Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

Tomorrow, my neighbourhood of Parkdale loses one of its most interesting citizens.

After 19 years of standing behind a counter every day, Jerry of Jerry’s Fish and Chips will be retiring. He will chop those potatoes, and batter that fish for the very last time.

Originally from Guyana, where he left in fear because he was a political dissident, Jerry spent many years in South America before ending up in Toronto. He took over a little hole in the wall chippy previously owned by a Greek family (the sign outside still says “Mom’s Fish and Chips”), and served up fish, chips and burgers to the locals, particularly to the kids from the high school next door.

Always with a smile and a wave for everyone, Jerry has handed out more than his fair share of freebies over the years to kids who were hungry but had no money to pay. When I broke my arm a couple of years ago, I’d head up to Jerry’s almost every day for lunch. One New Year’s Eve, we walked past just before midnight and he was still in the shop cleaning (cleanest hole in the wall joint EVER!). He waved Greg and I in, and pulled a bottle of brandy from under the counter and we toasted the new year together.

It wasn’t much of a place, just a narrow room with a counter, and no place to sit, although there were video games for the kids at the back. The menu hung above the grill, tattered from years of heat and grease, the prices crossed out and rewritten in chalk from the odd occasion Jerry was forced to raise the price.

The food was pretty typical; greasy, salt, as good fish and chips should be. But Jerry insisted on quality - hand cut fries, and fresh fish, battered to order. It was some of the best fish and chips I’ve ever had.

A few years ago, Jerry began wearing a neck brace; years of standing bent over the fryer or the counter had taken its toll and he was advised to retire then. He held out until this year and finally decided to call it quits. In typical Jerry fashion, he kept the place open until the end of the school year to keep the kids happy.

Jerry’s plans include travelling (he’s going back to Guyana for the first time in 30 years and will spend about 6 months with family before returning to Toronto), and then just takin’ it easy. We wish him well, but we will definitely miss him.

The landlord has decided that he doesn’t want another food place in there, so all the fixtures will be sold off and the space renovated. Within a week, the chippy will be nothing more than a pleasant memory in the minds of generations of Parkdalians.

We stopped by last night for our very last serving of Jerry’s Fish and Chips, made even more salty than usual by the tears we shed at watching a landmark disappear.

Many of you are familiar with my pie dilemma. Like it, love it, don’t want to eat a whole one. With only Greg and I in our household, a whole pie never gets eaten, or it gets soggy, or we do eat it and feel fat and guilty.

So I bought little bitty 6-inch pie pans.

I wasn’t sure how many I’d be able to make out of a regular pie crust recipe, but what with rolling it fairly thin, which is much easier when you’re doing little crusts, I managed four.

This innovation also enabled me to make different flavours - strawberry rhubarb for Greg, apple for me. One to eat, the rest to pop in the freezer so there’s pie whenever we have a craving. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this years ago, but having *just enough* pie makes me very, very happy.

While reading a review copy of Comfort Food for Breakups The Memoir of a Hungry Girl by Toronto-based author Marusya Bociurkiw, I was intrigued by her description of “green borsch”, a soup she was served while visiting Ukraine.

Green borsch contains no beets whatsoever, but instead is comprised primarily of potatoes, carrot, sorrel, broth of some denomination and spices. It sounded interesting and Bociurkiw’s description made it doubly so, but then I quickly put it out of my mind as I made my way through her book of food memoirs.

A few days later, I found myself in Benna’s, that delightful bakery/deli/grocery store in the Polish neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Village. I cannot pass Benna’s without going in and buying something, and I’ve found everything from delightful sweets and pastries to cheeses and Polish canned good there.

On this day, Greg and I were admiring the many varieties of both pickled herring and headcheese when I spied a jar of green stuff. In a total Celestine Prophecy moment, I reached up and realized I was holding the elusive green borsch or sorrel soup. And it was vegetarian.

Of course, I had to buy it.

Turns out, sorrel soup is considered a classic dish all across Eastern Europe right into France and the UK. A Google search turns up 205,000 entries, most of which appear to be recipes. Who knew? Certainly not me, or apparently, Marusya Bociurkiw. And since she’s both a foodie and of Ukrainian descent, I didn’t feel so bad.

This particular brand is concentrated, and so at lunchtime today, just after the temperature dropped from a humid 19′C to a frigid 10′C in about an hour, and it seemed like a perfect time for soup of any type, I added some water and heated it up.

I don’t recall ever having eaten sorrel in any form, soup or otherwise, and the flavour was intriguing. Many descriptions of sorrel refer to it as being citrus-y and vaguely acidic. I didn’t get either the wild strawberry or kiwifruit comparisons, but maybe it needs to be the fresh leaves and not cooked. To me, it smelled very green and earthy, not quite hay-like but definitely like something you’d smell on a farm.

Taste-wise it was that same green and earthy flavour, grass-like but not exactly, and had a tangy end note that I wouldn’t quite characterise as bitter, but a definite pleasant sharpness. Full of potato and carrot, the soup was hearty and warming. I’m not sure how close my little jar of sorrel soup came to the authentic version the author had in Ukraine, but this one certainly was good to me. And at $1.89 for a jar that contains 3 to 4 servings, also a very good deal.

Of course, now I’m on a mission to track down some fresh sorrel and make my own. Also to try the stuff in salads. I love it when eating interesting things becomes such a fun adventure.