EAT ME

Breaking Bread in Baltic

There is a pub in Kensington, they call the Island Stone, there they make fine sandwiches and, God, I love them so.

History frequently manifests as an exercise in bureaucracy. For such a tiny place, Prince Edward Island has a lot of it. Once the Treaty of Paris was ratified in 1763, Prince Edward Island (then known en anglais as St. John’s Island) became a possession of Great Britain. The Crown got to work. The Mi’kmaq people were discouraged from infringing upon a portion of their traditional coastal territory. Established Acadian settlers were deported. British surveyors created three counties, Prince, Kings and Queens. These tracts of land were then jig-sawed with parishes to better orchestrate the ministrations of the Church of England. Subsequently, these 14 parishes were  subdivided into townships. The townships were not named, just designated as numbered “lots.”

My big sister, Anne, a semi-retired physician, and her husband, Al, a semi-retired scientist, spend their summers in Prince County, in St. David’s Parish, in Lot 18. This particular area is named Baltic for the purposes of the provincial government and Canada Post. Their home is rustic, isolated. Still, when sitting on their porch, I believe I could, should I still possess my teenage arm, throw a baseball into Lot 19, a one-bounce frozen rope. Of course, a bad hop off the weathered boardwalk, a frost-heaved cobblestone or a rusted rail might break the window of the Island Stone Pub in Kensington, which is housed in the town’s old train station, now a heritage building.

I love and admire my sister; of our immediate family we two are the last ones standing, five minus three; we are still getting to know one another after all these years following different lives in different places. Anne’s place is just 13 two-lane secondary highway minutes from a “Crusty.” In my pre-covid memory the Island Stone’s “Crustacean Special” is a club, a double-decker stuffed with minced crab, minced lobster and smoked bacon. This year’s version was more of a BLT on a brioche roll. Maybe it always has been? I ate two of them, anyway - in separate sittings.

The top of a brioche glistens because of an egg wash. I’ve not been transported by the ones I’ve eaten in Edmonton. In my experience a brioche roll does no favours for its filling. Trendy does not equal taste. The bottom of the Island Stone’s roll was more alluring, lighter in tone, tastier, pebbled with cornmeal: bun conditionally delicious. I love sandwiches; I consume them like vitamins, one a day. I complained to my sister, who bakes her own bread, my frustration in being able to find manna in Edmonton - Jesus, my eternal afterlife in exchange for a mere decent loaf of bread. Anne, never passive and always practical, said, “Well, Geoffrey…”

My sister’s Beatles albums altered the direction of my life. That noise had so much more bandwidth than the Annunciation of Our Lady choir and the dining room hi-fi soft Muzak jazz of James Last or the choral warbles of the Ray Coniff Singers. God, you know, Anne had the London Records double A-side 45 of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday.” The Young Adult literary genre did not exist when I was growing up. I read her paperbacks too, prose above my level. One that still reverberates with me is Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A different world existed somewhere out there. I also read The Feminine Mystique; the jacket art suggested racy science-fiction: a bare-naked female torso on a clothes hanger.  That stolen input all took a while to gel, but I eventually stopped buying the Catholic catechism. I never saw Christ on the altar, not once and, frankly, His wafer-thin bread-body was a bit dry.

Anne holds strong opinions about pretty much everything, but they are never wrong-headed; I have always heeded her advice and counsel. When our parents were divorcing she sat me down in the screened front porch of our home that would necessarily be sold to state emphatically that what was happening to our family was no fault of mine; I’d been fretting because I was quite late to the game as the third child, Vatican roulette, and an angry voice from the living room carries up the stairs late at night and a baseball game playing on the radio in a darkened room is suddenly hard to hear.

And so, I spent a few hours of my time in Baltic learning how to bake bread. (As I type this, the dough rising here in the kitchen of the Crooked 9 is just about ready to go into the oven.) Anne’s kitchen is expansive, the locus of a century-old farmhouse. It makes me think of Celtic reels – a Maritime cliché to those of us who come from Away - and the blues of Robert Johnson, “Come on in My Kitchen.” There’s the large square table where we ate and played Dominos after dark. The picture hung above the wood stove to the left of the exhaust pipe has always struck me: an open window with fluttering, delicately precise, sheer linen curtains. How else may an artist depict a gust of wind beyond a bent tree? The frame of the sash window is brown. The sky is grey. The field is fallow, ochre stubble. I imagine the image as James Whistler’s mother’s view, a vague gothic dread of yet another winter storm looming low on the horizon (Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth, 1947). This was my classroom.

My education required three steps. First, I shadowed my sister as she prepared the bread. Anne explained the process step-by-step in a faux Scandinavian accent, sort of a cross between the Muppets’ Swedish Chef and Frances McDormand in Fargo. “Yaah.” I liked leaning over her shoulder; the closeness of sharing a chore and a few cups and teaspoons of expertise. I made our second loaf of bread under close, hovering supervision. I told Anne I couldn’t make up my mind about being left-handed or right-handed for whisking and kneading. We talked about combining two different types of flour, ensuring the teaspoons of yeast and salt were separated in the mixing bowl, dissolving tablespoons of honey in warm water. We walked through all of the steps together. I believe we were actually alluding to other things, stuff we were raised to never demonstrate, like love and affection. Anne would consider the combination of those two nouns a Joan Armatrading song. Me, I’m more Def Leppard. But we mean the same thing.

I flew solo on the third loaf. Anne was outside tending to her vegetable garden and yelling at the rabbits; they’re not tame so much as awfully complacent. Skittishness is for squirrels and chipmunks. Al’s been musing about purchasing a pellet rifle to give those rabbits a nudge, a wake-up call. My sister is more eco-friendly; the township’s foxes and stoats are welcome to cruise the property any old time. A short layover by a bald eagle would suffice too.

This sort of setting is half the charm of the Island Stone’s “Crusty.” Another portion is made up by the company. Landlocked Alberta isn’t exactly renowned in culinary circles for the superior quality of its fresh seafood. This is a sandwich I can never replicate in the kitchen of the Crooked 9. The “Crusty” is rare fare, what the trade describes as a destination item, a signature dish. And I have returned home from Baltic a novice master baker. As for my own repertoire of sandwiches, oh po’boy, my big sister Anne has once again helped me improve my game.           

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of ecstatic gluttony since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format.