Chefs Push the North Onto the North American Menu
Jeremy Charles tipped a frying pan over a flame and spooned hot butter on some scallops. Someone passed him an herb bouquet. He dropped it into the pan, and the air was filled with the scents of fresh shellfish, hot tea, thyme, butter and wood smoke.
傑里米．查爾斯把煎鍋斜置火上，拿湯匙將熱奶油淋在扇貝上。有人遞給他一束藥草，他丟入鍋內，空氣中瀰漫著新鮮貝類、熱茶、百里香、奶油和木材炊煙的香氣。
Mr. Charles, the chef at the acclaimed Raymonds in nearby St. John’s and a leader in a growing movement to celebrate the cuisine of the North, was so determined to show off the essence of his cooking that he, a fellow chef and two scuba divers had taken a small boat out to an isolated beach covered with rocks. Even in summer, the water here is cold enough to harbor icebergs that drift south from Greenland. Still, the divers jumped into the water to gather scallops.
查爾斯是附近聖約翰著名雷蒙餐廳的主廚，推廣北方美食這項成長中運動的領導人物。他一心想要展現他廚藝的精髓，因此和另一主廚同好、兩位潛水伕乘一條小船，來到這滿覆岩石的荒涼海灘。即使是夏季，這裡的水仍冷到可讓格陵蘭南漂到此的冰山維持不融。儘管如此，潛水伕還是躍入水中去採扇貝。
“I don’t want to go back to civilization,” Mr. Charles, 37, said as those scallops simmered over the driftwood fire. “I miss my children and my wife, but every time I go hunting or fishing like this, I never want to go home.”
37歲的查爾斯說：「我不想回到文明世界。我想念孩子和太太，但每次這樣外出打獵或捕魚，我從不想回家。」說時，扇貝在漂流木的火焰上燉著。
Chefs from some of the chillier regions of North America are making an effort to dive deeper into their habitat. From New England up through the Maritime Provinces of Canada and west to Montreal and Toronto, they are doing culinary work that poses questions without simple answers: What exactly is Northern cooking? And how do you make that identity clear to diners?
北美一些較寒冷地區的主廚正努力更深入探索他們的棲息地。從新英格蘭向上至加拿大海洋三省，再向西到蒙特婁與多倫多，他們的烹飪工作引發一些無法簡單回答的問題。北方烹飪究竟是什麼？如何讓食客清楚辨識？
Southern food has done a great job of branding itself, with widely known dishes like shrimp and grits, jambalaya and pecan pie. But northern food seems harder to pin down. Is it poutine in Montreal? Chowder in Boston? Can such a vast stretch of territory have much in common?
南方料理在建立身分上成績斐然，眾所周知的餐點包括鮮蝦玉米粥、什錦飯、山核桃派。但北方料理似乎很難固定菜色。它應該是蒙特婁的肉汁奶酪薯條？還是波士頓的巧達濃湯？這麼一大片地區真有許多共同點？
“The most important thing I have learned is that it’s completely misrepresented,” said Matt Jennings, 38, who opened a Boston restaurant called Townsman in February and who serves as the de facto leader of a loose group of American and Canadian chefs known as the Northern Chefs Alliance. “We still have this stigma that New England food is creamy and heavy and bad for you.”
38歲的馬特．詹寧斯說：「我最重要的領悟是，它完全沒有找到合適的代表。我們擺脫不了新英格蘭食物奶油太多、口味太重、對身體不好的汙名。」詹寧斯2月在波士頓開設「同鄉」餐廳，他也是美國和加拿大主廚的鬆散組織「北方主廚聯盟」的實際領導人。
At Townsman, Mr. Jennings’s team counters some of those clichés by reinventing them. The Townsman rendition of chowder, topped with black, crumbly squid-ink crackers and suffused with cream and country ham, manages to be lighter than its clam-shack antecedents, yet deepened with extra fathoms of flavor.
