did love her turkey though, especially the stuffing, and the turkey sandwiches and turkey soup that followed. I still love all of the above.

What’s the first dish you remember making?
Sautéed mushrooms with soy sauce and black pepper. I like to think I also put a touch of vinegar, but I think I may be imagining things.

Proudest food-related moment?
I can’t think of one. But if I didn’t feel proud at the end of most days, I wouldn’t be doing what I do.

Strangest food you’ve ever eaten?
Cured, fermented duck egg. Breadfruit.

Favourite sound in the kitchen?
The silence when I turn the fan hood off at the end of the night.

Favourite cooking smell?
Fresh coriander being chopped, or wild ginger.

Quintessential Canadian dish?
I could name a modern dish using the best local produce like you find on so many menus these days. But the low-brow shepherd’s pie (Paté chinois) comes to mind, because of a story someone told me about the origins of the French name. It came from the time of the building of the railway, when the cooks were Chinese, and this dish of potatoes, meat and corn was a staple for the workers who helped build this country’s backbone. It seems to have had staying power in the diets of many Canadians of different backgrounds, too.

Molecular gastronomy, best thing ever or the unwearable haute couture of food?
Some of it is ‘haute couture’, but a lot of it is positively just evolution, using new tools to do the same things but with better precision, or providing new ingredients and techniques for manipulation of texture and flavour. I’m sure that some of the tricks are here to stay, just as others will fade away. Regardless, I think all new approaches are valuable to stretch the mind and offer inspiration.

Cilantro — can’t get enough or tastes like soap?
Absolutely Love it. But not everywhere. And yes, it does taste like soap, but in a good way.

What non-local foods can’t you live without?
Lemons and olive oil. Coffee, but that’s not for cooking, but to keep me cooking.

What’s your greatest culinary extravagance?
Having my personal forager.

Most over-rated kitchen gadget?
I don’t have any useless gadgets like a garlic press, bagel slicer or Magic Bullet. There is no room for anything superfluous in my small kitchen.

What’s the most treasured possession in your kitchen? Why?
Besides my MAC knife, I would say my smiley face heat-proof spatula (because it makes me smile) and my microplane, because I use lemon zest and nutmeg so much.

Fill in the blank. If I never cooked / ate / heard about  ____ again, I’d be happy.
White pepper.

If you could cook for anyone, alive or dead, who would it be and why?
Leonard Cohen. It would be nice to offer him even the smallest comfort or pleasure, given how much his music has fed me over the years.

What would you prepare for him/her?
Anything he wanted. I think he is a vegetarian though, so I would go all out with the wild greens and mushrooms.

What  was the last thing you ate?
A cheese plate (Gré des Champs, Pizy, Terre Promise).

If you had to work outside the culinary field, what would you do?
Writing, journalism, photography.

Collecting red maple sap

Being one of the most abundant and widespread hardwoods in Quebec, the red maple (acer rubrum) is familiar to most of us, populating our forests and ornamenting our sidewalks; yet when it comes to maple syrup, it remains the underdog.  It is the sugar maple (acer saccarum) that is king, scooping up all the glory.

Before maple syrup became big business, most farmers made maple syrup to occupy themselves off-season. If red maples grew on their land, well then, that’s the syrup they made. Often it was a mix of varieties, including black and silver maple.  Of course, the expected only to put up their own reserves for the year, perhaps supply their neighbours and sell a bit on the side to put some money in their pockets. In the past, many Quebeckers poured sirop de plaine (as it is commonly called in rural Québec) onto their crepes and into their coffee. But today, few know what it tastes like.

Claude and his red maples

Happily, our favourite neighbour, Claude, a retired medical technician and farmer, carries on the tradition with his 220 red maples on a 25-acre plot in L’Épiphanie, northeast of Montreal. Claude does things the old-fashioned way.  His syrup is a hot commodity around here. We help collect the buckets of sap and barter dinner, duck fat and mushrooms to secure our share.  It is hands down our favourite sweetener at Les Jardins Sauvages, with its complex yet subtle flavour profile: so delicate, with a pronounced nuttiness, balanced acidity and some mineral notes.

Requiring sunny days above 4C and frosty nights, the season could last days or weeks. On a good year, one is lucky to get 30 to 40 L of sap from a tree, which boils down to about 500mL of syrup with the plaine — if everything is done right.

That’s the thing about the red maple. It’s tricky. Although it is the first of the maples to run, it is generally a smaller tree with fewer taps, so its season is typically shorter. Its sap also has a low sugar content (almost half that of the sugar maple’s 2%).  It needs to be processed immediately and requires a longer evaporation, which means a slightly darker product and more of a window for things to go wrong.  Plus, the red maple sap has a tendency to produce more ‘sand’ or precipitates, which could produce cloudiness if not properly filtered out.

Despite its unique taste, it’s not on store shelves because it’s labour intensive, less productive and more complicated. It takes almost twice as much sap, making it twice as expensive to produce, and it doesn’t stay pretty long enough by industry standards.  Claude’s syrup will hold the year before crystallizing, but he says that this crystallization occurs because he pushes the boiling a degree higher to get a more concentrated syrup. This is possible with the plaine because it is so mellow, with none of the potential bitter notes of the sugar maple. His methods wouldn’t fly with the maple board’s strict production policies. But their management revolves around consistency and stockpiling in order to control prices.  They support big over small; productivity and profit are favoured over flavour.

Red maple trees

Pure sirop de plaine is not commercially viable on a large scale, so it remains in the hands of the hobbyists and artisans, or anyone with red maple in their backyard crazy (or smart) enough to invest time and energy tapping into the resource.  For all his blood, sweat, tears, and good times, Claude’s average score for a season is 20 gallons, or 80L of liquid gold.

Sirop de plaine is truly “slowfood”.  And like with corn, tomato or wheat, while agribusiness has selected one breed for the masses, we should not lose sight of the others.  Besides, the impurities in that ‘evil’ sand might just be more tasty and vital, delivering extra minerals, vitamins, organic acids and the like. Maple syrup is already a good source of calcium, iron and thiamine.

The taste inspires me most though, and with spring in the air, I am looking forward to all this mapling off. In the kitchen, I will be making ham with the réduit, poaching quail eggs in the sap, making maple desserts, as well as sauces and glazes for trout smoked over maple wood, venison ribs and guinea fowl.  François will be making tire on the snowbank for our childlike customers.  At this rate, my sirop de plaine won’t last long enough to worry about crystallization.

Claude asked me if I wanted him to try making a less reduced batch for me. “Of course not,” I replied. “Keep doing what you are doing.”  In any case, I’m sure we could find some good use for those crystals!  All I need is a good year so that come next spring, I have leftovers to start my tests.  Fingers crossed.

Nancy Hinton is the chef at La Table des Jardins Sauvages, a woodland table specializing in wild plants and mushrooms, outside of Montreal.  You can read about her food adventures on her blog Soup Nancy.