Native peoples of Canada have used many berries, bark, roots, needles, and grasses to prevent scurvy among their own people (and to cure it in the case of the newcomers). If left untreated, scurvy is a deadly disease caused by the lack of vitamin C in the diet. Over the years, the First Nations’ remedies have included white pine sweet inner bark and needles, hemlock bark, the inner bark of black spruce, cranberries, the pale red berries of the false Solomon’s seal of the West Coast, black-currants, gooseberries, the seed pods or hips of the wild rose, and scurvy grass, which grows in northern Canada from the Yukon to Newfoundland.[4]
In July 1606, Jean de Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt, who was searching for a new home where he could establish his family in feudal splendour, arrived with fresh supplies and fifty additional men for the tiny colony. Along with Biencourt came Marc Lescarbot, a Parisian poet, playwright, and lawyer. It may have been Lescarbot who introduced the idea in one of his dramatic presentations that feasting and celebration would cure the difficulties that had plagued the colony and that everyone feared would return in the coming winter:
Come then, chefs, cooks, and boys — all you who make good cheer,
Scullions and pastry cooks, let soup and roast appear,
Ransack the kitchen shelves, fill every pot and pan
And draw his own good portion for every eater man!
I see the men are thirsty, SICUT TERRA, SINE AQUA
Bestir yourselves, be brisk. Are the ducks on the spit?
What fowl have lost their heads? The goose, who cares for it?
Hither have sailed to us a band of comrades rare:
Let potatoes and their hunger be matched with equal care.[5]
Champlain took Lescarbot’s suggestion in the hope that he could keep his men healthy, and L’Ordre de bon temps, or the Order of Good Cheer, was born. This morale booster became a well-organized evening meal, with a chief steward of the feast chosen for every day. The steward wore a gold chain around his neck and was responsible for all three meals on his appointed day. He had to hunt and fish in advance to augment the provisions of the ship and the fort, as well as instruct the cook in the preparation of the dishes.
The ship’s provisions probably included peas, beans, rice, prunes, raisins, dried cod, salted meat, oil, and butter. There were hogs and sheep at the habitation, as well as hens and pigeons, so we can assume there were eggs, as well. The First Nations near the fort were the hunter-gatherer Mi’kmaqs (also spelled Micmacs), who would have been trapping and hunting beaver, otter, moose, bear, and caribou; fishing for smelt, herring, sturgeon, and salmon; and bartering seal oil. Vines, wild onions, wild peas, walnuts (butternuts?), acorns, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, cranberries, and maple sap were also available.[6]
Lescarbot gives us an account of some of the ingredients and the dishes that were prepared from them: “good dishes of meat as in the cook’s shops that be in La Rue aux Ours [a street in Paris specializing in food]; colice, a hearty broth made from a cock, white sausages made from the flesh and innards of cod with lard and spice, good pastries made of moose and turtle doves.”[7] Could that last dish have been an early Canadian version of the traditional tourtière so well-known and loved in Quebec (and other regions of Canada) today?
Great ceremony attended the evening meal, as the steward
did march with his napkin on his shoulder and his staff of office in his hand, with the collar of the order about his neck, which was worth above four crowns, and all of them of the order following of him, bearing every one a dish. The like was also at the bringing in of the fruit, but not with so great a train. And at night after grace was said, he resigned the collar of the order, with a cup of wine to his successor in that charge, and they drank one to another.[8]
Despite the ravages of scurvy, Port Royal survived and became not only the site of the first successful colony on the mainland, but also the site of Canada’s inaugural gourmands’ club. There were other firsts that were to have an effect on agriculture and food, for it was here at Port Royal that the first grain was grown and a sample sent back to Europe to confirm the richness of the soil. It was to this colony that Louis Hébert, a Paris apothecary, first came. He was known to have a green thumb, and in 1617 he returned to Stadacona to become known as “Canada’s first farmer.”[9] In reality, this assertion was incorrect, for many of the First Nations had been farmers for centuries. Their well-established trade routes up and down the continent had brought the seeds for many crops to Canada. These included maize (corn), beans, squash, pumpkin, tomatoes, potatoes, sunflowers, and numerous others. Their tools and techniques may have been primitive by the standards of the newcomers, but as we have seen, their fields had been supporting their families and communities for generations and provided important items to barter with other tribes and nations.
The Order of Good Cheer, as imaginatively sketched by C.W. Jeffreys in 1925, attempted to boost morale in Samuel de Champlain’s precarious colony in what is now Nova Scotia. Library and Archives Canada
When Hébert did return with his wife, Marie, and their family, they became the first true colonists who came to till the soil and establish a home. Marie would have used her memories of medieval cooking traditions and utensils brought from her home in France to preserve and prepare for the table the harvest from the garden and fields and the meats, fish, and game from the river and the forest.
Champlain had already established a habitation at Stadacona in 1608 and planted a garden in which European plants such as cabbages, beets, radishes, lettuce, and other necessary vegetables and herbs flourished. Quebec, the trading post and struggling colony, was at a turning point when Hébert returned, for Cardinal Richelieu, the king’s chief minister and the most powerful man in France, suddenly became interested in it. The Company of New France, or Company of One Hundred Associates, was formed in 1627, pledging to send out large numbers of colonists and to support them for three years.[10]
In addition, devoted men and women arrived to found missions, churches, schools, and hospitals. There had been Jesuit missionaries at Port Royal, and in 1615, three Récollet brothers came to Quebec. Soon after they went out as missionaries to the Mi’kmaqs of Acadia, the Abenaki of the Saint John Valley, and to the Hurons. A decade later the Jesuits were invited to share this work. Unfortunately, there were many occasions when the two cultures — the First Nations and the newly arrived clergy — clashed over the concept of right and wrong, life after death, God and worship, superstitions, belief in magic, feasts and ceremonials. It is thanks to the letters, diaries, and writings of the Jesuits and Récollets, and of the sisters of the Ursuline Order who arrived in 1639, that many descriptions of the people, customs, dangers, and problems in seventeenth-century Quebec survived.
In addition to the spiritual benefits, there were many unexpected financial benefits to the new colony because of the arrival of the clergy. Just one example was the discovery in 1716 by Joseph-François Lafitau, who was serving as a missionary in Sault Saint-Louis (Kahnawake), south of Hochelaga (present-day Montreal), that ginseng was a local plant. He knew this plant had been considered a medical wonder in China for thousands of years, but that it was in short supply where his fellow missionaries also served, and thus its export from Canada to China began. Natives as well as newcomers started to gather the plant and sell it to the French merchants on the Montreal market. From there it was shipped to France, then to Canton, where it was purchased by Chinese merchants. They in turn sold it to doctors and pharmacists in the Empire of China. It took thirty-six weeks for this cumbersome system to move ginseng root bought in Montreal to where it would sell for sixty times its price in Canton.[11]
Meanwhile, Champlain, fur trader, explorer,
