Jeremy Charles tipped a frying pan over a flame and spooned hot butter on some scallops.
“Got a bit of thyme with you?” he asked. Someone passed him an herb bouquet. He dropped it into the pan, and the air was filled with the intoxicating scents of fresh shellfish, hot tea, thyme, butter and wood smoke.
Above him, tantalized gulls hovered.
Photo: AP/ Elise Amendola
No, this culinary display did not take place in a gleaming restaurant kitchen. 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, weather-bleached logs and stubborn patches of snow.
In summer, the water here is cold enough to harbor icebergs that drift south from Greenland, and summer was still a couple of months away. Still, the skin-blueing temperatures could not dissuade the divers from jumping into the water to gather scallops from the bottom of the bay.
“I don’t want to go back to civilization,” Charles, 37, said as those scallops, freshly knifed out of their shells, 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.”
Photo: Reuters/ Philippe Wojazer
DIVING DEEPER
Both at sea and far inland, 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 and compelling to diners?
Just think of shrimp and grits, jambalaya, pimento cheese and pecan pie, and you will recognize that Southern food has done a bang-up job of branding itself. Chefs like Sean Brock, who has restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, have drawn customers and critical acclaim by giving traditional Southern-food tropes a fresh spin.
Photo: AP/ Matthew Mead
But despite centuries of practice, Northern food seems harder to pin down. Is it poutine in Montreal? Chowder in Boston? Fried clam bellies? Can such a vast stretch of gustatory territory have much in common? Dixie does, but few people talk as romantically about Northern cooking.
“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. It’s so much more than that.”
Photo: AP/ Matthew Mead
At Townsman, Jennings and his team counter some of those cliches by reinventing them.
“I thought it was my duty to put a chowder on the menu, because why the hell not?” he said. The Townsman rendition, topped with black, crumbly squid-ink crackers and suffused with cream from Mapleline Farm in Hadley, Massachusetts, and country ham, manages to be lighter than its clam-shack antecedents, yet deepened with extra fathoms of flavor.
Every table at Townsman gets a little tower of molasses-hued bread that looks as if it has been baked in a can. It has. Before opening the restaurant, Jennings asked his pastry chef, Meghan Thompson, to recreate and refine this far-from-chic New England staple, which he had grown up eating with franks and beans. Her version, served with maple-and-honey butter scattered with handmade togarashi, gets an undercurrent of funk from a decidedly un-Puritan ingredient: the Korean soybean paste known as doenjang.
INTO THE WILD
The Northern Chefs Alliance, which Jennings helped start about four years ago mostly because he wanted to hang out with Canadian friends like Matty Matheson of Parts & Labour in Toronto and Derek Dammann of Maison Publique in Montreal, meets every summer for a public event in which the members celebrate local ingredients, raise money for charity and heighten awareness of Northern cooking. The next such gathering, hosted by Charles, will take place in July in the moose-teeming reaches of Labrador, an area of Canada so rustic it makes Cape Cod look like Hong Kong. The invitation promises “whale watching and icebergs.”
Even though “we’ve had indigenous cuisine here for hundreds of years,” Dammann, 38, said, Canadian gastronomy remains a huge blank for the same global diners who flock to cold-climate restaurants like Noma in Denmark.
“We have all the resources here to do everything they do in Spain and Italy and all those great food countries,” Dammann said. Expanses of Canada, he added, have something else, too: “We have wildness.”
That wildness is evident on menus throughout Canada and New England. At Restaurant Manitoba in Montreal, Chris Parasiuk, 25, is honing what he referred to in a phone interview as “deluxe campfire cooking.” He deploys ingredients like deer kidneys, cod collars, Canadian dwarf cornel berries and Labrador tea jelly, while Manitoba’s Web site declares, “We wanted a taste of the forest in our plates, a taste of nature in our glasses, wood, rock, wind.”
OBSCURE INGREDIENTS
For many chefs, defining Northern food also involves rediscovering relatively obscure ingredients. Whelk crops up on the menu at Boralia, a restaurant in Toronto, as it does at Raymonds in Newfoundland, where some locals have been known to refer to whelks as “tire plugs” before shipping them off to Asia.
Restaurants across New England are stressing their Northern-ness simply by remaining mindful of the seasons and by cooking with meat, fish and produce from close by. Jason Bond, 44, the chef at Bondir, likes to rhapsodize about Boothby’s blond cucumbers and Waldoboro green-neck turnips and the deep flavor of Randall Lineback beef.
“Those are the cattle that George Washington used to pull cannons up to Dorchester Heights,” he said. “I think it’s pretty cool we still have them.”
If the new interest in Northern food has an ultimate avatar, it’s surely Charles, who with his thick beard, squinty eyes and knit cap even looks like a hardtack-chomping, harpoon-wielding whaler 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, the meat does not hail from some government-regulated farm. It comes from a hunt, and your server will warn you not to chip your teeth on buckshot.
“We shoot a moose, and a week later it’s on the menu,” Charles said.
“We’re actually doing what we say we’re doing,” he added later. “We’re out there. On the water. In the woods.”
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