On The Night Table of Brian Young

July 2009

For me, summer leisure turns around reading good books, visiting stands for local fruit and vegetables, and motoring jaunts of history tourism. Paul-Louis Martin brings these pastimes together in fascinating fashion in Les fruits du Québec: Histoire et traditions des douceurs de la table (Sillery: Septentrion, 2002). He explains the New France origins of the Montmorency cherry, the Savignac pear, and the Montreal melon and their replacement in the central Canadian diet by cheaper imported food.

Martin includes ancestral recipes for blueberry pudding and reminds us of the centrality of a barrel of prunes as a laxative on the long sea voyages from France to Canada. An ethnologist, Martin has put his passion for ecology and history into action, opening his ancestral home and Damascus plum orchard, La Maison de la prune, in Saint-André-de-Kamouraska in Quebec’s Lower Saint Lawrence region as an eco-museum.

I like to scatter coffee-table books around the porch for summer thumbing by kids between hot dogs and by city-dwellers driven inside by mosquitoes. My favourite this year is René Villeneuve¹s Lord Dalhousie Patron and Collector (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2008) and in French as Lord Dalhousie: Mécène et collectionneur).

Governors in Canada generally get a bad press synonymous in our histories with insensitivity (Durham), racism (Craig), or snobbery (Massey). Drawing from works in a travelling exhibition on Lord Dalhousie (Ottawa, Halifax, Saint John), Villeneuve shows his profound effect on Canadian art, architecture, public monuments, and collecting during his service as Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia and Governor of Upper and Lower Canada in the years before 1828. Richly illustrated with materials from Scotland and Canada, this is cultural history from a new perspective.