The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [145]
In half an hour our seaplane was over open water, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which, my historical research discloses, was named for Juan de Fuca. Juan was a Greek seaman, sailing under both the Spanish flag and a Spanish pseudonym, who in 1592 may or may not have discovered the strait separating Vancouver Island in Canada from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. We dipped low and glided toward the seaplane terminal in the city of Victoria.
It was no coincidence that at precisely the same moment, thirty miles along the Vancouver Island coast, a Canadian diver named Francis hastily pulled on a wet suit and mask and jumped into the choppy gray waters of Sooke Bay off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Recent storms had stirred up the bottom, and Francis could see only three feet around him instead of the usual fifty as he searched for long-spined sea urchins, purple-hinged rock scallops, acorn and gooseneck barnacles, sea cucumbers, and orange crab. He bagged some urchins and sea cucumbers, but the crabs were elusive, and when he swam along the edge of the bay with his knife unsheathed to pry off the purple scallops, fierce currents threatened to drag him against the rocks. Not realizing the importance I place upon lunch, Francis thought of his own personal safety and pulled himself from the water.
When I reached Sooke Harbour House later that morning, Francis apologized that my table would not swarm with as much local seafood as he had hoped. To Sinclair and Fredrica Philip, who own the inn, “local” means seafood taken from the waters outside their dining room window an hour or two before lunch or dinner. Divers using scuba gear and air tanks go deeper than Francis; they bring up giant sea urchins, pink singing scallops, sea whelks, octopi, clams, and geoducks (which look like a cross between a giant clam and an elephant), abalone, cockles, and ten kinds of sea snails. Fifty-pound salmon are caught from boats in the same waters; only prawns, oysters, and ocean fish like black cod are bought from commercial fishermen who dock at the government wharf next door.
Sinclair and Fredrica are economists (they married while in graduate school at the University of Grenoble) turned naturalists-innkeepers-restaurateurs, and their dedication to the freshness and seasonality of local ingredients is monomaniacal. The neat white clapboard buildings of Sooke Harbour House are surrounded by astonishing terraced gardens where, with the help of Byron Cook, they grow four hundred varieties of edible plants, including flowers and weeds—sea rockets and nodding onions; wild sorrel, cress, and chrysanthemums; garlic chives in white, mauve, and yellow; all the cabbages and six varieties of leeks; five kinds of rosemary, six types of lavender, fifteen of mint, thirty lettuces, and forty other salad greens. Kid, rabbit, goose, and lamb are raised organically by farmers a few miles away. Local foragers gather wild berries, fifty types of mushrooms, ten varieties of seaweed.
In the kitchen I met my lunch, a tub of dreadful giant red-and-purple sea urchins, each a foot across, and a nightmarish landscape of sea cucumbers, writhing and slithering over each other like tumescent, warty maroon worms, a foot long and three inches in diameter, glistening and slimy. I also met the young bearded chef, Ron Cherry, a shy and unassuming man who was classically trained in some of Canada’s best restaurants. Ron’s talents are tested at every meal—the day’s catch remains a mystery until a few hours beforehand, and it can include twenty species.
Lunch