在「同鄉」，詹寧斯團隊為對抗這些成見而改造餐點。「同鄉」端出的巧達濃湯，上面是黑色、易碎的烏賊墨汁餅乾，散發著奶油和鄉村火腿的香氣，餐廳設法淡化前身蛤蠣巧達湯的口味，並為口味增添額外的層次感。
The Northern Chefs Alliance, which Mr. Jennings helped start about four years ago mostly because he wanted to hang out with friends like Matty Matheson of Parts & Labour in Toronto and Derek Dammann of Maison Publique in Montreal, meets every summer. Members celebrate local ingredients, raise money for charity and heighten awareness of Northern cooking.
詹寧斯約莫4年前協助創立「北方廚師聯盟」，主要因為想和好友，多倫多「零件與勞工」的麥提．馬席森，以及蒙特婁「麥森共和國」的德瑞克．達曼一起外出遊蕩。「北方廚師聯盟」每年夏天聚會，成員力推當地食材，為慈善機構募款，並強化北方烹飪意識。
Even though “we’ve had indigenous cuisine here for hundreds of years,” Mr. Dammann, 38, said, Canadian gastronomy remains a blank for the same global diners who flock to cold-climate restaurants like Noma in Denmark.
38歲的達曼說，儘管「這裡已有數百年的原住民料理」，對湧向寒冷氣候地區餐館，如丹麥的「諾瑪」餐廳的同一批全球食客而言，加拿大美食仍是一片空白。
At Maison Publique, he likes to serve a Mediterranean fixture like boquerones, signified by anchovies in Spain, but he swaps in capelin, a North Atlantic baitfish. “We have all the resources here to do everything they do in Spain and Italy and all those great food countries,” Mr. Dammann said. Expanses of Canada, he added, have something else, too: “We have wildness.”
在「麥森共和國」，他喜歡提供地中海招牌菜像是「波克洛尼斯」，西班牙以白鯷魚製作的一道名菜，但他將白鯷魚換成北大西洋的釣餌魚柳葉魚。達曼說：「我們這裡什麼資源都有，可以做出西班牙、義大利和所有那些美食大國做出的食物」。他說，廣袤的加拿大還有別的東西，「我們有野性」。
At Restaurant Manitoba in Montreal, Chris Parasiuk, 25, is honing what he referred to as “deluxe campfire cooking.” He uses ingredients like deer kidneys, cod collars, Canadian dwarf cornel berries and Labrador tea jelly.
在蒙特婁「馬尼托巴餐廳」，25歲的克里斯．帕拉修克不斷改進他所謂的「豪華篝火料理」。所用食材包括鹿腎、鱈魚魚頸、加拿大矮萸漿果和拉布拉多茶凍。
In Toronto, at Boralia, the wife-and-husband partners Evelyn Wu, 34, and Wayne Morris, 33, often do their foraging in the recipes of the past. They learned of an old French dish, éclade, brought to the shorelines of Canada in the early 1600s, in which mussels were blanketed in dried pine needles that were then set on fire.
在多倫多的「波拉利亞」餐館，34歲的艾芙琳．吳和33歲的韋恩．莫里是夫妻檔，常找些過去的料理端上桌 。他們發現名叫「艾克拉德」的老法國料理。它1600年代初期被帶到加拿大海岸線，作法是將淡菜裹以乾松針在火上燒。
If the new interest in Northern food has an ultimate avatar, it’s Mr. Charles, who looks like a from the 19th century. Newfoundland is one of the few places in North America where a restaurant can legally serve wild game, which means that when you find moose, arctic hare and partridge on your plate at Raymonds, your server will warn you not to chip your teeth on buckshot.
對北方料理的新興趣若有終極化身，此人非查爾斯莫屬，他看似19世紀的捕鯨人。在北美，紐芬蘭是餐廳可合法供應野味的少數地方之一，換句話說，當你在雷蒙餐廳發現盤內有糜鹿、北極野兔、鷓鴣時，你的服務人員同時會警告你，小心別讓獵鹿彈頭迸了牙。
（王麗娟譯）
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