POSTING #108

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A Memorable Merrickville Character

In 1970 we went for a Sunday afternoon outing with the family, driving along the Rideau Canal, and ending up in a cafe in Merrickville for dinner.

The walls of the cafe were covered with paintings of local scenes from the past and present. The paintings, which were in the style of Grandma Moses---what art experts seem to call 'folk art' or 'naive'---were bright, cheerful, and lively ranging from scenes of  horses and buggies, maple syrup shacks, to a man in an outboard motor boat racing past the Merrickville Block House. The pictures had price tags in the range of $10-15.

When we asked the young server who had painted the pictures she said Jonas Robinson, a retired man who lived just a few streets away.

"If you like the paintings, you should visit him. He has a lot more pictures there."

She lowered her voice a little, "He is a nice man, but a little strange."

I told her that I liked the paintings and was tempted to visit Jonas but said that I wouldn't want to disturb him.

"Go and see him, he won't mind."

I felt a little awkward as I knocked on the door of a small, single-story house.

A tall, erect man, probably in his late 70s, opened the door. I explained that we had seen his paintings at the cafe and were told that he had more paintings that he was prepared to show visitors.

Inviting us in, he settled down in what was obviously his favourite chair, and pointed to dozens of paintings on the walls of the living room, meanwhile asking us questions about ourselves.

He was treating us as guests, not customers.

We decided on five paintings but since, unlike the cafe, they weren't priced, I asked how much they would be.

He took them one-by-one.

Pointing to the first one, he said that he had bought the elaborate, gilt frame at an auction and it had cost him $3. The frame was in poor shape so he had bought some gilt paint to spruce it up, and that had cost $2. After a pause, he asked whether $9 would be too much. I said that would be fine.

For the second one, he said he had had to buy a new tube of red oil paint. He did some silent calculations and asked for $8. I nodded.

As he went through the two next paintings he followed the same kind of calculations---a new brush for that one, wood for the frame for that one, and so on. Both were under $10.

The last one, the same picture we had seen at the cafe of a man in an outboard motor boat on the canal in front of the Block House, he said he couldn't sell. It was the first version of that painting that he had copied many times because it seemed popular with tourists. He wanted to keep the original.

But, he said, he would paint us a copy, if we wished.

"The same scene?', I asked.

"Yes, but I'll have to know which flag you want on the Block House pole. Some people want that new flag (Parliament had approved the maple leaf flag just a few years before) while others prefer the Union Jack".

I had supported the introduction of the new flag but thought that the Union Jack would look more correct beside the venerable Block House.

He asked us to come back in two weeks.

When we returned to pick up the painting, he told us a little more about himself. He had been a house painter until he retired. I seem to recall that he also talked about being clerk of the town at one time, but that memory is hazy.

One winter when he was in Florida a friend saw that he was getting bored and suggested that he try his hand at painting---not houses but pictures. He found that he enjoyed painting the Florida palm trees and old shacks. Soon he was hooked.

Some pictures were painted from his memories of growing up in the Merrickville area while others were painted on site, using an easel.

On the way home from Merrickville after picking up the Block House painting, Pat and I agreed that he was not 'strange', the word used by the cafe server.

Eccentric perhaps.

He was contented, happy with a retirement hobby that he enjoyed. And a hobby that didn't cost him anything. People were kind enough to buy his paintings at a price that paid for the canvas, oils, brushes and frames.

In his view, he had things made.

We re-framed the paintings in a way that we thought showed off the pictures better than the auction-bought frames, but we wonder sometimes if we should have left them in the frames Jonas had selected for them.

The paintings have hung in all the homes we have owned since the 1960s. We have thoroughly enjoyed them, both for the images and for the memories they bring back of our conversations with Jonas.

About seven years ago when I was organizing a study tour of Statistics Canada for a group of Jordanian officials, I called a statistician to arrange a meeting. We set a time for the meeting, which would take place the following day, but she said she might be late because she was driving to Ottawa from her home in Merrickville.

I told her about our purchase of paintings in Merrickville in 1970.

"Oh, you met Jonas Robinson!", she exclaimed.

I said we had bought five of his paintings.

