Salal Jelly How to make salal jelly continues a BCFHN blog from May of 2018 on the topic of salal, http://www.bcfoodhistory.ca/salal/. I was inspired by a patch of salal under a stand of cedar trees close to where I live on Vancouver Island and intended to follow up with a post on salal jelly when […]
Archive | Local foods
Pine Mushrooms
Pine Mushrooms Pine mushrooms provide a source of income in various parts of British Columbia from August to November. This summer, you may come across signs like this one, when people are mostly travelling in-province. The arrow points to a mushroom depot where buyers pay cash to wild mushroom foragers and commercial harvesters for BC […]
Savory Rhubarb
By Mary Leah de Zwart on June 29, 2020 in Heritage foods and recipes, Heritage gardening, Local foods
Savory Rhubarb Cakes, crisps, crumbles, muffins, pies – tart and sour stalks of rhubarb have long provided a tangy, citrus-like food addition to plain, bare-bones diets. Rhubarb is the “pie plant” and as stated in previous blogs, the availability of sugar in the late 1700s increased its popularity. But, rhubarb goes further than pie. Savory […]
Misunderstood Rhubarb
By Mary Leah de Zwart on June 10, 2020 in Heritage foods and recipes, Heritage gardening, Local foods
Misunderstood Rhubarb. A vegetable treated like a fruit. Understated. What do you know about it? Try this quick quiz (T/F). Bright red stalks and green/red stalks are equally ripe. Its leaves are poisonous and its stalks are not. It requires a few weeks of cool temperatures (under 5 C or 40 F) and moderate summers […]
Penny Wise – BC Food Writer
By M. Gale Smith on January 20, 2020 in Consumer education, Food writers, Local foods, Resource management
Penny Wise – BC Food Writer “Penny Wise” (Vancouver Sun) joins “Edith Adams” (Vancouver Province) and “Cousin Rosemary” (Country Life in BC) as one of several newspaper writers who wrote about food and everyday life. Evelyn A. Caldwell used the name “Penny Wise”, a twist on the old saying, penny-wise and pound-foolish to help BC […]
Garlic Harvest Update
Garlic Harvest Update A 2016 garlic blog post on the BCFH blog came to my mind today when I heard about Northlands Urban Farm‘s garlic harvest night on Wed. August 14, one of a series of urban farm events this summer. (Don’t be jealous, rest of Canada. It’s a calming oasis of greenery right in […]
Cariboo Potatoes
Cariboo Potatoes The Cariboo Potato is not a BC Heritage potato but it’s applicable to BC Food History for its name and its history of being grown in seed potato programs in BC. The ’50s were a time of rapid plant development by both the Federal Department of Agriculture and plant […]
Haida Potatoes
By M. Gale Smith on June 21, 2019 in First Nations, Heritage foods and recipes, Heritage gardening, Local foods
Haida Potatoes After several years of living in a condo, my husband and I moved to a house with a yard on Vancouver Island. I was delighted to think about having a garden again. As we dug around the yard we realized that the soil was very poor and would need some work to get […]
A Locavore in 1877: Indigenous Foods in G.M. Dawson Journals 1877-78
By Linda Peterat on April 18, 2019 in First Nations, Food in History, Local foods, Plants native to BC
A Locavore in 1877: Indigenous Foods in G.M. Dawson Journals 1877-78 The word locavore, meaning a person whose diet consists only or principally of locally grown or produced food was invented in 2005 by Jessica Prentice and declared the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2007[i] For the Indigenous Peoples of BC, the definition […]
Apple Packing in BC
Apple Packing in BC How d’you like them apples? When you are doing food history research it is so easy to get distracted. I was looking for information on another topic when I happened to come across the above heading in the History of Metropolitan Vancouver website.[i] It was part of an excerpt from the […]