Stanley Park: A Book Review
Each June my book club holds its final meeting over dinner, for the purpose of selecting our book choices for the upcoming year. This year we met at one of Calgary’s best known restaurants, The River Café. (It was just mentioned in the October Gourmet.) My cousin Pat, who knows how much I enjoy the West Coast and food, suggested the book Stanley Park, and it was chosen for our December read. The setting of The River Café with its menu focus on local ingredients and heritage foods which have become obsolete, was a perfect prelude for the story I was about to read.
In Stanley Park, the novel by Timothy Taylor, several story-lines are woven around the central character Chef Jeremy, a quixotic creative genius without an ounce of business-blood in his body. But the story is far more than a simple tale of a successful restaurant in Vancouver’s East end. The portentous name of Jeremy’s restaurant is The Monkey’s Paw, and anyone who remembers this black tale, must remember the story’s moral: be careful what you wish for, you might get it!
The characters in this novel may seem like caricatures and way over-the-top, but that is what makes it a fun read. The bad guy, the all-powerful and wealthy Dante, owns a chain of successful, soulless, cookie-cutter coffee shops called The Inferno. Jeremy himself has come from a mother of Russian-gypsy blood and his father, an anthropologist, is living in Stanley Park with the homeless in order to write about their gypsy souls and their connectedness to the earth. The professor uses one of the park-dwellers, Caruzo, to relay messages to his son, although it is done in a strange language that no one else can understand. You can see what I meant by “over-the-top.”
The Professor and Caruzo are obsessed by “The babes in the woods” story, a 50-year old unsolved murder of twin boys in Stanley Park. Some Vancouverites may think that this is just an urban legion, but it is actually very true and is still considered an open case by the Vancouver police. The skeletons of two young children were discovered in 1953, along-side a fur coat, a shoe and an axe. It was estimated that they had been murdered in 1947. In this tale, Caruzo is intricately tied to the story.
Jeremy gets wrapped up in his father’s world as his own is crumbling. Unfortunately, Jeremy is as creative with credit-card fraud as he is with local food ingredients. You know, robbing Peter to pay Paul. This lands him in hot water and he is forced to sell his soul to the devil (a.k.a Dante) in order to save his business. Alas, this is still not enough.
Jeremy holds a firm belief that there are only two schools of cooking: Crips and Bloods. If you are familiar with the American gang culture, you will recognize these names as the two most infamous gangs in Los Angeles. Crips, as defined by Jeremy, are pretentious food snobs and will attempt to fuse any flavours just to be outre, with no allegiance to any particular ethnic or culinary root. Blood cooks, such as Jeremy, respect tradition, nostalgia and local culture: grounded cuisine; soul food. Crips avoid lard, fatty foods, strong, earthy flavours, while Bloods praise these ingredients. Crips eat rabbit and fig wontons in a gooseberry coulis; Bloods eat rabbit stew.
Author Timothy Taylor, who is an MBA with no food-service background, accurately captures the high-tension level of a kitchen getting slammed at the rush. The book was short-listed for the Giller Prize last year, but lost out to Clara Callan. That the author was impressed by the extreme organization and control required to get out dinners in a busy up-scale dining room is clearly apparent. Jeremy uses the term “mis-en-place” frequently throughout the novel. This cooking term refers to the preparation done before final presentation of a dish, in other words, everything is put into place, ready to assemble the final dish. The description of Jeremy’s signature dishes such as wild salmon tartare or black-cod ceviche are tantalizing. What Jeremy is able to do with squirrel and swan is equally delicious! It was obvious that the author had spent many hours with knowledgeable chefs in order to get all of the fine details he has included in his novel.
Jeremy’s financial problems and his growing involvement in his father’s “hobby,” lead him down strange and unusual paths and eventually lead the reader to the fanciful and tasty finale. It certainly lends credence to the old maxim, “Everyone gets their just desserts.” This is likely to be my favourite book club choice from our 2002-2003 reading list.
I was introduced to some new and interesting foods in the book, including black-cod. I had not heard of this fish before, but thought that it was probably the “flavour of the month” in seafood, or at least it was while this book was being written. I have since learned that this fish is actually not a cod at all but the Alaskan Sablefish, found in the cold waters off Alaska. It is highly-prized as a smoked fish by seafood lovers. I will keep my eyes open for it on menus here in Calgary, especially the up-scale ones.