Niagara Food: A Flavourful History of the Peninsula's Bounty

By Tiffany Mayer

A look at the history and culture of food, wine, and culinary culture in southern Ontario's Niagara region. The Niagara region has a unique culinary history and tradition. From its mild microclimate that supports the cultivation of tender fruits -- peaches, cherries, and more -- to its role as the birthplace of the Canadian wine industry and home to a new generation of trailblazing chefs and restaurateurs, the Niagara region boasts a food and wine heritage that rivals any in North America. Niagara food writer, advocate, and activist Tiffany Mayer provides a thoughtful look at the many elements of Niagara's culinary past and present, including the planting of the first orchards and vineyards, the rise and fall of the local canning industry, the artisans responsible for crafting the region's most beloved food products, and the Greenbelt Act, which protects more than a million acres of the area's most precious agricultural land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625850652

Tiffany Mayer

Award-winning journalist Tiffany Mayer runs Eating Niagara, a blog devoted to local food and agriculture in Ontario's Niagara region. For nearly a decade Mayer worked as a daily news and freelance reporter, covering agriculture and culinary topics for a range of publications, including the St. Catharines Standard. Mayer also founded the Garden of Eating-Niagara, a non-profit that harvests fruit for social agencies in the region. She lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

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day.

Introduction

As I packed up my notebook and pulled on my jacket, Mark Picone slid me an apple across the heavy wooden table in his culinary studio.

I had just spent the last hour talking about Niagara wine country cuisine with the storied chef when he offered me the fruit with pale green skin for the road. Earlier in our discussion, Picone had used the apple—a rare hybrid called Pink Pearl—as a prop in our conversation to highlight some of the unique, locally grown produce he makes a point of using in the meals he creates.

And this, as you’d know, is a pink-fleshed apple, Picone said gesturing to it before moving on to say something about a pile of heart-shaped—and aptly named—heart nuts he had handy to further his point about the uniqueness of his muse, Niagara’s bounty.

Did I know that? I suppose it made sense, given the blush cheek peeking through the Pink Pearl’s sallow complexion. Still, I hesitated before saying yes, which I sputtered more as a question than a statement.

I thanked Picone for his time and the apple as I headed back out into a grey November afternoon. I wasn’t expecting much from my edible gift as I sank my teeth into it on the ride home. I was sure the flesh of the Pink Pearl would still be white, like most of its apple cousins that I was used to eating. At most, it would have a slightly pink tinge, but the name would be largely hyperbole.

When I pulled away from the apple after that first bite, chewing flavourful flesh that flitted between sweet and tart, my eyes widened in amazement and I hit the brakes to take a moment to marvel at the sight before me.

Holy cow, I exclaimed out loud to myself, in awe of the vibrant bubble gum pink flesh revealed to me. And then I did what any excited foodie would do. I took a photo and put it on Instagram to share it with the world—this eye-opening, mind-blowing apple grown on a farm in quiet west Niagara.

In my nearly nine years living in this region, covering agriculture as a news reporter, shopping at farmers’ markets and farm stands and being a regular member of a CSA or local harvest share program, I had never crossed paths with the Pink Pearl. I had never even heard its name uttered.

In that moment, at the side of a rural Vineland road, a vineyard to one side of me and a stand of Carolinian forest to the other, that apple became more than a midafternoon snack for a hungry scribe. It became the raison d’être for this book, a metaphor for my task at hand. It made me realize how much I had to learn about a place I was so sure I knew intimately. And I wanted not just the world but also Niagarans themselves to learn about this magical, surprising place, too.

My mission as the writer of this book became clear as a diamond as I took another bite of the Pink Pearl. Yes, I would tell some of the familiar Niagara stories, those of peach crops, grapes turned into world-class wines, the food artisans who became household names, the restaurateurs who built landmarks in their communities and the tireless food security activists who ensured there was room enough at the table for everyone. As the person given the honour of penning those quintessential stories, I also wanted there to be a Pink Pearl or two among them for readers—something to take them by surprise.

Whatever your familiarity with Niagara, I hope as you read these pages that you’ll feel the same wonder and awe, much as I did that grey November afternoon when I met the Pink Pearl.

