Preserves: The Manitoba Food HIstory PODCAST

KENT DAVIES: You’re listening to Preserves: A Manitoba Food History Podcast. Exploring the rich, flavourful history of Manitoba food and the people who make it, sell it and eat it. From the packing table to the dinner table. From restaurant specials to grandma’s secret recipes. We consider the cultural, social, and commercial aspects of Manitoba food and what it means to us. I’m your host Kent Davies. As per usual, I’m joined by Manitoba business historian, Professor Janis Thiessen.

KENT DAVIES: What’s in the pantry for us today, Janis?

JANIS THIESSEN: All the things are in the pantry. The book’s in the pantry, the website is in the pantry.

KENT DAVIES: Yes. All the things. This is our leftovers episode where we kind of peel back the curtain on the Manitoba Food History Project and talk about all the things that are left to talk about. Stories, memories and of course, we'll talk about the book. And to do that, we have a very special guest today. It's been a long time coming. Our collaborator on the Manitoba Food History Project, co-author of Mmm…Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Food We Eat.Also, the programing and collections specialist here at the University of Winnipeg Oral History Centre, Kimberley Moore, is finally joining us on Preserves!

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Hi, Kent. And Janis, thanks for having me on the very last episode of the inaugural season of Preserves.

KENT DAVIES: Yes, she made the arduous trek from across the hall into the studio.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: It was really difficult.

KENT DAVIES: We're happy to have her on the show to talk about, you know, the project. This is, like you said, this is kind of the bookend episode of the first phase of the Manitoba Food History Project. And this is the day after the big book launch that happened last night in the Manitoba Museum for Mmm…Manitoba. Maybe you could tell the listeners kind of how it came to be at the Manitoba Museum, because that was just a wonderful event for this book launch. It just fits so perfectly.

JANIS THIESSEN: We were going to do the typical book launch at McNally (Robinson Booksellers), whom we love and adore, but McNally has a new policy of no food during book launches, and we had from the beginning decided that there had to be food at this book launch. It's just not possible otherwise. So, in a bit of a panic, I would say, we went to Diversity Food Services, who were our caterer of choice – there was no other choice because they were our research partners – and told them our dilemma. And they immediately said, “well, we're catering partners with Manitoba Museum. You could have it there.” And then Kim was like, “yes, it has to be the Urban Gallery.”

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Perogy pinchers are typically women who adapt their cooking skills to provide for their families, not only by preparing meals for them but by selling food made in their homes to others.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Yeah. There's not, you know, who knew that was possible? I had no idea. We had so many weeks where we thought about where a book launch could be. Should a book launch be paired with an exhibition, how would we advertise it? Where would we go? And we wanted Diversity and Spruce Catering to be the people who made the food, because they're such an important part of the last five years. So that was an option, and we started thinking about other places. We tried contacting the Neon Museum or thinking of other restaurants that would let us in their spaces, and it all seemed really ridiculous. So, when they said “we're a preferred caterer for the Manitoba Museum”, the light bulb went off and it was like, well, if that's possible, why would we have this anywhere else? It was perfect.

KENT DAVIES: It really was. And congrats on the launch. But even more so, congrats on the book. What are your thoughts now that you finally get to hold in your hands and look through it?

JANIS THIESSEN: The book is physically beautiful. I think they did a fantastic job with it, University of Manitoba Press, making this thing look as good as it does. I wish we always had – I wish all of us who wrote had the kind of funds to be able to assist a publisher in making something so beautiful. Because, you know, you know how it is, right? There's never enough time or money and there's so many books out, including mine, where it's cheap paper and it's black and white, grainy photographs. And this thing, it really does justice to Kim's photography and does justice to the maps. And then to have those QR codes, which are Kim's idea, and have that linking to all the lovely stuff on the website.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: And the recipes. Like, people gave us their recipes, like Helen Weber and Steve Watson. They didn't have to do that. They make a living with those, and those get to be our special red pages in the book. So, they have their own space to kind of shine in their own right. But you're right there. It's fine and good to appreciate the book as, like, a beautiful physical object. We did the very best we could, sometimes under not good circumstances like mid-pandemic.

JANIS THIESSEN: Well, and I remember – I think I've told you this too before – about reading an interview with E.P. Thompson at one point where he is talking about how some of the critique of The Making of the English Working Class.[1] And the critique that he got, it was, you know, “why didn't you include this?” or “why didn't you do this?” And he's like, “it's already a 400, 500 page book. And it's also not the only book on labour history out there.” Right? It's part of a conversation that started before this book was written. And will continue on after it. And I, I really have clung to that since grad school. The notion that, yeah, this book doesn't do everything. It's not a – and we deliberately decided that it would not even summarize our project.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Well, I think all of us work that way. And if you're going to be an oral historian, if that's what you want to do, that is the understanding. This is never going to be final. It's never going to be finished. It's never going to be uncontested. The work will never be done. And depending on what kind of person you are, that can be, like a really beautiful thing or a really awful, never ending, like, journey, right? Yeah. I think we're all here because that's a gift and that's freedom to us.

