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Oh Canada!

In the lumber camps of The Canadian Shield around the turn of the century, to speak during mealtimes was to be expelled from the dining hall. As there were always more men to feed than room to feed them, the idea was to carbo-load fast and make room for the next man at the table. Thus we come to the two great culinary contributions of Canada.

First and foremost is maple syrup. Pour it over pancakes, ice cream or even add it to the tea or coffee. Much easier to come by on the frontier than that fancy-pants store-bought sugar, and tastier too.

What the Canucks call back bacon or peameal bacon is almost nothing like what Americans call Canadian bacon, which is actually closer to canned ham. What is it? Lean, brine-pickled, pork back rolled in cornmeal and then sliced by hand (nice and thick) and pan-fried.

For a day of deforesting the Canadian Shield by hand, you can't do better than a stack of buckwheat pancakes drowned in maple syrup with a hearty side of peameal bacon. The thing to remember is that it must be real maple syrup and not 'maple-flavoured sauce' since the former is an aromatic, complex flavour which brings out the flavour of the bacon. The latter is disgustingly sweet and absolutely foul. Always read the label carefully before purchasing.

You get the true essence of a Canadian breakfast while camping at a Canadian Shield lake in the summer. To set the scene, it's a pine forest, you've been up since dawn and out fishing for four hours, with just a couple of slices of toast, toasted on the camp fire, and two cups of strong coffee in your stomach. Light the Coleman stove, get out two cast iron frying pans and set to work.

Breakfast is two or three fried eggs each, bacon, fish (catch of the day - perch, pickerel, jackfish or bass), fried bannock with real maple syrup, fried potatoes if there's any left from supper last night, toast, coffee.

Do the dishes, tidy up the camp, crawl into the tent camper and doze the afternoon away waiting for evening fishing.

A Canadian Trucker's Breakfast

And for those on the road in Canada, you can expect the following:

When I was in Canada on holiday some years ago I had a 'trucker's breakfast' in a restaurant one morning. I must have been about 12 but the thing was enormous. You got a huge fry-up with multiple pieces of bacon, a good few eggs, loadsa 'hash browns', etc but the centrepiece was a stack of five pancakes. Now I was expecting English-style, thin and crispy pancakes, but these were thick American, gloopy ones, covered in maple syrup. The whole thing was quite disgusting, but to my credit, I ate it all...

Great international breakfast dishes