"Lucky you, his paintings are becoming popular and sell for several hundred dollars!".

Searching the Internet recently, I found that in 2005 the Merrickville and District Historical Society had held a retrospective exhibition of Jonas's paintings. Local residents loaned some 50 paintings for the exhibition.

The Society's Newsletter of Spring 2005 discusses how the man who was often considered ' loveably eccentric' became famous partly due to his 'discovery' in the 1970s by Mike Laurie, an Ottawa dealer in antiques and folk art. The article reports:

"He (Laure) first saw a Jonas painting in a shop window in Ottawa in the early 70’s. Struck by its simple charm he tracked down the painter to Merrickville. Here he befriended Jonas and began collecting his work and was instrumental in having Jonas Robinson’s work included in the Ottawa Canadian Museum of Civilization collection."

The article goes on to say that the nephew of Jonas Robinson, Mervin Robinson, spoke to the overflow crowd at the opening of the retrospective exhibition.

" Mervin Robinson indicated Jonas would not only have been amazed but embarrassed at the present prices achieved for his work. Said nephew Mervin, “They are currently selling between $300 to $600 each” if you can find one. When the audience was asked by Mike Laurie how many folks had pictures by Jonas Robinson, practically everybody in the room raised their hands. With new knowledge of his reputation, many who acquired his work for the whimsy of the painter as well as the art, find themselves with not only treasured, but valuable remembrances of this memorable Merrickville “Character”.

As his nephew said, Jonas might have been "amazed but embarrassed at the present prices achieved by his work" but I think he would also have been thrilled---in a quiet, rural Ontario gentlemanly kind of way---at all the pleasure his paintings have given.

Here is the Hunter collection of Jonas Robinson's works (click on the images to enlarge them):

A typical scene of old-time Ontario, showing neighbours, homes, horses and a church.

One of Jonas's Florida painting

This is the picture that Jonas painted especially for us. Note the Union Jack

This is the signature on the Block House picture, nothing flamboyant, just his name and the date---printed I think with a ball-point pen.

A farm home and barn in the winter. I like the way Jonas captured a cold, winter sky.

Jonas called this painting "Sugar Time".

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See you on April 3rd for Posting #109 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.

POSTING #107

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To Malaysia with Love

In Posting #104  I told about visiting a casino in Malaysia's Genting Highland in 1992 while I was conducting a training course for senior managers of that country's employment service.

During an advance visit to plan the course, my Malaysian contacts and I agreed that the final dinner of the two-week course should be special. It should offer foods from the three ethnic groups that make up Malaysia, the native Malays, the Chinese and the Indians.

The Malaysians suggested that there should also be a typically Canadian dish. I agreed.

When I got back to Canada from the planning trip, Pat and I tried to decide which 'Canadian' dish we would offer.

Leaving poutine aside, there was not a great choice.

As a digression, some of us make fun of poutine because of its grayish gravy of unknown origin and its gummy cheese, but the chefs in one of  Niagara-on-the-Lake's best winery restaurants have drawn inspiration from the humble dish and are now offering a lunchtime poutine dish made of fries (of course) covered with a lobster sauce full of generous chunks of lobster, with a topping of  broiled old Canadian cheddar and fresh cheese curds. A fussy friend said it was wonderful!

Back to business!

When I was still with the Federal Government I sometimes had to help plan the menus for banquets at which foreign VIP would be honoured. We wanted to offer them a unique Canadian culinary experience but soon found that the distinctively Canadian foods boiled down to Arctic Char, Winnipeg Goldeyes, Fiddle Heads, and Maple Syrup.

Slim pickings!

As I remember them, the meals were never very good. They were Canadian, but they were boring.

Could Pat and I come up with something better for our Malaysian friends?

The dish had to be something we could carry on the plane to Malaysia, which ruled out Arctic Char, Goldeyes and Fiddleheads and it couldn't contain any pork products.

After a great deal of thought, we had an outside-the-box idea.

Butter tarts---the treat that is not found anywhere else in the world!

