Guest Post from Karen Heuler: Let's Be Brutally Honest Here

Is Canada’s fascination with zombies the death knell of undead chic?

Good day, eh? And greetings from the Great White North. It’s great to be here on Cat Rambo’s blog to extoll the virtues of our great Canadian literary culture.

OUR GREAT LITERARY CULTURE

We’ve got some great writers up here in Canada, eh? Like, you guys probably think that Ernest Hemingway’s the best thing since sliced bacon. But a lot of people don’t know that old Ernie had the stuffing beat out of him by Canadian writer Morley Callaghan in a boxing match in Paris back in the 1920s. (So much for your Nobel prize there eh, Ernie?)

Speaking of Nobel prizes, I should mention Margaret Atwood. Now, Margaret’s a real good gal, eh? She can hold her beer and paddle a canoe with the best of us but she’s a pretty good writer, too. People say she should win a Nobel, but she’s been standing in line for so long now that they’ve lost interest in her (like we have with Prince Charles). But it doesn’t change the fact that she’s smart as a whip. About our great Canadian literary culture, she said:

“Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all “¦ Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience — the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship — that killed everyone else.” ““ SURVIVAL: A THEMATIC GUIDE TO CANADIAN LITERATURE, Chapter 1

Like I said, she’s clever. And she’s right! Even if she couldn’t have licked Ernest Hemingway in a boxing match in his prime (but I bet she could now, eh?)

What Canadians are most often challenged to survive is our great Canadian wilderness.

OUR GREAT WILDERNESS

Whenever Americans want to make a cowboy movie, they come north to film it, eh? Because all their wilderness is gone. We still have some of ours, although Prime Minister Harper is working hard every day to change that, and to make us more modern and civilized like America. Indoor plumbing, Velcro®, remote control tee-vees. What’s next?

Well, what’s next is the very popular Northern Gateway/Keystone XL Pipeline, eh? Because whenever Canadians want to make money, they go south because all our money up here is gone. But Americans still have most of theirs (although their politicians are working hard every day to change that, and to make them more modern and civilized like, say, Russia ““ or maybe the Chinese).

Anyway, with the wilderness gone, what is there left to survive?

Zombies of course!

OUR GREAT ZOMBIES

Hold your horses, eh? That’s no zombie, that’s Prime Minister Harper (although it’s kind of hard to tell the difference sometimes because he never blinks). Anyway, Prime Minister Harper occasionally takes breaks from rehearsing with his rock band the Van Cats to negotiate trade deals, like the one with China that introduces a mysterious street drug into Canada called L that unleashes a zombie apocalypse.

You probably never wondered what a zombie apocalypse would look like up here, but I tell ya’ ““ it’s pretty scary! I wrote a book about it, eh?

Now why would anyone write a zombie book that takes place in Canada? Well first off, there’s what Margaret said about how we’re always taking the pulse of the patient to see if he’s alive. That sounds right up Zombie Alley, if you ask me! And as for survival, well isn’t that the whole point of a zombie story?

Some of you might be asking: without any wilderness left to challenge your survival, how can this novel truly be Canadian?

Well, like I said, Americans travel north for our wilderness (what’s left of it) and we go south for money. But in abandoning nature for civilization, we’ve created a new wilderness ““ one inside ourselves that’s every bit as ugly and toxic as the slag heaps at Fort Mac, one we try and fill with cash and dope and a new flat-screen tee-vee or fishing boat or something like that.

But that’s just us, eh? Dead inside and following the herd, slack-jawed and trying to consume enough to fill that bottomless hunger the wilderness left behind when it vanished.

So thanks for reading. I hope you’ll check out my book, eh? I worked real hard on it.

““ la fin ““

(“˜cuz this was made in Canada, part of it has to be in French, eh?)

Bio: Jamie Mason is a Canadian sci-fi/fantasy writer whose short fiction has appeared in On Spec, Abyss & Apex and the Canadian Science Fiction Review. His second novel KEZZIE OF BABYLON was released by Permuted Press in March, 2015. Learn more at www.jamiescribbles.com

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Part Three

The recipes in The Wizardry of Jewish Women are Jewish food, but not as most people know it.

In the novel, two sisters (Judith and Belinda) are sent boxes that were stored in a garage for two generations. One box is full of culinary recipes from their great-grandmother Ada. The other box is also full of recipes, but for spells.

