King John of Canada by Scott Gardiner

Author:Scott Gardiner [Gardiner, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-182-5
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

DAY TWENTY-TWO

I’M CERTAIN NOW the duck is staring back.

It may just be my foot, which might be bringing on a touch of fever. Or maybe it’s that all this policy wonking has got the better of me. At any rate, John’s merganser clearly belongs to the waterfowl category (phylum? genus?), which reminds me of geese, which is all the segue I need to launch into the topic I’ve decided to recuperate with today. This represents yet another betrayal of chronology, admittedly, but I’m discovering that history has greater flexibility than even I’d suspected. Besides which, that postmodern flight of fancy yesterday has tempted me to experiment with form.

It had always bothered the King that his country offered the world so few distinctly national dishes. (There was maple syrup, true, but that was not so much a food as a flavouring.) Throughout his reign, John devoted a great deal of time and energy to increasing Canada’s contribution to global gourmandise. He longed to do for his country what Artusi had done for Italy’s gastronomic nation-building, and definitely succeeded in raising the profile of certain agricultural sectors and wineries – there’s no denying the globalization of our pemmican trade, for example. But aside from those advances, John’s goose initiative was his only out-of-the-park home run. Some of his wilder notions – I’m thinking, for instance, of his plans for woodchucks on Groundhog Day – were pretty much doomed from inception. The goose campaign, though, was a smash hit.

It was, if you’ll excuse the pun, a classic example of the King’s uncanny ability to kill any number of birds with a single stone. To begin with, there was the long-standing problem of the geese themselves. Canada geese had for years been making a terrible nuisance of themselves all over the grounds of the Silos, all over King’s Island – all over the Great Lakes, for that matter. John’s goose campaign started, fairly innocently, with the goal of reducing the quantities of goose droppings on the King’s new green roof.

But then some hunting association, I forget which, invited John to a wild-game fundraising dinner for wetland rehabilitation or some such thing. John was always keen to bridge the gap between environmentalists and their natural enemies, so he accepted – on the condition that he could bring along a couple of the moderate members of the anti-hunting lobby, just to make the conversation interesting. He also sent ahead several cases of a very decent Niagara Riesling, with the same intent.

As it turned out, Roast Canada Goose was served that night, which – surprise, surprise – paired exceedingly well with the wine.

Unsurprisingly, since everyone was eating it, the talk came round to geese: how good they were when properly roasted, not greasy at all, how very well they went with this excellent Riesling, Canadian too, take note, how incredibly many geese there were all over the waterfront downtown. By this time, John’s anti-hunting friends had topped up their stemware often enough to admit that they disliked the goddamn geese as much as anyone, but, really, there wasn’t much that could be done about them.

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