The Decibel - Butter, sugar and a pinch of family

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Food and family are often front and centre during the holidays. These two ingredients also help make up our identities and cultures.So today, The Decibel is sharing stories of finding family through the act of baking.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Okay, going through these cookies, there is a shortbread with beautiful icing. There is a, I think it's a mooncake cookie? It's gorgeous. And there's a fudge brownie. There's chocolate shortbread. There are these peanut butter balls. And there's a snickerdoodle cookie, too. They look really good. It's like a really colorful, Christmassy spread here.

Every year in December, the Globe's most enthusiastic home bakers whip up their favorite cookie and do a holiday exchange. I'm excited to eat this. I think I'm most excited for this square. I love the bark. Oh, the candy cane chocolate, yeah. Peppermint bark. Peppermint white chocolate bark. Brownie, was it? I think it's candy cane bark. Candy cane bark?

I'm a real sucker for Rice Krispies and stuff. The peanut butter balls? Yeah, they give you that peanut butter ball. The Globe's annual cookie exchange has been going on for so many years now that it's hard to remember exactly when it started. But some people have been participating since the beginning, including editor Rasha Mortada. We used to do it when we were in our old building over at Front and Spadina.

We've been here for like seven years, so a few years before that. I would say like approaching 15 years. That's a long time. A lot of cookies. It's a long time. It's a lot of cookies. And I don't know if I've even missed any years. I think I might have even like come in during my mat leaves, my two mat leaves to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's... This tradition emerged from a mutual love of butter and sugar, but also out of a celebration for a non-traditional form of family,

a work family. It's just really, it's fun. And, you know, if you're a baker, you're a baker. You know, so it's like, these are my people here. This event isn't just about sharing cookies. It's also sharing little parts of our lives with one another. Yeah, the holidays are really about family., you know, people always think about their family members and the people that they've lost during the holidays.

Reporter Irene Galea brought some impressively decorated shortbread cookies to the exchange this year, ones that honor her grandmother. So I made these cookies for the very first time at her house five or six years ago. I took the entire week off and just holed up at their place in Richmond Hill. And I think I made 130 cookies, which was way more than anticipated. But that really started this tradition of making a lot of cookies and then giving them out to friends and family as a gift because, you know, in your later 20s, you don't really need to be giving each other presents. I think something baking is... Irene has been bringing this specific kind of cookie each year she's participated, but this year was a little different than the last.

So she was diagnosed with cancer in September, and she had been in the hospital since about September, and my brother and I went and visited her every weekend, really. And she was doing okay up until late October when we got a call that she really wasn't feeling well, and she passed away the next day. In the days and weeks after you lose someone, it's really sharp and then that slightly recedes a bit and it goes to the back of your mind a bit.

You're always aware of it, but it's not until you walk in and see the flowers left over from the memorial or you you smell the cookies baking and that memory comes back from from all the years that you did it with that person with her that it you know it hits you and I can imagine what she would have said leaning over my shoulder and looking down at the cookies and saying, wow, Irene, those look so beautiful. The icing, the way that you did the little roses. And yeah, it just makes me think I have to keep making these beautiful things that she would have loved and passing them on to other people to appreciate as much as she did.

Today on The Decibel, we're bringing you a story about baking and how it can bring people together over generations. Decibel producer Maddie White tells us about a special project she's been working on. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. It seems like there comes a time in everyone's life when either they or their parents start to try to build a family tree. I'm at that moment. Except my family is building a cookbook. Let's see what's there. Beat egg whites separately until soft peaks.

That smells good. Doesn't that brown sugar flavor smell good? I know. That's my mother, Carol White, talking with her sister, my aunt, Pierrette Prince. My mother's family story is one told through recipes. She comes from generations of women who were known for their baking. Her mother was the first to be a professional baker, and her name was Velma Bois, or, as I called her, Mamere. She died in 2004. Mamere is a French-Canadian term of endearment for grandmother.

And my Mamer was the living embodiment of the sweet, older woman who always had something buttery baking in the oven. And then describe Velma. She's a quiet and a sweeter one. Odd of all of them, the sweetest, I'd say. The least one to cause trouble over anything. No waves. Very quiet. And she liked to feed people.

Loved to feed people. She liked to have people over. Why does she love to feed people? Just because I think that's her way of showing her love. If I'm being honest, I have more memories of my mamare's food than I do of my mamare. One of my earliest is visiting her as a toddler and watching her work in her tiny apartment kitchen. I'd sit there and watch her make muffins, dessert squares, loaves, and cookies.