Things that oral historians know is that stories are told differently in every time that they're told, in every place that they're told, and they're told differently to different audiences. And I think foods are like that. They migrate and they morph and they change in different contexts. And when we share recipes or when we come together and convene over food, it's incidental where we're not there for the food. We don't love the restaurants for the food. I mean, we do. I've met you, Janis. You do. That's genuine. Hey, that's – but just like the project, right? It's the same as the intention of our project. This project was never about knowing the fact of foods. Food is the doorway to somewhere greater. It is the “welcome” to a conversation or a community. The food is great. But we return to it for reasons that are not about food.

JANIS THIESSEN: It reminds me a bit about one of the questions that was asked at the lunch. Right. “What's the oldest restaurant in Winnipeg?” It's not a question we had ever asked ourselves. No, I’m sure got it wrong. Well, because when you know it, it doesn't matter. Right? But these other things that you're talking about, that's what matters. And that is why we're doing this project.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: It's fun trivia to know these things. It's fun for me to know where the first Sals was, and that there was a Salisbury House in every nook and cranny of the city. And, you know, we could do a walking tour of them one day. That's – those are fun things to know. But it's more fun to know why, and why they're not there anymore. The oldest restaurant is fun to know. If you know the conditions under which you know it, continue to be that restaurant. I love stories. Like, I don't really care about the facts. They're kind of incidental. I don't care what the oldest restaurant is. I don't care about the stories we kind of conjure up to try to figure that out for unclear reasons.

JANIS THIESSEN: Well, this is what Rachel Laudan says in her, you know, Introduction to Food History on her website, is that they're not useful.[2] Questions that ask what date, when, who – you learn that knowledge and what does it do to change your life? Right? Whereas many of the oral histories, they are actually hearing about other people's lives and hearing about why they could ascribe meaning to certain things is, I think, life changing. For the person sharing. I say it's definitely life changing for the people listening in various ways and that's why – that's why you do it.

KENT DAVIES: For sure. Yeah. I'm interested to know, being this is The Leftovers episode, I'm wondering if you have any anecdotes, thoughts or stories you came across in your research that just, for whatever reason, didn't make it into the book?

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Yes, but it's not – it was sort of tangential to the story of diners and street sellers and this kind of thing. And one of the anecdotes or examples that's in the book of this is C.S. Parker, who applies to have a lunch wagon in Winnipeg and he – spoiler! The book's out. So sorry to anybody who hasn't read it, but – The city doesn't let him have his night lunch wagon because they, the licensing committee, said they had no such authority to grant such a permit. And what a disruptive action to the traffic it would be, right? They were willing to interrupt traffic flow like that. But anyway, the story of that comes out of learning the history of night lunch wagons, which it doesn't take place in Manitoba and only connected to that one little bit. But it was so fun to learn. And, and what the night lunch wagon is, it's just kind of a person or horse drawn cart that becomes bigger over time and has a serving window in each end, and they would park on the street at night and sell foods to people who work night shifts. And at first, they were opulent. They were beautiful and tiled and had stained glass windows. And they were not low-class food. Right? They were really beautiful places and they kept getting bigger and more complicated, adding bathrooms and amenities. So eventually those would become diners. But in between that shift, they became sort of associated with gastrointestinal upset and unsavoury clientele. Pop Tierney, who is credited with, you know, kind of the rise of the night lunch wagon and the addition of exhaust fans and toilets, unfortunately, eventually died of indigestion and I just – I like had to read that forty-five times. And I thought, that can't be true. And it is true. And I, it's – I know it's so uncouth to laugh at that, but I thought that was so ironic and sad that he really follows the same sort of path as his night lunch wagons.

KENT DAVIES: What about, were there things you couldn't find answers to but you were looking for and it just didn't happen?

