As we talk, Lucy Waverman is listing ingredients she always keeps in her kitchen. “Olive oil and chilies — I always like to have dried chilies or some fresh birdseye or banana peppers — just a pinch of something a little spicy brings out flavour,” she says.
Then there’s salmon. Butter. Salt. “Salt is one of the most important ingredients in cooking,” she says. “I use Diamond kosher salt — it’s a slightly different flake that melts better into food and it’s not as salty; and a finishing salt, like Maldon.”
Then, onions. Red, yellow, Spanish and Cipollini. The French cooking she was trained in, says Waverman, relies on mirepoix, or a flavour base of onions, carrots and celery in many dishes. You can dispense with the carrots if what you’re cooking doesn’t need a sweet profile, she says — but never the onions.
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Then, lemon rind. Or better yet, lime, which, she says, can add a surprising twist to familiar dishes.
Last but not least — garlic. “I love garlic,” Waverman says, with passion. “It should be fresh and Canadian, and I want it organic. In our garden we grow our own garlic but we never grow enough. You’d be surprised at how much garlic you can use over a winter.
“If you take mushrooms and sauté them and grate a garlic clove over the mushrooms, it just pops the flavour of the mushrooms. Or, for a simple pasta, olive oil, garlic, salt, parmesan cheese — you can’t go wrong.”
It’s a measure of Waverman’s skill that the simple listing of ingredients can become a mouthwatering spell, and it explains why she is among the most widely read food sources in the country. She may tell Canadians what they need to know, but she spices it with what will make them happy.
A food journalist, educator, columnist for the Globe & Mail and author of eight cookbooks, Waverman has been cooking for decades —- and she’s not done. Recently, she shared a photo of a gleaming leek strata on Instagram. She’d whipped it up for a six-person brunch.
“It was big enough for eight or 10 people, but we finished it,” she laughs. “I was hoping I’d have leftovers.”
Since the beginning of her food career, Waverman’s goal has been to make food approachable. She’s always, she says, tried to get people to “go into the kitchen and cook and not worry about it.”
In her column for the Globe & Mail, Waverman likes to answer readers’ questions, and offer cooking techniques and home kitchen tips or recipes using seasonal ingredients.
But she doesn’t think she’ll write another cookbook.
“If I have information I want to pass on, I can do it on Instagram or Twitter,” she says. “But you can’t ever say never, because who knows?”
Local food
Waverman lives in Toronto, and has endless appreciation for the Toronto food scene — its restaurants and creatives, and its farmers markets.
She says food culture changes constantly, but differently in different places. “In Toronto, you might see changes that you’ll never see in northern Saskatchewan,” she says.
What she’s noticed in Toronto during the pandemic is a shift back to home cooking, a return to families sharing meals, and a growing appetite for simpler recipes and meals — recipes that “pack a punch but don’t require 22 steps to get there.”
Cooking like this takes its cues from the seasons and what’s locally available, and it allows individual flavours to shine.
Simple, seasonal cooking has been Waverman’s bailiwick from the beginning, and it’s what helps lend her recipes their comfortable air. That’s down to her childhood in Scotland, she says, where there were few restaurants but everyone could get excellent local fish and beef.
Waverman’s grandmother owned a restaurant in Glasgow, and her mother ran a cooking school and kitchen shop in Toronto. Waverman herself initially trained as a journalist, but gravitated back to the food world when her family moved to London, England, and she enrolled at the famous Cordon Bleu Cookery School. Later, she opened her own cooking school. Her cookbooks, including the award-winning Home for Dinner and A Matter of Taste, followed.
She believes food writers have a responsibility to highlight seasonal, local and fresh ingredients.
“You can use spices from other countries, flavouring agents and all the rest of it, but (otherwise) we should be using what we grow here,” she says. “It drives me crazy when I see an article about asparagus in November. Any asparagus that’s available is coming in from Chile, Mexico, Peru. They’re good products, but why would we buy these when we’ve got everything local going on here?”
When Ontario asparagus comes into season in the spring, Waverman eats it “just about every day,” she says, for the six weeks it’s available.
Seasonal boundaries have blurred with the rise in local greenhouse-grown produce, which is a great thing, she says, although not attainable for every wallet. But when tomatoes are off-season, she says, they’re better canned anyway.
It sometimes surprises even Waverman what ingredients can be found locally, like the black French lentils she once purchased at the supermarket, which turned out to be Canadian; now, she only buys Canadian lentils.
“I spent a little time in Saskatchewan watching the harvesting for lentils, chickpeas, all these pulse crops. We grow so much,” she says. “I think people use them more now than they did 10 to 20 years ago, and it’s a trend I’m glad to see is growing, because they’re healthy and it supports our farmers — and we grow very good ones.”
Waverman loves plant-based food, but she’s also here for sustainably-grown meat; one recipe she published last year was for beef Wellington, a vintage puff pastry-encased beef tenderloin served in a boozy sauce.
And recently, she says, she sampled a “very fine” locally raised heritage chicken that was rich, succulent and somehow more “chickeny” than anything she’d ever found in the supermarket.
The farmers responsible for this greatness, says Waverman, aren’t doing it for the money. “They’re doing it out of love and passion,” she says. “That’s why going to a farmers market should be a part of everybody’s life — to see what is being grown here.”
Waverman’s next project is to refurbish her website, she says, so she can post recipes — but never ads — which will keep her connected to the community. And she hopes soon to be cooking more strata for six. “I love entertaining, having people over,” she says. “It’s terrific to be back to this again.”