She used to bake all of the sweets for the Second Cup cafes in Sudbury, back when they were still small local coffee shops. Well, we moved to Sudbury in 75, because I was 15 years old. Yeah. And the second cup had just opened up into the New Sudbury Shopping Centre, and she happened to know the lady who owned it, and the lady...

Said you wouldn't bake for me, would you? She just came over, and she knew my mother baked, and I'm not sure how the connection is there. Good question. Yeah, I don't know the connection. So she asked if she would bake for the second cup and that's how it all started. Mom, what did she make for a second cup? Big chocolate chip cookies, big oatmeal cookies, squares.

Carrot muffins. Date squares. Date squares were a really big thing. Date squares. All the muffins. Date squares. Date squares were a really big thing. Date squares. All the muffins. Are those recipes in the book? I know the carrot muffin is. Yeah, the date squares.

Is the date square in here too? Yes. She kept her recipes in a spiral-bound notebook, just like the ones I'd buy at the start of each school year. But instead of class notes, hers were filled with her cursive writing and splotches of batter. This is what my mom, my aunt, my sister, and I are working to digitize now. This sounds like a simple task.

You just type up the recipe, lay it out, print the book. But it's not actually. Beyond the fact that time has slowly faded the ink in the book, there are also missing instructions and measurements in the recipes themselves. I asked my mom why. Why didn't Mamere's recipes have... Because she didn't need them.

The rest of us mere mortals need them. Mamere Velma's cookbook has all of her Sudbury-famous second- cup recipes, but also her favorite recipes from her nine sisters, her mother, and her friends. These recipes contain more than just the ingredients for sweet treats. They are the keys to unlocking memories about these women who were in her life. Long dead relatives are remembered by one specific recipe that they perfected, like my great aunt Mia and her famous sour cream cookies.

Oh yeah, because she was very forceful. Mia was the eldest. Yes. And the... I'm a little meeker. She wasn't... Oh, very quiet. You know it.

Very quiet. Unassuming kind of. But she did make the best sour cream cookies. She made great cookies. The best. I think the recipes... As we've been testing recipes together, memories like these spill from my mother and my aunt.

And soon, a snippet of a memory about a cookie becomes a laugh fest about a childhood story of a beloved uncle in a pair of roller skates. He liked to dress. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Well, we would dress him up in women's dresses, put him in roller skates,

and send them down the hall. Do his makeup? At the apartment. The only weird part of put them in roller skates and send them down the hall. Do his makeup. On the side, at the, at the apartment. The only weird part of that is the roller skates. Really? Well,

I used to roller skate a lot. So I would, so, and then, and then we'd toss them into the elevator and send them down to the lobby. Send them down to the lobby. And then he, and they would be stuck.

He couldn't walk. He'd be doing the, we'd take the stairs down. He'd be doing the splits. We couldn't walk. We'd take the stairs back. We'd be doing the splits. New Year's Eve. We'll be right back. Velma Bois, my mamare, was the youngest of 11 kids. She was born in 1934 in a small northern Ontario town called Espanola.

Her father was a man named Napoleon Bois. He came to Ontario from Quebec in the early 1900s, following a mass migration that many French-Canadian men took at the time, according to historian Serge Dupuis. And most Franco-Ontarians have an ancestor that was from Quebec, going back not more than two or three generations. In the late 19th and early 20th century, they moved out west to mid-northern Ontario to work in the resource industry there. So you often had to find people that kind of had nothing to lose in emigrating,

that had everything to gain. So they found French Canadians to kind of do that job. I'm ashamed that I don't know much about what life was like for this generation of my ancestors. But by working on this cookbook, I've learned that it wasn't easy to be a French speaker in Ontario at the time. In 1912, the Ontario government passed something called Reglement 17, or Regulation 17. This outlawed the teaching of French in schools after grade two. There was a will to develop a uniform, or philosophically, that we have a uniform education system to produce British subjects. And that's the way we spoke in those days.

British subjects, preferably Protestant, English speaking, maybe hyphenated, but with the other language being relegated to the family sphere and hopefully forgotten within a generation or two. It was repealed a few years before Mama Mere Velma was born, but it would have affected her siblings and her mother, a woman named Eva Peradi. Eva died decades before I was born, but I have maintained a tiny connection to her through her Christmas cake, which is one of my favorite holiday treats, and to her unfortunately named but wonderfully delicious boiled raisin cake.