Belinda, the cook, takes the box with the recipes. She sends food parcels to Judith as she tests the recipes. In one of the parcels is feminist biscuits, because Belinda believes profoundly in teasing her feminist sister. The recipe box was terribly important. I wanted to show readers that lost culture could be fascinating and familiar. Also, I wanted to balance magic with memory.

Ada’s recipes are mostly from Belle Polack, my grandmother, because Ada and Belle are from near-identical cultural backgrounds. Jewish cooking followed a really interesting historical path from London to Australia and that is the path I used for Ada’s recipes.

Now for some recipes. First, the feminist biscuits (which would probably be called “˜cookies’ in North America) and then, some of my grandmother’s recipes.

Anglo-Jewish Australian cooking has some significant differences to other Jewish foodways. Ask me sometime, because this is one of my favourite subjects. I often start by saying something like, “My people cook, but we have no family bagel recipe.” The family lost many recipes for a generation. Only my first cousin believed we had family recipes for Christmas until my grandmother’s notebook was found hidden in my father’s study after he died.

The only metric recipe is the one for feminist biscuits, because it’s the only modern recipe. All the other recipes use British Imperial measurements. The cups are pre-metric Australian cups: a cup of sugar is 6 ounces and one of flour is 4 ounces. Here is a conversion tool for some of the rest.

I admit, I use a table at the back of a 1970s cookbook when my memory fails me, or I do conversion using my family’s classic “By guess and by G-d” technique.    

Feminist Biscuits

Ingredients

• 150 g butter or equivalent amount of oil
• 1 large egg
• 1 small cup sugar
• 1 cup self raising flour
• 1 drop vanilla (optional)
• Desiccated coconut
• Green food colouring
• Purple food colouring (red and blue combined)  

Method

Melt butter. Add everything except the food colouring. Mix well. Swirl the food colouring through the mix. Drop a teaspoon at a time on well-greased trays. Bake in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes. Try not to eat them all at once.  

Christmas Pudding

This is my grandmother’s recipe, transcribed. I haven’t modernised it or translated it at all. I did, however, add a comma. Note: Do not even think of making the milk variant of this Jewish Christmas pudding for anyone who keeps kosher.  

(Medium Rich) 1 lb suet, ¾ lb fine breadcrumbs, ¾ lb brown sugar, ¼ lb flour, 1 lb sultanas, 1 lb currants, ¼ lb mixed peel, ½ teaspoon mixed spice, a good pinch salt, 1 lemon, 4 eggs, ½ pt beer or milk, ½ gill brandy. Prepare all the ingredients. Sieve flour & mix with crumbs & finely chopped suet. Add fruit & chopped peel & grated rind of lemon & sugar. Mix in the beaten eggs, beer or milk. Stir well. Cover a clean & put away until next day. Add the brandy, turn into greased basins & cover with the greased paper & pudding cloths. Boil for 8 to 10 hrs. Remove the paper & cloths, let puddings cool & recover with fresh paper & dry cloths. Store in a cook, dry place. Boil for a further 2 hrs before serving.  

And now for a few more less contentious recipes.  

Belle Polack’s Honey Cake for Jewish New Year  

Ingredients

• 1 lb honey
• 1 ¼ cups plain flour
• 1 small cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 small cup oil or melted butter
• 1 tsp cocoa
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• a heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda  

Method

Melt the honey and sugar over a low flame. When they are cold, add the eggs (which should be well-beaten first””a form of domestic discipline), the oil and the remaining ingredients. Put the bicarbonate of soda in last.

Pour into a well-greased cake tin and bake in a moderate oven for 1 ½ hours.    

Madeira Cake  

This cake is from Belle’s maternal grandmother who left London in the 1860s.  

Ingredients

• 5 oz butter
• 6 oz sugar
• 6 oz self raising flour
• 2 oz plain flour
• 2 eggs
• ½-1 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla  

Method

Cream butter. Add vanilla. Beat in eggs well, one at a time. Add flour then milk and vanilla. Bake for 1 ½ hours in a moderate oven.

BIO: Dr Gillian Polack is a Jewish-Australian science fiction and fantasy writer, researcher and editor and is the winner of the 2020 A Bertram Chandler Award. The Green Children Help Out is her newest novel. The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel and was shortlisted for best SF novel in the Aurealis Awards. She wrote the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel (The Wizardry of Jewish Women). Gillian is a Medievalist/ethnohistorian, currently working on how novels transmit culture. Her work on how writers use history in their fiction (History and Fiction) was shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review.

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