Chapter 1

Roots and Shoots

Farming in Niagara

My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a preacher, but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer.

—Brenda Schoepp

Len Troup puts his head in his hands and shakes it at the question. Would he ever consider selling his family’s two hundred acres of peach, pear and cherry orchards? I bet if you asked Ron tonight, he’d say yes, Troup says, a rueful smile spreading across his lips.¹

Ron is Troup’s eldest son and to whom he is relinquishing the reins of the family farm as Troup, himself a lifelong farmer, eases into retirement. It’s an early September evening at the family’s Lakelee Orchards in Jordan Station, and the weakening summer sun has sunk below the horizon. Though it’s dark outside, the family’s packing shed is alight as Ron and his crew of workers continue toiling, nowhere near calling it a day. They’re drowning in a flood of peaches that need to be graded, packed and prepared to go to market—if they can find a market. It has been five years since the last fruit cannery in Niagara—in Canada, in fact—closed in 2008.² The peach trees the Troups planted in 2009 to replace those bearing fruit for canning with varieties suited for fresh market sales are just starting to produce crops. The young trees aren’t even in full production, yet the Troups, like many local farmers this particular fall, are jammed with huge volumes of fruit, keeping consumers in more peaches later in the year than ever before.

Jordan Station fruit grower Len Troup in his orchard. Photo by Nathaniel David Johnson.

Troup rarely concedes to uncertainty and worries about sounding depressing. Still, it’s clear circumstances have unnerved the usually stoic farmer. It has been ten years since the Troups have expanded the capacity of their packing shed, and it’s clear the yellow-sided building overlooking that ultimate symbol of urbanism—a multilane highway called the Queen Elizabeth Way—is inadequate when the season yields a good crop. The family is going to have to consider doing something, Troup says. Perhaps a new grading line is in order. But that’s a big expense, and who knows what the future holds for the farm?

It’s such a struggle. The family wants to keep it going, but it’s a financial struggle, and at some point, people have to say, ‘Is it worth it?’ It’s a lot of stress, Troup admits as he sits at his kitchen table, removed physically, if not emotionally, from the scene in the packing shed.

You’re rolling the dice with a lot of cash. This isn’t nickel-and-dime stuff, he adds about the business of fruit farming. You shouldn’t be this close to the edge.

Fertile Ground

The Niagara Peninsula comes by its moniker as the buckle of Ontario’s fruit belt honestly. The northern tier of the region is the largest and most important fruit-producing area in Ontario, with nearly twenty-six thousand acres of orchards and vineyards.³ Farmers grow more than 90 percent of Ontario’s peaches, nectarines and apricots; 80 percent of its plums; more than 70 percent of its sweet cherries and pears; and 60 percent of its sour cherries. That’s thanks largely to a body of water and rocky ridge joining forces to foster the perfect microclimate for these tender fruits to flourish.⁴

Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment border the peninsula’s fruit lands, which stretch roughly sixty-five kilometres from Stoney Creek, just outside Niagara, to the Niagara River. Together, they create an air circulation system that sees southwesterly breezes spill down from the escarpment and sweep air toward the lake. In the spring, cool lake air is then drawn back over orchards and vineyards as the land warms up. This delays bud burst and lessens the chance of damage from spring frosts. In the fall, the reverse happens. Air is warmed over the lake and then moves inland, staving off season-ending frosts. As that warm air hits the escarpment, it’s deflected upward, drawing in more of the mild air behind it and extending the growing season.

Peach, nectarine, cherry and apricot trees also thrive because of the northern tier’s well-drained sandy soils near Lake Ontario, along the Niagara River and in Pelham, while the silt and clay loam elsewhere suit pear, plum, apple and grape production.

The potential of both the climate and those soils was capitalized on in the 1700s when the Loyalists began cultivating the region. Peter Secord, the uncle of War of 1812 hero Laura Secord, is believed to be the first Loyalist farmer to plant fruit trees, settling here after taking a land grant in the mid-1780s. Less than one hundred years later, there were 375,000 peach trees growing in Ontario, though none of those varieties exists today. By this point, fruit farming had blossomed into Niagara’s main industry.⁵ It wouldn’t be long, though, before it would start to come under threat with the construction of the Queen Elizabeth Way highway in the 1930s, followed by decades of urban encroachment.