Like most Franco-Ontarian families, my ancestors were Catholic, in case the 11 kids didn't give it away. And this affected the kind of food these families made. They needed to make a lot of food for cheap, as most were working-class families. Isabelle and Emily Bourgeot-Tassé helped educate me on the key themes of Franco-Italian food. I like to think of them as guardians of this minority culture. Pride in the Franco-Italian identity runs deep in their family. So our father, as a young person, was part of a group of friends at Laurentian University who were looking for ways.

I mean, it was the 70s was the Franco-Ontarian Renaissance, right? It was a time in our, especially up north, where we were really finding our voice, our political voice, our artistic voice. And he was part of a group of friends that was guided by a professor who was also a friend. And they wanted to create a symbol that would rally all Franco-Ontarians to a similar cause. They came together, drew the flag, decided on the colors, the green of our summers, the white of our winters, the list, which is, you know, the flower of La Francophonie, but also the trillium, which shows that we belong here in Ontario. And over the course of decades, the flag turned into a major rallying point for Franco-Ontarians across the province. And

whenever we come out to protest, we pulled out the flag and we draped ourselves on the flag and it became a symbol of who we are. Isabelle is a journalist. She writes a blog called La Tortière that honors not just Franco-Ontarian food, but also the community's politics and identity. And to me, being French-Canadian is my ethnicity. It's the culture that I was raised with. But to be Franco-Ontarian is also a political and social identity. Her sister Emily is a professor and food enthusiast.

She taught me that Franco-Ontarian food is defined by a few common themes. I already knew some of them, like butter, brown sugar, and cream. These are pretty key in our culinary culture. I mean, the butter tart might as well be our patron saint. But there was another important element that she introduced me to. Competition. Big families meant recipes were how sibling rivalries played out. You think of French-Canadian food and culture, and that's one thing.

But then you think of that same culture coming into a minority province where you don't, you find yourself in those communities, right? And there's a really strong sense of identity, especially in a small town. Everyone knows everyone and recipes are shared or they're competing recipes. So you see food is such a connecting tissue for culture. This explains one major mystery in my Mamera Velma's cookbook. For fudge, there are six different recipes. As it turns out, Velma and her sisters all wanted to be crowned the queen of fudge. In the end, that title went to my great aunt Georgette. It's possible, though, that she had an unfair advantage. Georgette's is the best. That's the only one that should be in there.

And that's the one with the story behind it, right? Yeah, she stole it from Laura Secords. She was working at Laura Secords, her and a couple of her girlfriends, and apparently the story goes that she... I don't believe that. Because she was making it there, they stole the recipe,

and that's the Laura Seegard foot recipe. Behind almost every recipe in Mimere Velma's cookbook is a story like this. And when you combine them all together, it tells the story of my Franco-Antonian ancestry. It also tells the story about their values. Benjamin Hill is a philosophy professor at Western University. He thinks about how food shapes our values and how our values shape our food and both are integral ingredients of our identities. Food connects us with people in place in important ways. Food goes into the kinds of smells that we are and the smells that we possess, the smells that those around

us possess, the ways in which we're comfortable with the foods that are offered to us and the people that we're around. That's why grandmothers in particular play such a big role for us. They really help to kind of ground us in that notion of the family itself and what constitutes the family and the family unit. So from a philosophical perspective, I think that this is connected up with our values and the value set that we have that lies at the center of our person and our being. When I look at the more than 250 recipes in Mamere Velma's cookbook, the value that stands out is community. The collection of recipes here represent a collective of women who work together to better feed their families.

This is a value that I'm trying to pass down to my three-year-old niece. Her name is Lucy Velma. She's named after a woman that she will only know through this cookbook. Lucy, qu'est-ce qu'on fait aujourd'hui? What are we doing today? Ginger man. Nice. Lucy and I recently baked a gingerbread cookie recipe from our cookbook. This is actually one of the recipes my mother crafted and perfected. That's it. Lucy's very strong, so you have lots of muscles to roll. No having. It's so funny. Sometimes a cookie is just a cookie.

And sometimes it's a century of connection over family, food, and identity. We're taking a holiday break over the next few days, but we'll be back next week on December 27th with our favorite episodes of the year picked by our producers. We'll take you behind the scenes on how we made them and get into some of the interesting tidbits that never made it

into the original reporting. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer.

And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. On behalf of all of us here at The Decibel, I hope you have a wonderful holiday and a very happy new year. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.