100% Cowichan

Sighs of contentment rise and fall in steady waves as one score and 10 fortunate souls tuck into the fruits of the Cowichan Valley. A collection of leading chefs from this rapidly emerging culinary region has pooled its talents to raise funds for Providence Farm, a 160-hectare spread in the Vancouver Island countryside east of Duncan. For a century, the historic property was run as a boarding school by the Sisters of St. Ann. Today it serves as a therapeutic retreat for those with physical and mental disabilities, where a central part of community life is horticultural therapy. The organic produce sold at the Duncan Farmer’s Market and Providence’s on-site store is the result of willing hands sunk deep into healing soil. In fact, the crisp greens that follow the appetizer platters of Denman Island oysters were plucked from the ground here minutes earlier. As one wag at our convivial table puts it, the salad is a classic example of the “100-metre” diet.

Chef, cookbook author and master of ceremonies Bill Jones interrupts the luncheon to toast Providence’s worthy activities and applaud the largesse of its paying customers. He then turns to the half-dozen chefs in starched whites arrayed beside him. Brad Boisvert of Amusé Bistro in the village of Shawnigan Lake takes a bow for the rabbit terrine now being served. The roasted butternut squash soup in the on-deck circle is courtesy of Matt Horn, chef at Cowichan Bay landmark The Masthead. Fatima Da Silva from Bistro 161 in Duncan smiles briefly at the mention of her name, then vanishes back into the kitchen to continue preparing her contribution – seared duck breast with blackberry demi-glaze. Welcome, in other words, to a high-end slow-food Cowichan feast. All the ingredients are harvested locally from land and sea and paired with wines from such fine valley vineyards as Averill Creek and Blue Grouse. Glasses are clinked and laughter bubbles up freely, but our attention remains squarely on the white china plates before us.

In the burgeoning world of culinary and agritourism, the Cowichan – tucked between Victoria and Nanaimo in the fertile lands on either side of the Trans-Canada – is an upstart newcomer coming on like gangbusters. While retaining its blue-collar, dirt-under-fingernail roots, this region has undergone a shift in the last 20 years as the forestry and fishing industries flounder and a new wave of farmers, restaurateurs, vintners and foodies reinvent what has traditionally been a pit stop for fast food and gasoline. A generation of daytrippers weaned on the Food Channel and equipped with discriminating palates now detours off the highway here to track down fresh-from-the-field veggies, artisan-baked goods, free-range meats and top-notch wine and cider in such pocket-sized communities as Cobble Hill, Cowichan Bay, Chemainus and Glenora.

“Bring your own shopping bags and an empty car trunk,” advises Kathy McAree, organizer of B.C.’s first culinary tourism conference early this year and a driving force in marketing local foods and wines through her Victoria-based Travel with Taste epicurean tours. “British Columbians are realizing how lucky they are. Rather than travelling to France or Italy, they’re now taking advantage of the amazing food scenes right in their own backyard.”

Fresh farmgate eggs and seasonal produce are available around many Cowichan corners, if not quite every one just yet. In the north of the valley near Ladysmith, herb-laced jellies can be purchased at Hazelwood Herb Farm and berry-laden marmalade at Yellow Point Cranberries. At the Victoria end of the Cowichan, in Cobble Hill, the tasting bar at Merridale Estate Cidery is routinely jammed with tipplers, while antibiotic-free turkey is on the takeaway menu at Mill Bay’s Stonefield Farm. The hub of the region is Duncan, and there’s nowhere better to take the local pulse than at its award-winning farmers’ market, fractured by small-town politics but thriving nonetheless on Saturday mornings in two locations: one in Duncan’s revitalized downtown core, the other up the highway at the Forestry Discovery Centre.

