Northern Cuisine

There 's a new regional cuisine that's making itself known - it's the Northern style.This is a reflection and blend of Canadian and New England recipes and flavors. Unlike Southern cooking, there is a crispness and sharpness to it; ,a more primal feel like the rugged Northern landscape itself

Jeff Gordonier wrote about it in today's New York Times Food section.He interviewed the innovators of this interesting and varied  as well as trying the different dishes that make up the foods served from Canada and the New England corridor.It is not what people think, especially when it comes to  Bostonian cuisine. This is usually misrepresented, according to Boston chef , Matt Jennings, who is also with the group Northern Chefs Alliance.It's not just creamy chowders and the standard baked beans, He does put chowder on his menu but its' perked up with black Squid ink crackers. Even Boston brown bread which is served at every table is punched up with maple butter and the Korean soybean paste doenjang The wildness of the Great North is also represented throughout this vast region. Foods that the indigenous people first caught , through crude hinting and fishing, are turned into haute cuisine fancies.These are deer kidneys and cod collars- fish throats.along with   Canadian dwarf cornel berries-  a kind of cross between a lingonberries and cherries, and Labrador tea jelly made from a kind of  mountain rhododendron. These come from  nature and not a downtown  farmer's market. Foods are cooked over fires kindled from wood found on beaches or in forests.

 Many recipes reflect the micro local bounty.This is true at Boralia a Toronto restaurant, owned by husband and wife team Wayne Morris and Evelyn Wu who go foraging locally for their restaurant's ingredients.They even use variations of recipes that the French explorers brought with them back in t the early 1600's such as eclade , mussels blanketed in dried pine needles. Their updated version involves a pine  ash infused butter. Some restaurants will serve freshly shot moose, arctic hare and partridge at one restaurant Raymond's. This is not regulated meat, in fact some dishes come with a warning as to watch out for the buckshor or you'll wind up with chipped. teeth.Local seaweeds are  such as dulse, lavar kombu and sea lettuce are incorporated in both  main and side dishes.Some of the traditional European recipes like the ones served at the Montreal eatery Maison Publique rely on these wild ingredients to fuse the new world with the old.Their Spanish dish  boquerones usually made with anchovies is now made with capelin, a North Atlantic bait fish.it gives the dish a rawer , taste that reflects the roughness of this untamed country.

Northern cuisine is a cuisine of wind, rock and wood as some chefs have deemed it.It is a rugged blend of sean and leand ,Old world and New.It is the food of wildness but also the food of great sophistication..