The idea of butter tarts had a special appeal to me because Kenilworth, a tiny hamlet a few miles north of my home town of Arthur, seems to have declared itself the spiritual capital of butter tarts. Every so often Kenilworth has a butter tart festival and enthusiasts from across Canada and from some enlightened pockets in the US make a pilgrimage to this butter tart Mecca. When the festival is not on, the hamlet organizes a Butter Tart Trail Tour (now there's alliteration for you) that lets tart lovers sample the best of Canadian tarts from different communities in North Wellington.

We decided that we would carry two pounds of vegetable shortening (no lard) with us to Malaysia. Pat would then buy the other ingredients in a market and try to sweet-talk the pastry chef at our hotel into letting her use  part of his kitchen to make tarts for the special dinner.

The choice of a recipe could have been problematic.

Lovers of butter tarts can all agree that the pastry has to be flaky and the filling has to come to just below the top of the pastry shell---nothing worse than leathery pastry or a skimpily filled tart.

But there is a dispute about the perfect consistency of the fillings in butter tarts. Some people like the filling so runny that it dribbles in a sticky stream down one's chin. Others like the filling so stiff that it has to be chewed.

We were lucky because Pat's Aunt Margaret (Margaret Pirrie) had a recipe in which the filling was always in the perfect mid-point between the two extremes, firm enough that it didn't dribble but soft and succulent.

Sorry if I have offended any of you who may have a different view of the ideal butter tart, but it is clear that this is the tart that true connoisseurs (aka Pat and I) prefer.

So, armed with Aunt Margaret's recipe and two pounds of Crisco, we set off for Malaysia.

At the hotel, Pat explained her plan to the pastry chef. He studied the recipe and then said he would make the tarts for the dinner himself, but there would be a condition. Pat would have to let him add Aunt Margaret's recipe to his repertoire of recipes.

Pat quickly agreed and handed over the recipe and the Crisco.

On the night of the dinner each of the course participants had a perfect Canadian butter tart.

I would like to be able to say that the course members loved the tarts and marveled at the sophistication of Canadian cuisine.

But I can't say that.

The truth is that the participants didn't like them very much.

As one of the Malaysian fellows explained to me, "We don't like things that are too sweet. We like things that have kick."

That made sense. Malaysians have wonderful tropical fruit---papayas, mangoes, pineapples, bananas, etc---that come to the table truly 'tree-ripened' and naturally sweet. They hadn't (at least in 1992) acquired our taste for super sweet desserts.

So our attempt to introduce butter tarts to Malaysia wasn't a great success.

But I have this fantasy.

An important international meeting is being held at Genting Highland---it is a popular place for such conferences---and the Canadian Minister of Finance or perhaps of Foreign Affairs finds on the dessert plate, along with the chocolate bombe (or whatever),  a perfect butter tart. She or he, starts with surprise and pleasure and looks around, and sees standing in the doorway a smiling pastry chef, who bows modestly.

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One of the participants, who was from Penang State in the northwest coast of the Malaysian Peninsula, invited us to visit him after the course.

After consulting some tour books we decided to take the train from Kuala Lumpur to Penang (about 370 kilometres)  so that we could get a feel for the Malaysian jungle. When I told one of the members of the course---a woman who came from a wealthy family---that we were going by train, she became alarmed, "Oh no, the train is dirty you must go by taxi, or fly."

"But we're going first class on the train," I countered.

"That just means the cockroaches are twice as big as the ones in second class", she responded.

We did in fact go by train and had a splendid view of the jungle and of rubber, banana, and palm oil plantations.

The menus were a little fly-specked but we didn't see any cockroaches.

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Our host gave us  a very pleasant tour of beautiful Penang. We could see why Kipling, Maugham and other writers had raved about this 'Jewel of the Orient'. As the tour ended the host asked if we would like to see 'a nutmeg factory'.

Ever ready for an adventure we agreed, and he drove us up into hills outside Georgetown, the main city in Penang, to a farm that had a number of open-air buildings in which the fleshy nutmeg fruit were being processed.

Our host gave us a short lecture on the nutmeg. At the centre of the fruit is the nutmeg seed pod that is covered with a coating that is removed and ground into the spice, mace. The 'nut' that is left becomes the nutmeg that we all have on our spice shelves.

