Chow Chow: a French Canadian Food
I push the massive chunks of zucchini into the white plastic hole, unhappy with the way it’s squishing through the metal holes at the base of what I thought was the chopping attachment to my Kitchen Aid Mixer. Apparently, this is a grinding or pureeing piece, not the time saving part one of my participants used during my Master’s project when she was making chow chow. That had been a truly slick gadget that was, in my opinion, even better tool than having a separate food-processing machine that would also have to be stored somewhere in my house.
I know, just by looking at the mush accumulating in the bowl, that my chow chow will end up different from the one I’m trying to emulate. The one my friend sent me home with last weekend was chunky and textured. YThis will be more like a vegetable jam. Not the worse thing, really, just not what I was looking for…
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I also know that my version will end up sweeter. The recipe calls for a green pepper and I only have a red one. I could reduce the amount of sugar I’m supposed to include, but that might alter the way the recipe binds. I fear that messing with the chemistry any more than I already have will be, well, a recipe for disaster. At this point, I’ll just have to finish this batch and see what happens.
If you’ve never had chow chow and are looking at the pictures I’ve included, you may be a bit confused. Isn’t this just relish? It is. And somehow it also isn’t. The origin of chow chow is, from what I have been able to find, unclear. It’s a very popular dish in the southern states of America where it’s known to be recipe that uses up vegetables from one’s garden. It’s also a well-known dish in the eastern provinces of Canada. Chow chow raises so many questions! Did the dish migrate to the States with the displacement of the Acadian people? Why does it seem more ubiquitous to the maritime provinces than in Ontario where there are also a lot of farms? Do English speaking Canadians make chow chow but call it something else? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and a deep dive into the history of this dish is not the focus of this post. Rather, I’m interested in digging into the power of this dish has on people. The way it binds individuals together. The way it fits into the local, French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian cultural food identity.
Chow chow is an interesting traditional food as it fits into a number of the categories I outlined in “Trail Mix Tradition – Defining ‘Traditional Foodways’”. It is:
1. Remembered from childhood AND it is not always easy to replicate today.
2. Still being made today though it’s not not mainstream.
(It’s like something people can buy at the store but is not as mainstream as relish.
3. Culturally significant.
4. A nostalgic food associated with a positive longing for an earlier time.
As we discussed in “Raspberry Memories” and “Peach Pie and Pie Crusts – How Food Creates Identity,” foraging and gardening are closely tied to East Ferris’ rural past. The people who colonized this area came to farm, and having large gardens not only kept families fed, but also offered variety in what they consumed. For some families, the garden was a source of revenue. This was, it seems, even more true during the Depression when many things, like butter and sugar, were rationed. Canning and preserving were paramount as they allowed food items from the garden and the wild to be consumed at a later date.
Gardens, like most of the food I’ve talked about on this blog, are not unique to French-Canadians. What matters, as I’ve mentioned before, is that the people who eat chow chow recognize it as a French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian food. The French speaking, rural farmers of the area made chow chow to feed their families and their children. Having grown up with it, they passed the recipe and their fondness for it down through the generations. This is how food works as a language that structures experience and governs behaviour.
Chow chow, in East Ferris as in other parts of Canada and the United States, is a way to use up vegetables. Thus it has direct ties with the need to avoid waste and to add variety in a diet that was once limited to a few ingredients (see “Peach Pie and Pie Crusts – How Food Creates Identity” for a discussion on how foods become staples). Creatively using up food stuff came up often in my interviews for both my MA and PhD, especially with people born in the 1930s and 1940s. The need, rather than the desire, to make everything count was directly tied to survival in the past. Today, however, the need to preserve is not acute. Making chow chow is not directly tied to survival. Rather, it’s a tied to a desire to continue to have the food one likes.
Chow chow also brings up the question of authenticity. What is a real chow chow? Does it have to have certain ingredients in it? This is one of those foods that is unique to the maker because even when everyone starts with the same ingredients, the vegetables are cut a little differently. Some will cut the vegetables thicker or longer. Some will use a knife while others will use a grater or a food processor. Even the type of heat that is used from one home to the other is a little different, meaning that the liquids warm up more slowly or more quickly. And the vegetables themselves change from crop to crop: some are sweeter, some are bigger, some are softer. Thus, even if one cut the vegetables in the exact same way, the final product will still be sweeter or tangier from one home to another and from one year to the next. Each of these parts changes the result so that remaking your grandmother’s or grandfather’s chow chow authentically can be very challenging.
My friend's chow chow on the left and mine on the right.
Directly linked to the question of authenticity is a question of instinct. If one did not grow up making a certain type of food, then one doesn’t know how to troubleshoot issues when the product doesn’t look or taste the way it’s supposed to. Instinct, we’ll see in future blogs, is a key part of continuity and this is why I say that chow chow is not always easy to replicate. For a tradition to continue, making the food needs to come with a certain amount of knowledge that is not communicated in the words of a recipe. It means being able to recognize when you need to add more sugar or more starch or reduce certain elements that are too watery.
Instinct is related to practice and practice means time and money. It takes time and cash to grow a garden. It takes time and money to try something that may not turn out. If one doesn’t know how to solve problems and/or doesn’t have the disposable income to commit to trying something that may not turn out, people likely won’t try it at all. So chow chow is one of those foods that doesn’t always get passed down. It’s similar enough to the relish you can buy in the store, and many people would rather just buy something close enough than commit to learning the process and/or investing the time it takes to make it.
Ultimately, this food begs the question: Why? Why does chow chow continue to be made in some homes but not in others? The answer to this question has multiple parts. On one hand, it is one of those foods that can easily be altered to include what you have on hand, so it can easily be adapted. Easiness is a key element to the survival of a tradition. If something is hard to replicate, people generally tend to let it go.
The other part of understanding the “why” has to do with what happens to the chow chow after it’s made. Do you put in on a hamburger like relish? Or do you eat as a side dish the way people did in the past? Do you gift to friends and family? Or does it end up sitting on a shelf in the basement?
Until this year, I had never made chow chow. I’m a picky eater and I never loved this dish as a child. However, when we went to visit a friend a few weeks ago, she was making a zucchini chow chow. The smell in the house brought me right back to my grandmother’s kitchen and I wanted that smell in my own home.
Her chow chow was so good! I realized that I am now an adult who eats zucchini and peppers and that combining them all in a pot makes for a really delicious side! Plus, I write about this food, food I didn’t really grow up with but that I was exposed to at my grandparents’ house, food that people talked a lot about during my interviews and that also prompted a lot of conversation while I was at my friend’s. This is absolutely I food I consider to be French-Canadian/Franco-Ontarian and, even if my own kids don’t eat it right now, and even if they tell me they hate the smell of it in the house, it’s food I want them to be familiar with because it’s part of who they are and where they come from.
Since making it, I’ve had many opportunities to pull out my chow chow and share it with friends and family. It’s been an important talking piece that has allowed us to reminisce about the past and the people who have made me who I am today. When I serve this for guests, they learn about the area, and we compare different regions of the province and even the world. This food, like so many others, has the power to teach. It has the power to show us where we’ve come from, what matters to us today, what possibilities exist, and which don’t. Chow chow, like so many other foods we take for granted, has the power to show who we are.