JANIS THIESSEN: There were certain things that while we were working on them, I was worried shouldn't be in the book. Maybe by virtue of they weren't based on oral histories we had collected. And so – and it's not as though we had set out at the outset saying it would only be ours. But for some reason, you know, that was a bit of a sticking point for me. Particularly the manomin chapter is not a history that I knew. And so I did not know that, you know, wild rice isn't wild. And the whole history of legislation attempting to control and dispossess Indigenous people and deny the agricultural component of raising and harvesting manomin was such news to me at such a late age, in an environment that should be, in my view, fairly common knowledge. I just thought, “This has to be – like, it has to be in the book”, even though it's not interviews that we ourselves did. So there were a couple of places like that where I felt like, “oh, is this something that should make it into our book? Because it's not our interviews or interviews that we conducted with people, but it's so important,” and I think it added to the story.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: I think some of those interviews would not have been possible for us to do. They weren't for us to do, whether by virtue of community or affiliation or, you know, sort of purview. They're just not ours to do. Some of them exist. And the people they've recorded are no longer alive. That doesn't mean they don't inform us. Step one of doing an oral history project is always, should always be, discovering what else is out there. And it's beautiful to learn from that. That's great. We don't have to redo the work because it's there for us. And we should not exclude it from a Manitoba food history. Because it is one of the things we learned by virtue of somebody having gifted that to us.

KENT DAVIES: During the launch, somebody asked what your favourite memory was during the project. I'm not sure if you answered it, I think. I think you said you had to, you know, think about it. I know for me it was when, you know, we usually did things as a team, but there was, there was one week where Janis and Sarah (Story) did a number of interviews in Steinbach without Kim and I. So, there weren't any photos of these locations for the website. And we had this upcoming podcast. So rather than just, you know, using a stock image because it was important for us to actually take photos of some of the locations that we’re doing the interviews in. And we took a field trip to Steinbach with really the main goal was to take photos of Chinese food.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: We did get the picture and it cost a bit. Worth every penny. We walked around Steinbach in the winter taking photos of this, that, and the other. Yeah, listened to the Walker Brothers Nite Flights, like, probably high on Chinese food. Can I say that? I think it was perfectly legal. That was a very good day.

Yeah, I remembered what my favourite moment is of this whole project. And it's not about food, but like everything, food, it's about identity, I guess. So, my favourite moment when we got to Churchill, we dropped our stuff off and walked out to Hudson Bay, and that was like that. That's still enormous for me. It was huge for me, my whole life. That how – Okay, so I make sense of my place in the world through maps. I love maps; that's a thing I inherited, I think, from my dad. I like to look at maps. And so, getting to go to the shore of Hudson Bay was so surreal and beautiful, because whenever you look at the globe or a map or, you know, that's how you find your place in this world, literally. And so to be, every time I closed my, my eyes, standing at Hudson Bay, I could see where I was on a map. And that's still the most exciting thing for me. Like, that's so cool.

JANIS THIESSEN: If I was going to pick one, it would be the feeling I had every time I saw the food truck. And as much as the food truck was an ongoing source of frustration and so much work, every time I saw it, you know, just walking up to it and seeing it again for the first time, just that feeling of giddy ridiculousness and gratitude that like, how is this a thing that we are allowed to have and do? Yeah. And that people are willing to do with us? I'm tearing up because laughing makes me cry. But I remember sitting in the room next door while we were thinking of ideas for this grant application we were going to write. And it was it just at some point – this is my memory, at least – it was just like, “oh, what the heck? Like, this is already so ridiculous what we're asking for here. Let's just pile on all our fantasies and dreams and hopes and yeah, we'll do a podcast. I don't know what that is, but you know, Kent does, so we'll do that. Yeah, we'll get a food truck. I don't know what that will do, but, sure. Why not? We'll put all this in there.” And then to have SSHRC say, yes, we trust you to do this thing. And then I remember getting the email from the Research Office here saying, we hear you got a SSHRC. We must have a meeting because we understand you would like to have a truck.” And Kim's reaction being, “This is it. This is where they tell us no, like, cool your jets, Janis.” And then going, “you know, we kind of always wanted to have a food truck” and just going, “Wait, what?” So just the absolute delight of having such an unusual and ridiculous and amazing and, to me, inspiring and wonderful project and so many years of it. And, you know, it had, as I said, it had its ups and downs and COVID was no fun time either in terms of, you know, destroying some momentum, especially with the truck, but no regrets. And just yeah, to do that would be if I had to pick one, it would be that, you know, that feeling of delight and surprise every time I saw it.

KENT DAVIES: And Kim not only did our photography, our website and a whole bunch of other things for this project, she also drove the food truck. No one was willing to do it. And Kim stepped up. So I would like you to describe, if you can, what was what it was like to drive that thing?