Meanwhile, the fleshy outer part of the fruit is cooked, aged in sugar syrup, and dried in the sun. There is a Malaysian name for it but we just called it crystallized nutmeg. 

We fell in love with it!

It has a rich, strong nutmeg flavour and is sweet but not too sweet. We bought many packages to carry back to Canada.

We ate it right from the package as a kind of candy but I understand that some people use it in cooking, especially in desserts.

There was a Chinese store on Somerset Street in Ottawa that used to stock it but the store changed hands and the new owner, who was probably from Hong Kong (where crystallized nutmeg seems to be unknown) rather than Malaysia or Singapore, stopped carrying it.

Friends brought us a few packages from a trip to Singapore some years ago but since then we have been without the flavourful treat.

I have searched for it in the Asian stores that have been springing up around Toronto but without success.

My plan now is to write to the President's Choice people and tell them that if they want a culinary scoop they should send a buyer to Penang and feature crystallized nutmeg in one of their upcoming PC Reports.

As an indication of my commitment to the suggestion, I will even volunteer to  go along  (no finder's fee, just expenses) to make sure the buyer finds the right nutmeg factory!

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See you on March 27th for Posting #108 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.

POSTING #106

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Homebrew in Harrogate

You may have read about the Obamas serving homebrew at their Super Bowl party, a Honey Ale made by their chefs using honey collected from a beehive on the south lawn of the White House. Guests had a choice of commercial beers from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin---home states of the competing Super Bowl teams---or the White House Honey Ale.

I know which I would have chosen.

It makes me thirsty, just thinking about.

And it all reminded me of my first venture into the making of homebrew.

It was 1962 and we were living in a small, two hundred year old Georgian cottage in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

I was exploring and enjoying the tastes of British bitters and ales, so different from the bland Labatt's and Molson brews that we drank at university, but I kept running into people who told me that the commercial products couldn't compare with the 'real thing', homebrewed British beer.

Factory-made beer, they argued, was homogenized, pasteurized and otherwise stripped of its British character.

There were many beer-makers in Britain at the time, some of them getting very scientific with precise analysis of the ingredients, and careful control of sugar content and of things like the exact temperature of mashing and fermentation. Their recipes all called for the use of a hydrometer---more about that later on.

It all sounded a lot like  a chemistry class.

I opted instead for a beer recipe I found in an ancient Yorkshire  cookbook. I would be producing a true Yorkshire beer, the kind that for centuries had sustained that county's  hardworking coal miners and farm labourers.

Soon I had my first brew fermenting away in a plastic dustbin (translation: a brand-new, white garbage pail). As the beer fermented, I scrounged a collection of  20 quart beer bottles of the kind in use in Britain at the time, heavy brown bottles with a screw-in top (click here for a picture of  one of those bottles  

One of the joys---and frustrations---of old recipes is their damnable imprecision. They use expressions like,  "a pinch of this', "butter the size of an egg", "beat until thick", "bake until done", and so on.

My beer recipe said that I should bottle the beer when "the fermentation has finished'. There was a warning that I shouldn't leave the bottling too long or the beer would "go off'.

The problem is that beer is a living thing and fermentation doesn't totally stop at some point in time, leaving a placid, calm surface---there is always some activity, some bubbles. I found it hard to gauge when the fermentation was sufficiently complete to permit bottling.

Finally, I made an executive decision that the time had come to bottle the beer. I carefully added a spoonful of sugar syrup to each bottle to provide the food for a little fermentation in the bottle that would provide for a good head when the beer was poured. Then I siphoned the beer into the bottles, tightly screwed in the tops and placed the bottles on shelves in a little pantry off our kitchen.

And started to wait for the two or three weeks until the beer in the bottles was clear and  ready to drink.

Then, in the middle of one night there was a suspicious noise from the kitchen. Pat was pregnant at the time and needed her sleep so I quietly put on some clothes and went down to investigate.

I was met by foaming beer running along the stone floor of the kitchen with shards of glass everywhere.

Oh, oh!

After I cleaned up the mess, I sat down and tried to think what to do.

It was clear that I had bottled the beer too soon, that there was sugar that hadn't been converted to alcohol and in adding sugar syrup I had created the conditions for a lethal pressure of carbon dioxide in the bottles.