Certainly the Cowichan isn’t the only food-centric region in B.C. – not with emerging slow-food scenes in Pemberton, Vanderhoof, Nelson, the Gulf Islands and other pockets of the Island (notably the Comox Valley and Saanich Peninsula). But this fertile valley, protected by a horseshoe of mountains from the storms that batter the far West Coast, is both easily accessible to the province’s largest population centres and unique in its concentration of producers, chefs and culinary visionaries. “The Cowichan has the most disproportionate number of food-aware people of anywhere in Canada,” states Heidi Noble, one of the new-breed cooks and vintners making an international name for herself in the southern Okanagan. “We’ve got some amazing gems out here, but everyone’s spread out across the great divide between Osoyoos and the Shuswap. By comparison, the Cowichan is incredibly compact. It’s a great place to vacation if you want to sample amazing food and wine right from the source without piling on the mileage.”

Wineries have been key to the Cowichan’s character since Zanatta bottled its first harvests in 1990. With 10 vineyards now in production, the valley has been dubbed “the new Napa” by excitable tourism reps and headline writers – just like the Okanagan, Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, Quebec’s Eastern Townships and practically every other emergent grape-growing region north of California. Yet the Cowichan stands alone as “Canada’s Provence,” a widely quoted epithet coined by the late James Barber, the beloved food writer and ebullient host of television’s The Urban Peasant who passed away last December at his Cowichan farm with a pot of chicken stock bubbling on the stove.
As with chefs Mara Jernigan and Bill Jones before him and writer/CBC broadcaster Don Genova shortly after, Barber was among an influx of influential food mavens drawn to the Cowichan by its charm, upside potential and the fact that a small farm holding could then be purchased for not much more than a two-bedroom Vancouver condo. Shortly after planting his first garlic bulbs here in 2001, Barber coined his catchphrase for the valley in a newspaper column, and it has stuck as the area continues to grapple for a marketable identity.

“It’s the only region in Canada with what the meteorologists call a ‘maritime Mediterranean climate,’ ” explains Jones, a French-trained gourmet chef with a quick wit who leads cooking workshops at his Deerholme Farm. Like the fabled southeast region of France, the Cowichan enjoys the kind of dry summers and mild, wet winters ideal for a year-round growing season. Cowichan itself is a Coast Salish word meaning “the warm land” or “land warmed by the sun.” Lavender, sage, rosemary and basil winter nicely here, notes Jones, just as they do in Provence.

Not everyone is fond of the comparison. Jernigan is a pioneer in the West Coast Slow Food movement who, a decade ago, kick-started the Vancouver Island edition of Feast of Fields – the leading foodfest among a growing number of local seasonal events. She feels the ‘P’ word creates unduly high expectations. “I don’t think we need to be imitative,” she says from her kitchen at Fairburn Farm, where she teaches her “field to table” cooking philosophy (read: fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic) during popular culinary boot camps that range from a few hours to five days. “Besides,” Jernigan adds with a laugh, “I haven’t noticed any olive trees around here lately.”

Sinclair Philip, a champion of culinary tourism locally and co-owner of the internationally celebrated Sooke Harbour House, doesn’t like the comparison game either. “We live in a beautiful part of the world with its own character and charm. We don’t have the history or culture of Provence, but then again we’re not overrun with tourists either. We need to develop our own reputation and personality. Every new farmgate and restaurant serving local food is testament to the fact that it’s happening.”

Postcard-perfect Cowichan Bay is a good starting point for understanding the valley both historically and in terms of what rates – by my rather proletarian, non-foodie standards – as superior comfort food: chewy ciabatta, other- worldly ginger cookies, cheese so runny it “gallops” (again citing the words of James Barber) and real-deal homemade ice cream. A rainbow arches above wind-lashed waves as the cheesemaking Abbotts hold court in their waterfront lunch spot, Hilary’s Cheese Company, renowned for its homemade soup and rich assortment of creamy, blue-veined cheeses. “Not long ago this little community was in major decline,” says Patty Abbott, a former banker and landscaper who was pulled irresistibly into the cheese business when her husband, Hilary, mastered the fine art of transforming goat and cow’s milk into thick rounds of aromatic fromage. Storefronts were boarded up. The hotel at the top of the hill was closed and the marina was in disrepair. “Now the challenge is to retain the charm of the place without it being overrun with cars and parking issues.”