KIMBERLEY MOORE: So, dear listeners, if ever you push on the brake pedal of your vehicle and it sort of precedes towards the floor in a soft manner, like you're pushing on a sponge, don't drive it to Dauphin after. I mean, something is wrong with your brakes. Whether or not your colleagues or the mechanic they bring it to agrees with you or not. So yeah, I have the good fortune of having a parent who never really thought things were off limits to me. So, one would – The benefit of that is that I suffer from the delusion that I can do anything. If I give it a shot and I can drive anything, why couldn't I drive that? So that's how I ended up driving a food truck. “If none of you other people are going to do it, I guess I will do it.” And I did, and that wasn't bad at first. The first difficult thing about driving the food truck is that it's a diesel. So you can't just start it up. You have to kind of wait, and then you get to drive it through the city of Winnipeg. And now in the spring is a really good time to talk about that, because of course, when we brought the truck out of storage every year, it was pothole season, the beginning of construction season. So driving the food truck in the city is always driving it through some kind of obstacle course. So you have a giant box vehicle with propane tanks strapped to it. And in the back of it there's cutlery rattling around. We had a table that was round and would kind of roll around back there. And so every time I would have to drive over train tracks or hit a bump or swerve around pylons or construction signage, my heart would just like drop all the way to my knees. And I think, “Oh, this is it. I, like. I've wrecked something, I've driven over something. I've done something that's going to cost us a lot of money or get us in trouble.” Because unlike in your personal vehicle, the truck is really big and it's got a big old logo on the side. So, there's like, if you mess up, people are going to notice; that would be bad advertising for us, the university and Diversity. But it was a problem on the highway too. This is somebody who's grown up driving back and forth on highway eight from Gimli to Winnipeg. It is frustrating when people drive 80 kilometres an hour on that highway. It's like – it's a silent agreement that the speed limit is between 100 and 110km/h, and if you want to drive 80, you should drive on a different highway. But the truck doesn't go faster than 80, 90 kilometres an hour. Like if you're going 90, it's terrifying. White knuckle tight. The truck has a water tank that lives beneath the floorboards, and if that's full, that's a lot of water that is momentum underneath your truck. You can feel it. So there's a lot of kind of issues I had with the truck. So Janis, like, I love that you maintained that enthusiasm for the truck because in many ways, for me, the truck was my nemesis.

JANIS THIESSEN: It's like Howard Cosell and – what was it? “The beauty of victory, the agony of defeat” or something like that.[3] And that's exactly the truck, right? When it was great, it was amazing.  When it was not, you just wanted to set it on fire and walk away.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: So, we got a lot of attention, and a lot of that was because we did have this really novel truck. We had a food truck; we had this big banner that drove around the city all the time. And we really did create a space where people, not only felt comfortable coming there, but they were excited to go for it, too. Like for folks that had businesses when we went to William Stephenson Library with your class and, you know, we got, you know, Anthony Fauci, they come out with their food truck, Steffen Zinn with Red Ember and their giant food truck, and even Sharon Steward, who has a cook camp like that's also a busy life. I think all of those people were drawn because this, too, is a good thing for their business. This is an opportunity for them to be able to have, you know, have the time to come and tell their story because it's mutually beneficial this way. Right? And those were really – that was a really fun week.

JANIS THIESSEN: Yeah. And it was just such a lovely partnership with Winnipeg Public Libraries. And it was their idea. It was really lovely. And I remember sitting and we were essentially listening in to some students interviewing someone and just having feelings of, sympathy, empathy for the students because it was a more challenging interview. It wasn't as story based. The answers were a little shorter and more brief. But I was just thinking, “oh, what are they going to do with this?” Because their task was to turn it then into a podcast or a story map with some additional research and thinking, “oh, there's you know, it's not a lot of meat on the bones here. How are they going to do this?” And they're students, too. It's not that they have decades of experience behind them. And then having the students create some final projects from that interview that were just so creative and so thoughtful and so well and deeply researched and on topics that I wouldn't myself, just sitting there at that moment, have thought to draw out of that interview. That too, was just some of the beauty, again, of how oral history has so much depth within it. It's never just one thing and different scholars will bring different takes to it. And so, you know, just the loveliness of – we've created an archive here at the Oral History Centre that we will do more things with, but other people will do different things with. And so it's just this – you feel like you've accomplished something.

KENT DAVIES: There were a lot of recipes, in Mmm…Manitoba. I wanted to ask, did either of you try to make one of the recipes from the book?