That's where a hydrometer comes in.

I am sure you used an hydrometer in high school science classes but just to refresh your memory, it is a glass cylinder with a bulb at the bottom weighted down with mercury or lead. The cylinder floats in a beaker of liquid and measures its specific gravity.

It is not to be confused with a hygrometer---but let's not go there.

In beer making, the hydrometer tells whether the sugar has all been converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide. And whether it is safe to bottle.

So I had 19 bottles of over-pressurized beer sitting on the shelves in the pantry. Or in today's parlance, nineteen IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices), or perhaps, more accurately, 19 UED's (Unimprovised Explosive Devices).

How to disarm them?

I decided that the only thing to do was to take each bottle gingerly---very gingerly---to the kitchen sink, unscrew the top and let the beer flow out, and down the drain.

But I would need to wear some protective gear, just in case one of the bottles decided to go 'kaboom'.

My improvised anti-explosion equipment consisted of a hat, sunglasses, leather gloves and my leather Arthur Tigers Hockey Team jacket, which I wore back to front. (While in high school, I had played as a left winger with the Tigers and after a particularly successful season there had been enough box-office money left to buy us all jackets.)

I wish I had a picture of that outfit!

One-by-one, I took the bottles to the sink, loosened the tops, turned my head to the side as beer sprayed  every which way,  and once the pressure was released,  poured the beer down the sink.

There were no explosions but for a while the kitchen smelled like an old Ontario beer parlour (without the cigarette smoke, of course!).

After that experience I decided that I would turn my back on old Yorkshire recipes and follow more modern recipes. The taste might be a little lacking in character but the process would be a whole lot safer with the new hydrometer I had bought and learned to use.

I continued brewing beer and using the screw-in top bottles during the rest of our stay in Britain and for many years in Canada (I brought a good number of the beer bottles home with us.)

With the large number of excellent craft breweries in Ontario one no longer needs to 'brew it yourself' to get a beer that has the authentic taste of pungent hops and rich malt. 

I got rid of my bottles, and my hydrometer.

I am no longer a home-brewer, but the article about the White House ale started me thinking.

My brother, Jim, and his wife, Fannie, raise bees and produce a superb honey.

Doesn't "Hunter Honey Ale" have a nice ring to it?

But I would have to buy a hydrometer.

And I'm really busy at the moment.

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See you on March 20th for Posting #107 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.

POSTING #105

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Some Holiday Highlights

In Postings 102 and 103 I took you along with us on our drives to and from Florida. Here are some stories about other things that happened during our holiday.

Apparently Not as Old as I Look

As I mentioned in Posting #102, we found that all the restaurants were closed on Christmas Eve in Columbus, Ohio so we had to fall back on our emergency supply of canned baked beans.

I thought it might be good to have some beer to wash down the beans---in my experience beans can use a lot of washing down.

A local service station had a food section with a selection of beers  (the convenience of it, no need to find "The Beer Store"---are any Ontario politicians listening?)

I took a largish can of German beer to the cashier.

"ID", she said.

"What?", I asked.

"I need to see some photo ID."

"You can't be serious."

"I can't sell beer without ID."

I handed over my driver's license. She made sure I was over 21, and returned the license.

"That will be $4.70".

I handed over the money and she gave me my beer.

It all reminded me of a column by Bill Smiley.

(For those of you who don't recognize the name here is an excerpt from an Albertan weekly newspaper, the Stettler Independent in February 1961: "Canada’s favourite humorist, Bill Smiley, whose column appears each week in this newspaper, has won the distinction of being syndicated in more papers than any other Canadian columnist. He is being read in 111 newspapers throughout the country.")

When Bill was about my age (somewhere north of three score years and ten), he wrote a column about problems he was having reconciling his chronological and psychological ages.

He said he felt 18, and thought he looked 19.

I understand that.

I feel 18---most days---and think I look, perhaps not 19, maybe 29.

Anyway, it was kind of satisfying to know that in Ohio I had to be 'carded'.

