MAR 13 |
My spiritual home: Ruckle Park, Salt Spring Island, B.C.
When I was a small child I lived on Salt Spring, an island in the Salish Sea off the west coast of Canada. We made our home in a ramshackle 19th century farmhouse at the bottom of a dirt road, a short walk from the Pacific Ocean. The property was surrounded by orchards. My father picked apples and sold them at the weekly farmer’s market, along with the herbs my mother grew and dried. We kept a vegetable garden and you can’t imagine how sweet the new potatoes tasted, dug up from the ground each spring. I boarded a rusted school bus in the mornings and delighted in the afternoons when it barrelled past miles of meadows, towards the windswept Ruckle Park, delivering me home. My mother cooked meals she served over soba noodles or brown rice, and for dessert I picked apples straight off the tree. We had an ancient wood-burning stove and on rainy nights we would pull chairs into the kitchen’s warm embrace and my parents would read Anne of Green Gables aloud.
Every year, right around now, I start missing the island of my youth. Something about the melting of snow beds in Toronto makes me yearn for Salt Spring’s apple blossoms. I picture the island’s country roads and its misty forests, its gleaming lakes and mossy bluffs overlooking the sea. I long for its rust-coloured Arbutus trees, its blackberry patches, its mild climate. Its sleepy town and aging eccentrics.
When I was young Salt Spring was a remote outpost, a haven for counterculture artists and American draft dodgers. My father produced a beat poetry journal, Raven, on an old Gestetner mimeograph machine. My mother illustrated it and painted large canvases. There were community gatherings at the Beaver Point Hall. Everyone kept acres of farmland, as the island became a hub for the organic food movement.
These days, homes on Salt Spring sell for millions and the vibe is more La Jolla than Berkeley. Even so, its history lingers. As does mine.
This past fall, my husband and I took a day trip from Vancouver. We stopped in at Salt Spring’s natural foods market, which appeared to be going strong. So much was still being produced locally, from lamb and artisanal cheese to apple cider and berry preserves.
We perused the bookstore, leafing through books from local authors. I thought about all of the coastal British Columbia titles I’d adored over the years: Intertidal Life by Audrey Thomas, On Island by Pat Carney, Wild Fierce Life by Joanna Streetly, Trauma Farm by Brian Brett, Adventures in Solitude by Grant Lawrence. I remembered, some years back, coming to Salt Spring on assignment, to cover the release of a gorgeous cookbook, Seven Seasons on Stowel Lake Farm.
My husband and I took the island bus down to Fulford Harbour, near where I lived as a child, and listened to a man play an outdoor piano out on the wharf. We ate lunch in the diner where my mother used to flip burgers. We waited for the Morningside Organic Bakery Café & Bookstore to open. Its brusque owner, memorably referred to in an outraged Yelp review as “the angry vegan,” happens to make the best chai I have ever tasted. And her sourdough! But alas, she never appeared and Morningside’s gates remained locked. And so, we headed back to town for coffee, picking up a bag of locally roasted beans and some sea salt as edible souvenirs.
When I got back to Toronto, I made a pot of coffee and got to work baking a batch of cookies, the same recipe I’ve used for the past 25 years. I let the memories of my childhood wash over me. I played music from the Vancouver singer Ferron, an old acquaintance of my family’s. (For the soundtrack to this column, stream her “Misty Mountain” here.) There, at my stove, I ached for days gone by. I missed the folk music and the food. I missed the coast’s wild beauty, its strange magic.
Somehow, all of this came out in the cookies, which tasted not just of butter and chocolate and salt — but of wind and water, and apple blossoms, and decades past.
Homesick for the Coast Cookies
Adapted from a 1929 recipe in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
Makes about 16 large cookies
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 and 1/8 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon table salt (plus a pinch of sea salt to finish)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 375 F. Cream butter and slowly add sugars. Beat until smooth. Add egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix flour, salt, and baking soda. Add the dry ingredients to the wet. Stir until combined. Add the chocolate chips. Drop spoonfuls on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake for 8-10 minutes, until brown but still soft and chewy in the centre. Remove from the oven and sprinkle on a little Salt Spring Sea Salt. Eat warm from the oven, with a cup of strong coffee, dreaming of the coast.
Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication
Printed with permission. substack.com/tarahenley