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Yeah. This is actually a good opportunity to tell the snow goose story. So a story that does not appear in the book, and I don't think I've told it to any other media outlet yet. Because of how – it's simultaneously really lovely and an embarrassing experience for me. So, in Churchill, we interviewed Helen Webber who owns – I think she's retired now, or her kids are running the business, but had a hunting lodge and did all the cooking there. And she has her own cookbooks, and she was really gracious and hospitable to us. Cooked us snow goose tidbits. Had cloudberry jelly for us with fresh bread. And she showed us how to cook goose tidbits. And the recipe is in the book and it requires, you know, frying up snow goose in butter and vermouth. And it's very showy. And it was delicious. And so, because Helen's sisters live close to my mother, they arranged to send me a frozen milk carton packed full of snow goose. And I was like, yes, I'm going to make this. So with all the unearned confidence in my world, I started to make snow goose tidbits and my kitchen had the big, like, pan out, and the vermouth, and I was following the instructions. And almost immediately, this process got away from me. I have a monitored smoke detector, and I live about seven blinks away from a fire hall. So, before I could even call the alarm company to say false alarm, the fire department was at my house, and I was like, I like, I'm sorry, I'm just bad at cooking. But they have to – you can't tell them, like, “sorry. My bad” and then they go away. They have to come into your house to make sure you're not lying. So, they had to come into my kitchen, and I had to explain to them what I was doing. And at no point in that did they look at me like I was saying, and I was a little bit concerned about, like, a subsequent wellness check after that. But I showed them Helen's cookbook and explained to them what I was trying to do, and eventually they laughed. And somehow, I did not get charged for the false alarm. I just for months after that, I waited for like, some sort of insane bill in my mail. But yeah. So, you know, they weren't as good as Helen's.

KENT DAVIES: One of the things I really enjoyed with this project was kind of, you know, getting out of your comfort zone and being forced to cook new things. We cooked or, very least prepped on the truck. We tried our best to make sushi with Chef Ono. That's another great memory. But maybe, Janis, you want to touch on how this research was at times very participatory.

JANIS THIESSEN: A thing I like about food history, which is also the thing I like about oral history, is that it gives you a physical connection, like a tactile connection to the history in a way that just the documents do not themselves. Do not. So you're engaging so many more of your senses. So, I really liked when we went to Dauphin and completely kind of unrelated, I had a chance to pitch a few sheaves right onto the combine, the threshing machine. And for me, that was – like, I had grown up hearing stories of my dad, who was born in 1925, using exactly that kind of steam-powered equipment in his youth. But to actually physically do it and understand some of his stories about – like, it's really hard work and super tiring and so you would deliberately misload the machine from time to time to, to force it to jam so that you could take a break for a couple of minutes while the guys fixed it. Having those physical connections and being able to engage like, yes, it's not about the food, but the active ingesting the food or preparing the food or being in the space where those things are happening, gives you a different understanding than just reading about it. Yeah, for sure.

KIMBERLEY MOORE: Absolutely. I'm a tactile person like that, too. And I, you know, I loved going to all the greenhouses that part of my needing to know how this is done is about like kind of digging in the dirt and making the soils and doing the experiment of trying to make that all happen. You know, whatever comes out of it at the end, it's just I appreciate all of that work, work and experimentation being done.

KENT DAVIES: So, congrats to you both. Mmm…Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Food We Eat is great. It's out now. It's available through U of M Press, their website, McNally (Robinson Booksellers). It's everywhere, really. Thank you so much for coming on, Kim. And before we go, I guess the last question is for Janis. What's next for the Manitoba Food History Project?

JANIS THIESSEN: Well, we do have to give tremendous thanks to Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for making this all happen. And then logistically and financially, in many other ways, to the UW, University of Winnipeg Research Office and Diversity Food Services and the Oral History Centre. We have great partners on this. Working with the two of you, a delight, but yeah. So, thanks for all of that. But yeah. I do. I know I had said this from day one, right, that I wanted to do this basically until I retire or I'm hit by a bus. And so, we – it has always been designed as a thing that I can continue doing in the absence of grants. But that with grants, of course, things are possible like the hiring of students. So, for me at least, we'll continue working with what we've gathered and I hope to write another book that would look at Manitoba Sugar in various capacities. And, ideally, if you're willing, another season of Preserves.

KENT DAVIES: I hope so. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope we can keep doing it in the future.

You've been listening to Preserves: a Manitoba Food History podcast. This episode was produced by myself, Kent Davies, from a discussion with my co-host Janis Thiessen and special guest Kimberley Moore. Our theme music is by Robert Kenning. Preserves is recorded at the University of Winnipeg Oral History Centre. You can check out the OHC in the work that we do at the oralhistorycentre.ca. For more Manitoba Food History Project content, information and events, go to manitobafoodhistory.ca. We're also on Instagram and Facebook. Preserves was made possible from a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks for listening.

SOURCES

[1] E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1st Vintage edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

[2] Rachel Laudan, “Getting Started in Food History,” https://www.rachellaudan.com/getting-started-in-food-history.

[3] The correct quotation is “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”