Taché Avenue, St-Boniface

Until It's the Right Colour

Plenty of the cards in Mémère’s box give no quantities at all. No oven, no minutes — just jusqu’à ce que ça ait la bonne couleur, and the assumption that you were standing beside the woman who wrote it. You weren’t. Most days, neither was I. You can still cook from them.

Open the recipe box Or start where the recipes stop

Eighty-five pieces. Cabbage rolls you freeze before you boil, a February supper built out of a cellar and a shelf of jars, a postcard from 1961 filed in with the pie cards — and thirty arguments for the moment a recipe, a cookbook or a documentary starts telling you more than it knows.

Two shelves

Supper, and the arguments about supper

One shelf is what you are making tonight. The other is for the moment somebody at the table says actually.

Fifty-five pieces

From the Kitchen

Tarte au sucre, four ingredients and two lies. Holubtsi in a roaster for three hours, cabbage frozen instead of boiled. Honey dill sauce, which the rest of the country has never heard of. And a two-dollar recipe box from an estate sale, read the way you would read somebody's letters.

Pull up a chair

Thirty essays

Distinctions

Is the dough late, or has it already gone? Is that sausage cured, or is it actually preserved? Are fifty episodes about one case fifty sources, or one police statement read aloud forty-nine more times? Every one of them comes with the test that tells the pair apart.

Settle an argument

Open at random

What's in the box

The card she actually cooked from is disgusting.

The tidy one — even hand, underline done against a ruler — is pristine because nobody ever cooked from it. It is the kitchen she meant to have. The stained, soft, grease-translucent one is the dish she made four hundred times.

See which card to trust

Three cups of flour. Four pairs of hands.

Perogies are not an inefficient recipe. Rolling, cutting, filling, pinching — four jobs running at four speeds, handing off. The dish is correctly efficient for a number of people the kitchen no longer has.

Count the stations

Fifty retellings of one early account is still one account.

The true-crime shelf is where this gets expensive. A case can look thoroughly documented when what has actually happened is that one police statement has been read aloud, with music, forty-nine more times.

Run the audit

Wish you were here. Cold here too. Home Tuesday.

Four lines of blue ballpoint, a 1961 postmark, and a picture of Lake Louise, filed in the back of a recipe box where it does not belong. It is still a complete account of somebody's week.

Read a stranger's whole trip

Most recent

Everything, oldest to newest

recipe archaeology

The Bilingual Recipe Box Is a Map of a Family's Migrations

French on some cards, Polish on others, one switching mid-card. Read the languages as data and the box becomes a map of a family's migrations.

5 September 2026

cooking

Bison Stew, and Cooking as Architecture Against the Cold

Bison is lean and will not forgive a hard boil. A low, slow stew treated as what it actually is — engineering for a minus-thirty night.

5 September 2026

cozy living

The Plug-In Post in Every Parking Lot Is a Monument to Needing Each Other

Every parking stall on the prairies has an outlet on a post beside it. A whole city poured its admission that nobody survives the cold alone.

5 September 2026

cooking

Borscht Is Two Opposite Soups Wearing One Name

One simmered for hours with beef and cabbage, one raw beets under cold buttermilk. Same beet, same name, and at the table two opposite soups.

5 September 2026

cooking

Butter Tarts: Runny or Firm, and Why You Have to Pick

Same batter, two tarts: pull them at eighteen minutes and the filling runs, leave them to twenty-three and it slices. You have to pick a side.

5 September 2026

cooking

Cabbage Rolls, and the Case for Food You Can't Hurry

Freeze the cabbage whole instead of boiling it and the leaves come off limp and intact. Holubtsi, rice and onion, and the case for food you cannot hurry.

5 September 2026

Stay informed

A note when something new lands here.

Your address is used for these notes and nothing else.

One more thing, and then go cook

The recipe was never on the card.

It was in the hands of someone who is not in the room. What is left is a colour, a smell, a tin of paper, and whatever you can reconstruct from them — which turns out to be a great deal more than nothing.

Start with the box

Recipes out of a café kitchen on Taché Avenue, where the cooking is Franco-Manitoban, Ukrainian-Canadian and prairie, and four months of the year are spent indoors. Tarte au sucre. Holubtsi. Kubasa three ways. Saskatoon pie when you cannot get saskatoons.

Then the recipe box itself, read as an archive: what the handwriting says about the body that wrote it, why the greasiest card is the one she actually cooked from, how to date a recipe by its ingredients, and what to do with a card that gives you a list and no amounts.

And thirty pieces on the things that get mistaken for each other — a cure and a preservation process, a hot pan and a browning plan, a public record and a permission slip — each with the test that tells the pair apart.