Provisioning à la David Phillips

Otherwise known as roaming and around and gathering supplies

Tom and I were hoarders before the pandemic. We always have a pantry full of dry pasta and home-canned tomatoes. Squashes scattered about the house for roasting on a winter’s eve. Sauerkraut jarred from previous years and some of this year’s cabbage still fermenting in a crock. We have a freezer full of local lamb and bought on-sale roasts; yogurt containers filled with chicken stock; three kinds of beans from the garden and a shrinking supply of our own peas.

But provisioning, as David Phillips used to say, involves sourcing and collecting the specialty items particular to a region. David used to run the Copper Beech House, a rustic-elegant bed and breakfast in Masset, Haida Gwaii that poet, Susan Musgrave, now owns.

He died in 2010, but I wrote about him and his storied hospitality ages before for Northword Magazine http://northword.ca/summer-2005/lifes-a-beech. “When not looking after guests he spends much of his time ‘provisioning.’ Some would call it shopping, but Phillips travels the islands to seek a special vinegar, a jar of wild huckleberry jam or the fresh fish, crab, prawns, scallops and local venison he loves to serve.”

In another article about being Hungry on Haida Gwaii (for the defunct Hawk Air’s in-flight magazine), I described how he “sautés chanterelle mushrooms until the moisture that drenches the remote archipelago has evaporated away. A self-taught culinary artist, he then stirs them with peaches and locally grown tomatoes in a soup characterized by the mushroom’s nutty snap.”

Tom and I often spend a day out roaming around gathering supplies, and it makes me think of David driving his burgundy mini-van around and stopping to chat with the deer hunters and sea asparagus picklers on the islands. When we lived chanterelles grew close enough to home that I could head out and gather enough for dinner in less time than it took to stand in line in a big-city grocery store. We had friends that took us fishing, or sometimes left crabs, cooked and gutted, in plastic bags at our front door. The abundance on the islands is so well described in Susan Musgrave’s feasting and foraging book, A Taste of Haida Gwaii.

Since moving to Chilliwack on the eastern edge of the Fraser Valley, we’ve discovered a whole new set of specialties. Local blueberries, strawberries and corn! No berries at this time of year, of course, and although the rush before Christmas wasn’t anything like it normally is (COVID restrictions and a 48-hour power outage helped slow things down), we still spent a significant amount of time gathering items for the traditions and indulgences of the season. A masked trip to The Farm House Cheese store and Back Porch coffee roaster in Agassiz, to Sardis’s Town Butcher for the fresh turkey, to Local Harvest for Brussels sprouts. We even made it to Famous Foods in Vancouver for candied peel and currents for Mrs. Holder’s Christmas Cake, (before the new restrictions were set in place).

This year, we missed going to all the Christmas markets, but managed to find some candied nuts and beeswax candles in any case. I love roaming around and gathering things. We still go out of our way to roll past one of our favourite old farms out on Keith Wilson Road. An elderly Portuguese man (maybe Italian?) sells fresh walnuts in the shell from his orchard (he also has figs and quince in season), but his gate isn’t often open anymore. When it is, we’ve beeped and knocked and no one has come to the door. I think about David Phillips and his life-lived-like-a-story. He would have made a better connection. Would have brought something with him, the last time. A jar of Tom’s marmalade? Might have gotten the walnut-seller’s phone number. Had him up to the Copper Beech House for tea?

“The hotel is what you make of it,” he told me all those years ago. If wild strawberries are part of your earthly desires, he would have helped you find them. If you wanted to be left alone, he would have packed up his gear and stayed at the neighbour’s house for a while. As the calendar turns from 2020 to 2021, I hear his words. “You become part of the story.”

I know it's been a weird year and we can only dream of roaming far afield, but here's to all the stories to come and all the provisions to be discovered in 2021!