BON VIVANT: Worldly Delights

Lessons From the Sea

By Darcy Rhyno

Johanne Vigneau secures the corners of two large sheets of parchment paper to her countertop with eight dots of sticky, reduced balsamic vinegar from a squeeze bottle, then drizzles both sheets with the gooey dark liquid. I join the other participants of her Hommage à ma mer cooking class in building a Japanese-inspired salad of tender seaweeds, sesame, crushed wasabi peas and radish slices on one sheet. And we place sliced cucumber, halved cherry tomatoes and succulent shoots of locally foraged sea sandwort on the other sheet. Both salads are topped with moon snails sautéed in olive oil and chopped into bite-sized pieces. Earlier, Vigneau led us through the steps of preparing this local delicacy, a kind of smooth-shelled northern conch.

JOHANNE VIGNEAU (RIGHT) DURING A GOURMANDE DE NATURE COOKING CLASS

© DARCY RHYNO

With those swirls of dark balsamic in the background and the splashes of colourful veg scattered about the parchment frames, these salads begin to resemble works of abstract art. We gather round, scoop up servings onto saucers and dig in to savour their palette of flavours.

Vigneau and her team at Gourmande de Nature offer immersive dining and hands-on experiences like this one. Her kitchen also serves as the prep studio for many locally sourced and unique products. Flavoured salts, sugars and butters, chutneys and syrups are sold in their retail shop, located on the south side of Cap-aux-Meules, the main island of Quebec’s Îles-de-la-Madeleine archipelago, made up of a dozen islands, six of which are knitted together in the shape of a fish hook edged with 300 kilometres of soft sand beach. The Magdalenes, as they’re called in English, lie nearly equidistant between Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Quebec in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

LEARNING HOW TO PREPARE LOBSTER AT GOURMANDE DE NATURE COOKING CLASS

© MICHEL NADEAU

It’s this location on these tiny tufts of land surrounded as far as the eye can see by the Atlantic that inspires Vigneau and infuses her cooking, her culture and her very identity.

MAGDELAN ISLANDS

It’s this location on these tiny tufts of land surrounded by the Atlantic that inspires Vigneau and infuses her cooking, her culture and her very identity.

Hommage à ma mer acknowledges that influence. The name translated means a “tribute to my sea mother.” It has a double meaning. In Vigneau’s case, the sea (la mer) is as much her mother (la mère) as the woman who raised her and taught her to cook. As a child, Vigneau helped her mother prepare meals for a family of 11. Local foods were at times the only ones available. The ocean, the seashore and the garden stocked their cupboard with the fish, vegetables and flavours that define Magdalen Islands cuisine.

ANSE-À-LA-CABANE LIGHTHOUSE, HAVRE-AUBERT ISLAND

© TOURISME ILES DE LA MADELEINE

About 95 per cent of the 12,000 Madelinots, including Vigneau, speak in a local French dialect, so her assistant Denis Lemoine translates her teachings and these memories from her past. The French spoken here is somewhere between that of Quebec and of France several hundred years ago. Madelinots are fond of pointing out that inhabitants of each island in the archipelago speak their own unique version of the local dialect.

TRADITIONAL HOUSE ON THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS

© DARCY RHYNO

Between courses, Lemoine invites me and the dozen participants I’m just getting to know to sample the shop’s preserved foraged herbs and spices. He pops open some alder catkins collected last winter and encourages us to taste them. Known locally as poivre des dunes, they remind me of peppercorns with a bitter edge and a citrus glow. We crush wild bay leaves, then wild rose petals, between our fingers, and inhale the aromas. A bowl of freshly foraged sea parsley – a convincing substitute for Italian flat-leaf parsley – overflows on the counter in preparation for the next course.

Salt cod was once a staple food and an important export for Madelinots. Vigneau remembers her mother hanging it on the clothesline to dry. To cook it, she would soak it in water and mix it with shortening to serve with boiled potatoes. In her daughter’s version, I see the influence of Vigneau’s experiences working with chefs in Portugal and Montréal, where she developed international techniques.

SEAFOOD IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE REGIONAL CUISINE

© ILE IMAGIN'AIR

For the main course, Vigneau selects a childhood favourite and a very rare treat today. Her father was a fisherman who regularly supplied the family kitchen with halibut. Today, the halibut steaks she’s gently poaching in olive oil and finishing in a warm oven were carved from a fish caught in a season that lasts less than a day. The white steaks are plated in a frame of yellow curried mussel sauce next to a bright mound of pureed carrots.

Once again, Vigneau has painted a glorious local dish using a palette of global colours and flavours. Out here in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, at the crossroads of four Canadian provinces, the many influences on local foods date back 500 years. Vigneau fuses many of those influences in dishes that recall a time of teeming oceans and subsistence living for large families.

COLOURFUL FISHING BOATS IN THE HARBOUR OF HAVRE AUBERT

Vigneau uses the word ‘grainages’ to describe the spirit in which she offers her dishes, preserves and workshops. An archaic word from French spoken in the past, grainages refers to a seasonal ritual of berry picking that awakens pleasant emotions by returning to a familiar place with friends and family to resume conversations, breathe the sea air and hold on to the moment with rare bites that brighten our days. We carry our plates of halibut to the communal table, remove our aprons and take our seats. With the working part of the cooking class at an end, we pour the wine, savour the rich flavours and pick up conversations like we’re old friends.