Between the longtime efforts of P.E.I. chef Michael Smith, all the international buzz around the Fogo Island Inn, and an exciting crop of young chefs embracing and seriously jazzing up what the land and sea has always provided, East Coast cuisine is enjoying a renaissance. Foraging, fishing, hunting, making unique dishes from sea vegetables and all the odd bits such as dulse, caribou moss, cloudberries, cod tongue and seal flipper pie — Canada’s East Coast is a celebration of place and season. And with a long and storied history as a point of first contact for traders, fishers and invaders from many parts of the world, the area’s global influences, perhaps most enduringly from the U.K., can also be found in East Coast cuisine.
The classics, or at least the first things that come to mind when thinking about the foods of the Maritime provinces — Jiggs’ dinner, chicken fricot (Acadian stew), fish and brewis with scruncheons, mustard pickle, Solomon Gundy (pickled herring), salt cod, hodgepodge, grunt, figgy duff, and touton and molasses