The Most Doggone Thing

We were stopped at a light on the Tamiami Trail, a busy multi-lane road---which we learned gets its name from the fact that it links Tampa and Miami---somewhere south of  our rented condo in Bonita Springs.

Two lanes over from us was a man on a motorcycle with a dog belted to the pillion seat behind him. The terrier-sized dog was wearing goggles and a cream-coloured helmet that was about the size of half a coconut shell.

As the light turned green, we set off, staying level with the motorcycle so we could study the dog.

He, or she, was obviously enjoying the ride, leaning out from side to side to look around the driver to see what was coming. When the biker leaned to the right to exit from Tamiami, the dog leaned to the right as well.

It was interesting that although the dog had a helmet, the biker was just wearing a bandana, tied tightly around his head.

We were impressed  with the biker for protecting his pet with a helmet but couldn't help wondering why he didn't think his own head deserved the same protection.

A very unscientific survey that we conducted later suggested that more than half of Florida's bikers do wear helmets, but that still leaves a lot who don't.

By the way, some Google research tells me that in biker circles the pillion is sometimes referred to, vulgarly, as the 'bitch seat' or 'bitch pad'. I suppose with a dog occupying the pillion  seat there is a 50/50 chance that the slang terms are accurate and therefore not vulgar.

I have also learned that bikers sometimes refer to the bandana as a 'doo-rag'.

It always amazes me how much information is packed into each Posting of this Letter from Virgil blog.

What an education the blog provides---it's better than reading the New York Times!

Tale of Two Trucks

On another occasion, we were again stopped at a light on Tamiami---it is a wide road with a fascinating jumble of stores and restaurants but it does have a lot of stop lights.

We were behind a pick-up truck that had a poster covering the back window of the cab, one of those see-through-from-the-inside signs. The poster had a picture of a baby with blond hair and blue eyes and the slogan, "Every foetus is a baby."

On the tail-gate there was another anti-abortion sticker, "If you are pregnant, you have a baby", along with a sticker that claimed that the driver had a "Terrorist Hunting License". There were also some decals of 'pretend' bullet holes.

The driver kept revving his engine and the special mufflers responded with a throaty roar as though the driver was impatient to be off to 'get hisself'  an abortionist, terrorist, or some other -ist (perhaps a monogamist, who knows!). When the light turned green, he tore off, mufflers raging and rubber smoking.

Later that same day, we pulled into a space in the parking lot of the renowned Naples Botanical Garden, to attend an open-air jazz concert. Beside us was another pick-up, of about the same size as the first truck. This pick-up had only two stickers, one that said, "I believe in evolution, not God", and the other that proclaimed "Hate is not a family value".

Two trucks, two takes on life!

Proud Hockey Parent

While visiting an information centre in Southern Florida, we met a volunteer who when she heard we were from Canada told us that her son had once played for an NHL team in eastern Canada. 

She then told a story about her son that I would like to tell but I will change some of the details to protect her privacy.

The son who had been playing with an NHL team in the southern US was suddenly told that he had been traded to a Canadian team and that he had only two days to report to his new team.

He called his parents, who lived at that time in New England, and told them about the trade and asked if they could help him. He had no winter clothes with him and wondered if they could drive him and some clothes to Canada.

He flew to his home, and helped his parents load warm clothing into the family van. They set off for the border with the mother and father taking turns driving so their son could sleep in the back---he had to play the next night with his new team.

The parents were worried about whether they would have trouble with Canadian Customs but once they had explained the situation, the officer waved them through.

After several seasons in Canada, the son was traded again, this time to another team in the southern US.

Looking back on the experience, the woman chuckled, "I know every word of your national anthem---I used to sing along with the Canadians".

The son has retired from the NHL and is now involved with other ex-players in some business ventures.

I said that she must be proud of her son.

"We are but you know", she continued. "playing in the NHL is not all glamour."

I thought of all the times the parents must have taken their son to cold rinks in the early morning as he worked his way up from Peewee (and before!) to the NHL

I am sure that being the parent of an NHL player is not all glamour, either.

I think she enjoyed telling the stories about her son, and we enjoyed hearing them.

They gave us some rare insights into what goes on behind the scenes in a hockey career.

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See you on March 13th for Posting #106 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.