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The power of one James Barber: Still making our food world better

Students at SFU’s Centre for Dialogue are given a pretty interesting assignment each semester. To help them understand the power of the individual, they’re given, amongst other things, the mandate to do something over the next four months that will make the world a better place. By semester’s end, they’ve achieved their mission.

One man has been in the news this past week who has definitely made the world a better place in terms of food, its procurement and how we regard same. But rather than just a few months, he made the world a better place over the course of decades.

James Barber died at his home near Duncan on Saturday while reading a cookbook and preparing a pot of soup. He was 84.

“He definitely left this world in a way that he would have wanted to," his widow, Christina Burridge, said in a CBC News report. "But I think he would have been pretty upset about the timing."

Bon vivant, former engineer, writer of cookbooks, restaurant critic, host of CBC TV’s long-running and far-syndicated Urban Peasant show — you could fill up a whole page with Barber’s accomplishments in the world of good cooking and better living.

He came to claim his rightful position in life after complications from a severe leg infection left him in a full body cast and unable to continue in his first incarnation as an engineer. Soon thereafter he was divorced from his then-wife, and found himself living in a bachelor apartment along with a frying pan.

Of all of Barber’s achievements, one really stands out for me — wait, make that two things. One was his ability to get British Columbians to appreciate food that comes from our own backyards and rivers and farms decades before anyone even dreamt of the term “locavore”.

The other was to take good food back from the food snobs: the name “Urban Peasant” wasn’t an idle bit of wit. Barber was sophisticated but down-to-earth enough to deconstruct a simple but elegant dinner into one or two pots (or frying pans) or have you using mascarpone with ease.

He seemed most at home with what I call sincere food well — and even quickly — done. I used to love watching him chop things up and throw them together on his show; he made cooking feel messy and fun, like you were four years old again, mucking about in the sandbox.

So what if some of that handful of chopped parsley falls all over the counter and a bit gets on your shoes? That kind of exuberance and ease gets you out from under the withering yoke of measuring cups and tedious recipes.

Two of the most yellowed and tattered sheets from my recipe box are “Best Eating” columns that Barber did for the Georgia Straight . Both happen to be from 1994.

One is from early summer, in which he laments how hard it is to work — at cooking or anything — when summer’s sun makes lazy drunks of us all. So he suggests two easy things for dinner. One is, appropriately, a Cantonese dish called Drunken Chicken, best started in the morning.

This dish is so weird to make, it’s worth doing just for the fun of it, especially if you have an audience at hand. And don’t wait for summer to do it. Take the best whole chicken you can and “size” it in a saucepan so it fits loosely. Fill the pot with water till it’s an inch over the chicken, then take the chicken out of the pot and stick it in the sink to wait for its grand theatrical preparation and moment of entry. Put a lid on the pot and bring the water to a boil. Add a tablespoon of salt.

Now the fun starts. Stick six or seven or eight knives, forks or spoons into the back cavity of the chicken. No, this isn’t Barber gone mad or a nonsensical ritual — they help to conduct heat inside the chicken and cook it.

So just quit asking questions and do what you’re told and lay them in there and carefully lower the whole cutlery-laden chicken-sculpture into the boiling water. Bring it back to a boil and let it simmer for five minutes, then turn off the heat, put the lid on tight, and forget the whole thing until dinner time eight or ten hours later.

The chicken will be cold and white but exquisitely tender and delicious. Take it out and carve it up into chunks, traditional style, or slice it as you normally would.

This is where the drunken part comes in: Mix equal parts soy sauce, vinegar, oil and whiskey and a couple of good pinches of cayenne pepper in a jar with a lid. Shake it up and serve a saucerful for each person. Dip the chicken in and enjoy.

The other part of that early summer column was how to make your own crème fraiche. Again, this is so easy and good you’ll never use vanilla ice cream again to dress up a simple dessert.

Pour 500 ml of whipping cream into a jar, add 6 tablespoons of buttermilk and stir it vigorously. Cover the jar with a cloth and let it sit, completely undisturbed, at room temperature (but not in direct sunlight, as if that’s a concern this time of year) for 24 hours until the contents have thickened. Use it that night for dessert — it will dress up nearly anything, even sliced bananas or tinned peaches.

But Barber, in his eminently practical way, suggests you use the rest of the buttermilk in a commercial biscuit mix instead of whatever’s recommended. Add some sliced strawberries (in season, of course; don’t forget this column was written in early summer) et voila , a brilliantly easy and much-more-delicious-than-traditional strawberry shortcake.

Crème fraiche is also perfect to stir into a frying pan and make an instant sauce after cooking up a bit of meat or chicken because it doesn’t separate.

My other yellowed and tattered Barber column happens to be from the Georgia Straight edition from this exact week 13 years ago. Don’t coincidences like that send a shiver up your spine?

Barber was always tied in to the seasons and their subsequent human conditions. In this particular column he delivers the straight goods for coping with the Christmas holidays when “... the mean get meaner, the spenders wear out their credit cards…. And the lonely, up to their necks in nobody, run up long-distance bills…”

The only cure, he recommends, is the comfort of chicken soup.

I like to think that that’s exactly what he was making last Saturday in his kitchen in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who has enjoyed — and will continue to enjoy — making and eating many a great meal under the remote tutelage of James Barber.