Introduction

Contributors to this seventh issue of CuiZine are taking an interest in that which has often been relegated to the realm of the mundane, the quotidian. They offer us depictions and explorations of the banal fried egg, the humble leek, the unloved brussels sprout, the little-lauded community cookbook, and the underdeveloped plot of urban land. This issue is a looking over of the overlooked. The result? Such food items, publications and practices are given pride of place. This batch of contributors is taking a step back, probing practices, uncovering histories, and assigning or assessing value. Jean-Pierre Lemasson’s l’oeuf sur le plat is an exercise in egg erudition. Lemasson describes the look, the taste, and the gestures that accompany this quotidian habit/pleasure. Yannick Portebois attends to a cheap, hardy, somewhat lonely assemblage of vegetables: leeks and brussels sprouts. Rachel Black writes about, and engages in, guerrilla gardening: the appropriation and cultivation of abandoned and underused urban spaces. Black traces the characteristics and the implications of this movement in pre-Olympic Vancouver. Nicole Gastonguay reimages such everyday objects as pickles and sardines using yarn, a few well-placed goggle eyes, and undeniable wit and whimsy. Over the next few issues, we will hear from a handful of scholars on the subject of community cookbooks – those spiral-bound, marshmallow salad-laden biographies and histories. First up are Kristine Kowalchuk and Julia Christensen who write, amongst other things, about beet rolls and Kraft dinner goulash. Can you guess the communities from which such delicacies hail? To our regular cast of research articles and creative work, we add a new series: CanLit Food. We ask our readers/contributors to represent, scrutinize and/or reinterpret food in Canadian literature. Rita Taylor initiates this series with her photographic representations of Catharine Parr Traill’s recipe for stewed tomatoes (The Backwoods of Canada) and Mary di Michele’s vegetable patch (Mimosa and Other Poems). What CanLit meals whet (or dampen) your appetite? Continuing our efforts to put you in touch with food events across the country, we bring you an interview with Simon Mayer, librarian at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec’s national collection and curator of Le livre de cuisine au Québec. Through the lens of a formidable coterie of cookbooks, this exhibit puts us in touch with Québec’s institutions, its industries, its ideologies and its foodways. The books reviewed for this issue include collections of essays: Food and Trembling (Jonah Campbell) and Kitchen Party (Sheryl Kirby); cookbooks: The New Best of Better Baking.com, A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking (Marcy Goldman) and 500 Tapas (María Segura); a memoir, Prairie Feast (Amy Jo Ehman); and Food Studies readers, Food (Jennifer Clapp) and Edible Histories (Franca Iacovetta, Marlene Epp, and Valerie Korinek) – carefully considered by a diverse and enthusiastic group of readers. This issue has passed through, and been crafted by, many hands. To our team of contributors, anonymous reviewers, and editorial assistants Stephanie Watt and Deborah Hemming, we extend our gratitude. With thanks to McGill Library and Érudit for supporting and producing this issue of CuiZine. We acknowledge funding from the Prestige Journal fund of the Faculty of Arts at McGill University for editorial support. We leave you to feast on this latest issue with two final announcements: First, CuiZine is now indexed through CAB abstracts and Global Health Database. Second, to meet and work with the next generation of food studies scholars, we have launched our first Best Student Paper Award. Visit our splash page (http://cuizine.mcgill.ca/) for details. Results will be announced in the next issue. Cette septième édition de …