texasmesquite

INSATIABLE: THE COOKBOOK STORE: BEHIND THE RISE OF CULINARY CULTURE
From simple shop to foodie salon


SASHA CHAPMAN
schapman@globeandmail.com
May 10, 2008

The Isabel Bader auditorium at the University of Toronto was packed. Not with university students, mind you, but with a who's who of Toronto's most curious cooks - chefs, product developers, food scientists and dedicated cooking enthusiasts. They were there to watch a PowerPoint presentation on molecular gastronomy, involving flow charts and diagrams of hydrogen bonds.
The event had been staged by the Cookbook Store, one of the city's last independent booksellers. Alison Fryer, its long-time manager, looked out at the filled auditorium and shook her blond bob. "If you'd told me 25 years ago that we'd be hosting a French chemist lecturing on molecular cooking, I'd have thought you were nuts," she said. "It's fantastic how far we've come as a city."
Toronto's culinary landscape looked very different when the Cookbook Store first opened its doors at the corner of Yonge and Yorkville in 1983. "That was back in the days of nouvelle cuisine. You know, you'd get three peas on your plate and then people would go home and eat a pizza," Ms. Fryer recalled a few days later. Back then, devoting an entire shop to cookbooks seemed like a crackpot idea, and the words "Canadian" and "cuisine" almost never ended up in the same sentence together.
Now, look at us. The number of cookbooks published each year has increased more than tenfold. Food stories regularly make the front pages of newspapers. Television chefs command the kind of attention usually reserved for rock stars. And words such as "local" and "Canadian" are more likely to evoke pride than derision.
Ms. Fryer, who has managed the Cookbook Store since it first opened, has done more than just watch our city's food culture grow up over the past 25 years; she has quietly helped create it.
Chefs regularly drop in to pick up Ms. Fryer's newest arrivals, often a sign of what is to come on their trendsetting menus. Publishers take Ms. Fryer out to lunch to pick her brain about the marketability of their latest cookbook ideas. And this year, the Cookbook Store formalized its role as a kind of salon for foodies, by staging lectures and events for the city's culinarily minded.
It's been a hugely popular move. Those not quick enough to get tickets for the first event - Michael Pollan's appearance at the Royal Ontario Museum a couple of months ago - found themselves scouring craigslist for tickets.
If shopping has become our nation's pastime - part therapy, part diversion and all-consuming - then our best shops have become salons, places where like-minded people come to meet and mingle.
It's easy to forget that even French cuisine was not as easy to define as it is today. At the turn of the 20th century, tasting salons, established by shop owners such as Henri Androuët, helped Paris define French cuisine, often by exploring the fruits of the surrounding countryside.
Likewise, our city's tasting salons - whether done informally, at places such as the Cheese Boutique, or more formally at events at the Coupe Space in Leslieville - are helping us define who we are as a food culture. And at the Cookbook Store, a national cuisine is finally taking on a discernible shape, thanks to a banner spring for Canadian cookbooks.
Here are just a few of the titles published last month: Anita Stewart's Canada explores what Canadians are cooking today and offers a window into our past through essays on ingredients such as wheat and salmon. Margaret Webb visits Canada's farms in a serious of essays, Apples to Oysters. And historian Elizabeth Driver has just published Culinary Landmarks, our country's most comprehensive bibliography of Canadian cookbooks.
To celebrate, Ms. Fryer has invited Ms. Driver to stage a kind of Antiques Roadshow at the Cookbook Store on June 7 so that customers can bring in their tattered copies of old Canadian cookbooks. Though Ms. Driver won't be putting a price tag on the heirlooms, she will give owners a sense of their historical importance.
French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote that the "fate of nations depends on the way they eat." If so, then Canada's future is looking very bright.
The last bite
Every weekend this month, the Cheese Boutique, 45 Ripley Ave., hosts a guest chef as part of its fifth annual Festival of Chefs. From 12 to 4 p.m. today, Jamie Kennedy celebrates spring with "asparagus and wild leek gratin topped with chives and Monforte Dairy's Toscano cheese." Tomorrow, Patrick McMurray shucks oysters. Admission and food and wine tasting is free.
http://www.cheeseboutique.com,