Today, Cowichan Bay’s colourful main street bustles with life and retail activity as visitors and locals browse the shops and stroll the boardwalk. The renaissance can be credited in large part to Hilary’s Cheese Co., True Grain Breads and the Udder Guy’s Ice Cream Parlour. “I think we’re giving people
in the Cowichan and beyond good reason to visit on a regular and even daily basis,” says True Grain’s Jonathan Knight as he expertly shapes raw dough into plump rolls ready for the ovens of his natural organic bakery. After clocking his apprenticeship in North Vancouver, Knight, 33, cycled across Canada and ran a bakery on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island before setting up shop here in May 2004. Most mornings he and a trio of fellow bakers are submerged in fragrant heat and clouds of flour by 5 a.m.; the first baguettes are steaming fresh when his doors open three hours later. Knight currently grinds heirloom Red Fife wheat imported from Saskatchewan. In keeping with his dedication to locally sourced ingredients, however, he is encouraging Island farmers such as Metchosin’s Tom Henry to experiment with crops of their own. A house special called the 30 Mile Loaf uses Henry’s first batch of wheat from last summer, and a Three Mile Loaf will be a blackboard favourite if Providence Farm follows through on its plans to grow wheat.

True Grain is on the site of what was once “Cow” Bay’s general store at the close of the Victorian era. The deep-water port was one of the first landfalls in the area for European settlers in the 1850s, reports Kathryn Gagnon, curator of the Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives. One of the earliest local farmers, William Chalmers Duncan, arrived on the H.M.S. Hecate in August 1862 with a group of men who came to the valley in hopes of taming the wilderness. Though the task of clearing the thickly forested land proved too arduous for most, a few pioneering families with the names Dougan, Drink- water, Chisholm, Bell and Alexander did build cabins and plant crops to feed themselves and their cattle. The local population grew in earnest with the arrival of the Esquimalt & Nanaimo rail line in the 1880s. Experiments with tobacco crops failed, but dairy farming took hold. The Cowichan Creamery was producing award-winning butter by the turn of the century, and milk shipped from Duncan’s Station (as Duncan was  then known) to Victoria and Nanaimo was considered superior to any supplied by other regions because of the Cow- ichan’s lush grass and mild climate, says  Gagnon.

A handful of those pioneering farms are also pillars in today’s slow-food scene. Mara Jernigan’s culinary guesthouse is located on 53-hectare Fairburn Farm, a circa-1884 spread where owners Darryl and Anthea Archer operate Canada’s only water-buffalo dairy despite a rough early ride from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (which dictated that the couple’s first 18 buffalo be destroyed for fear of mad-cow disease). It’s also possible to step back into history while negotiating the rutted road into Cowichan Bay Farm. Poultry farmer Lyle Young’s grandparents first settled the acreage in the 1920s, and the past is charmingly visible in its vintage barns and farmhouse, rusted tools nailed to the sides of outbuildings and classic automobiles housed in open-door garages. Sheep browse in the close-cropped fields and mud-spackled geese honk loudly as visitors pull up to the self-serve farm store to purchase frozen chickens and homemade sausages.

Young’s pasture-raised meat is also routinely served in the valley’s finer restaurants, most of which have hung out their shingles in recent years. Bill Jones isn’t kidding when he says burgers and below-par Chinese food were effectively the only local dine-out options back in the 1990s. Now there’s a consistently packed brewpub in downtown Duncan (the Craig Street Brew Pub) and such further-afield gems as the waterfront Genoa Bay Café, elegant Steeples Restaurant (in the former home of the Shawnigan Lake United Church) and little-known Old Road Inn, a B&B on the road to Cowichan Lake that serves “splendid, market-fresh meals,” according to Hilary Abbott.