The Niagara Escarpment forms a dividing line in the region. While the farmland above the escarpment in south Niagara covers an area larger than the region’s tender fruit land, it’s filled with more generic crops—corn, soy, wheat and livestock—that make it indistinguishable from other farming regions in Ontario. However, it’s the fruit, grown on 637 farms that’s synonymous with Niagara and is the region’s claim to farming fame.⁶

Reginald Francis Thwaites packing peaches in his Jordan Station orchard in 1952. Photo courtesy of Vineland Growers Co-operative.

James Troup (right) and help with an apple harvest from Troup’s Jordan Station farm destined for Dominion Canners, circa 1900. Photo courtesy of Vineland Growers Co-operative.

Environmentalists cheered in 2005 when the Ontario government legislated to protect that fruit land. It’s now part of a two-million-acre swath called the Greenbelt that stretches from the Niagara River to east of Toronto. It meant the end of urban sprawl that had been threatening Niagara’s orchards and vineyards for decades. Statistics from the 1950s and 1960s showed that Niagara was developing its agricultural land faster than any other metropolitan area in Canada, and now, with the advent of the Greenbelt, cities within the protected area were forced to grow up rather than out.⁷

Aron Wall sits on his horse-drawn water sprayer on his St. Catharines farm while Gerry Wall looks on, circa 1946. Photo courtesy of Vineland Growers Co-operative.

But for the farmers who owned farmland in the Greenbelt, it was an imposition that meant the end of a say in how they could use their property, at least for the next ten years until a policy review in 2015. They were bound to farm, rent or sell their land to someone who would cultivate it or, barring any takers, let it go to weeds. Depending on whom you ask, the Greenbelt is either a two-million-acre agriculture preserve or a two-million-pound millstone weighing landowners’ down because of the limits it puts on land use.

The easy part of the Greenbelt was just establishing it, Jordan Station fruit grower Len Troup says. The hard part is now, and that is to make it work. Financially, it has to function. The business environment in which we operate has to allow farming to be profitable and this hasn’t been addressed by those who created the Greenbelt.

Today, agriculture remains one of the main industries in Niagara, but the tender fruit so emblematic of the region has lost ground despite the Greenbelt. Some of the biggest blows to Niagara’s quintessential crops have come in the past few decades with the loss of processing plants, the most recent being CanGro Foods Inc. in St. Davids. The factory, which shuttered in 2008, was the last major fruit cannery in Canada, taking with it a buyer for Niagara’s canning peaches and imperfect pears that couldn’t find a home on the fresh market.⁸

With nowhere to sell their fruit, farmers razed their orchards, replacing them with more profitable crops, including wine grapes and freestone peaches suited to be eaten out of hand rather than a can. It’s also around this time that something else started to encroach on this precious farmland, raising the question of whether protecting that tender fruit land in the Greenbelt was for naught. Corn—a crop that can be farmed virtually anywhere and doesn’t need Class 1 farmland in a microclimate to grow—started popping up where orchards once blossomed. Troup calls it the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the tender fruit industry.

In the old days, the grape or fruit guys would have run around buying that land, but they’re saying now, ‘I don’t want it,’ Troup says. The one that’s profitable is filling the void.

Stalking the Money

The sight of those cornfields growing below the escarpment has caused some to wonder—and worry—what it means for the future of Niagara’s signature crops. Jerry Winnicki isn’t one of them. If anything, corn is sparing Niagara a fate far worse.

We have the most unique land in Canada. I don’t mind it going into corn because it can go back into cherries and grapes, Winnicki says. It’s better than going into housing.⁹

Winnicki is an agronomy manager at Clark Agri Service in Wellandport, which sells seed and fertilizer for corn, soybean and wheat farming. He joined Clark at one of the most fascinating times of change in agriculture: the rise of technology in farming.

As he sits in the office of a Wainfleet grain elevator belonging to Lennie and Peter Aarts, a combine works its way up and down the field behind him, guided by a satellite that sends a pixelated image to a computer. It tells the driver what sections of the field he has left to harvest and how many bushels he’s netting per acre. At the moment, he’s pushing two hundred.

That’s almost twice as much as a decade earlier, thanks