The New Farm by Brent Preston

Author:Brent Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2018-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

When the invitation to the first Canadian Chefs’ Congress arrived a few weeks later, Gillian and I got very excited. The meeting would take place over a weekend in September and was open only to industry—chefs, culinary instructors and producers. Registration was expensive, but with so many amazing chefs from all over the country meeting just down the road from our farm, we didn’t think twice. The agenda also looked intriguing. Things were scheduled to get underway on Saturday, with the opening ceremonies at noon and the rest of the day taken up by three separate meals, back to back, culminating in a midnight barbecue. Lunch was scheduled to take four hours. We signed up right away.

My memories of the congress weekend are a happy blur. It was perfect late September weather, cool and sunny. Gillian and I drove over in the pickup on Saturday morning and set up our tent among the hundreds in Michael and Nobuyo’s farthest back field. Chefs had flown in from every province and territory, and there was a happy, slightly chaotic air about the gathering, as if no one was sure exactly what was going to happen. The chefs marched into the cooking field in vague groups for the opening ceremonies, carrying their provincial flags tied to cedar branches that Michael’s apprentices had pulled out of the woods. Gillian and I were the only farmers in attendance, so we just watched.

Lunch was cooked over open fires by the provincial and territorial delegations, thirteen stations spread around the hayfield. The Manitoba team made an incredibly delicious wild pike chowder. One guy from British Columbia was serving tiny oysters that his grandfather had originally brought from Japan, which were almost unbelievably rich and creamy, like little nuggets of foie gras—his family had been cultivating them in a single location on the coast for three generations. We ate fermented blubber and skin from a whale that the Nunavut team had harpooned in the high arctic. Michael and his apprentices marched in at the end of the meal with dessert, an enormous rustic cake with wild blueberry preserve that was about thirty feet long, served on a rough wooden plank. It took a dozen people to carry it. There was a seemingly unlimited supply of excellent wine from Niagara and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, and microbrews from all over the country.

Lunch merged seamlessly into dinner, which merged seamlessly into the midnight barbecue. At some point Michael made a speech and lit the bonfire, a pile of brush, scrap wood and slabs that was literally as big as a house. The heat was so intense that we all stood in a big circle about a hundred yards away from the inferno. The volunteer firefighters from Singhampton were on hand with a pumper truck, but they had hit the bar pretty hard and didn’t look like they would be very effective if the fire got out of hand; luckily, it didn’t. We all stumbled back to our tents well after midnight.

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