The area’s one Relais & Châteaux hotel, the Aerie, has long utilized local food under its former executive chef Christophe Letard. His successor, Castro Boateng, is equally committed to all things fresh and seasonal. “Food is an art and an adventure for chefs, but we are indebted to our suppliers – they are the real heroes,” Boateng tells me one evening in the hotel’s restaurant, before serving a six-course repast that begins with a crab salad topped with basil foam and ends several dazzling hours later with a slow-poached apple from Hummingbird Haven Farm. The farm, a few minutes south on the Malahat from the hotel, was once a hobby for former auto mechanic Dick Clement and his wife, Georgie. Now, like other ambitious retirees in the region, the couple are busier than ever with a .8-hectare garden in which they grow spinach, chard, parsnips, beans, onions and heirloom tomatoes. For his part, Boateng particularly enjoys trekking into the forest with Brother Michael, a Benedictine monk at the nearby Sole Dao Monastery with an uncanny nose for chanterelle, pine, hedgehog and lobster mushrooms. Hotel guests can forage alongside the fungi specialists, then learn how to prepare their finds with lessons from the chef back at the Aerie. (See page 20 for more on Brother Michael’s mushroom tours.)

The other hotel on southern Vancouver Island routinely cited in the pages of Condé Nast Traveler is located just outside the Cowichan. But most food critics in the know cite the Sooke Harbour House’s Sinclair Philip as the regional scene’s prime mover for the past quarter-century. “Sinclair and [his wife] Frédérique have supported local producers from the get-go, purchased local wines in volume and generally brought credence and an international profile to the region,” is how Jernigan puts it.

Seated beside a crackling fireplace in his Sooke House art-strewn restaurant, the BC Restaurant Hall of Famer with a Ph.D in political science and an omnivore’s passion for everything from fine wine to karate serves up an hour of rapid-fire home truths. “Good things are happening here, no question, but there are growing pains,” says Philip, wrapped snugly in a jacket he picked up at Feast of Fields a few years back. “The salmon runs are drastically diminished. The dairy industry is in serious decline. Our aging farmers are wondering why they should keep working 70-hour weeks when they can sell their land to a developer and become overnight millionaires. Ten years ago we produced 10 per cent of the food we ate on Vancouver Island; today it’s six per cent. So I’m both optimistic and pessimistic about the future. I’d be a lot more positive if the government stopped focusing on promoting single crops and began to genuinely support independent small-scale farmers.”

But when the conversation shifts to food, Philip waxes poetic about what’s emerging from the Cowichan, Salt Spring Island and southern Vancouver Island as a whole. (Right outside his doors, in fact, is Whiffin Spit, where seaweed diva Diane Bernard harvests the ocean for unusual ingredients.) “The difference between 15 years ago and today is that you’ll find local food served and promoted in many top-end restaurants, such as Zambri’s and Brasserie L’École in Victoria,” he says. “There’s a growing cachet about the word ‘Cowichan.’ And the reputation is solid because a large, enthusiastic group of dedicated people are working incredibly hard to establish slow food as a way of life in this province.”

Pulling apart one of Jonathan Knight’s crusty rolls  at the Providence Farm chef’s luncheon brings back images of the young baker hefting large sacks of grain to his mill – hard, physical labour in pursuit of artisan delights that require little effort to devour. We’re having the kind of grand, bubbly time that is commonplace when the valley’s epicurean set gathers in one place, and as plates and glasses appear and vanish in seamless succession, a warm glow suffuses the room. Local food served with skill and love from field to table with creativity, skill and a profound love of the earth. It may be more than just a recipe for a green and leafy organic future.

ACTIVE INGREDIENTS Self-guided roadtrip: Vancouver Island Tourism (vancouverisland. travel), Tourism Victoria (tourismvictoria. com), Cowichan Tourism (cowichan.net/visit/ index.htm) and BC Culinary Tourism Society (bcculinarytourism.com). Guided roadtrip: Travel with Taste Tours (250-385-1527; travel withtaste.com). Contact info for events, accommodations and producers in this article: bcaa.com/cowichan. Serving temperature  Low. Contemplate & Serve An Edible

Journey: Exploring the Island’s Fine Food, Farms & Vineyards, by Elizabeth Levinson (TouchWood Editions, 2003; $23.95). l  –J.B.