Best Food of a Lifetime

The last day of the year always makes me feel a little melancholy and very close to that veil between past, present and future, living and dead. In that spirit, while catching up with some overdue paper filing this morning, I ran across a list my brother Dwight made not too long before he died of cancer at age 43. Like him, it's idiosyncratic, playful and intelligent: a typed-out list labelled "Top Memories", and covering his best food experiences from age 5 onwards.

Here's the list, in the order the items apparently occurred to him, preserving the original spelling, but with a few notes and illustrations.

• D.Q. BRASIER 1966 – When we were small, my family spent summers in Brockville, where my mother grew up. A frequent family treat was to drive out to the east-end city limits for dinner at the Dairy Queen, one of the few we knew of that served the "Brazier" menu of burgers and onion rings along with the ice cream. Dwight would have been remembering those charcoal-scented burgers in their condensation-dampened yellow paper sacks from when he was five years old.

• Peanut Buster Parfait 1987 – A Dairy Queen opened on Sherbrooke Street not too far from our house in Montreal in the mid '70s. We used to walk down or ride over on our bikes for ice cream. Apparently Dwight was still fond of dropping in when he was in his late 20s.
• Burger King Cheesburger Brockville 1999 – After the era of the Brazier Burger, my parents purchased a piece of land on Charleston Lake near Brockville and built a small cottage there. Dwight had some of the best times of his life there; he liked fishing and swimming and wandering around on the old unpaved back roads. He also enjoyed visits into town to get fast food, a continuing pleasure into his 30s.
• Pineapple Chicken Tchang Kang House 1978 – This is the Tchang Kiang at 6066 Sherbrooke West in Montreal, just down the street from the house where we grew up. It was one of the few restaurants where my dad, a fussy eater, felt comfortable. The irony is that Dwight and my dad would order things like spare ribs and pineapple chicken, given that I was repeatedly assured by a family friend who grew up in Shanghai and other parts of Asia that the place served extraordinarily fine and authentic Szechuan food long before most Montrealers knew much about that regional cuisine.
• Back Bacon Christmas 1980 – This was our family Christmas breakfast treat.
• Pinnochio "Hot Pepper" pizza 1981 – Pinocchio was one of several noble pizza places in the old neighbourhood. I'm not sure it still exists, but I expect Dwight would have ordered many, many of these to his various little apartments on Decarie and Sherbrooke.
• Fries Paul Frigon 1973 – My brother John recalls a small restaurant named Paul's, run by one Paul Frigon on Décarie south of Côte St. Antoine in Montreal. Apparently all the kids from the Catholic boys' grade school would congregate there after classes let out to order some combination of a hot dog, a Dr. Pepper and a Puffed Square (now known as Flaky Pastry or Passion Flaky). This memory would date from about Grade 7.

• Braised Lamb Ritz Carlton 1986 – After my brother John and I moved to Toronto, my dad used to treat the rest of the family to Christmas dinner at the Ritz in Montreal. He had a fascination with big hotel dinners honed during his rather tough time through the Depression in Toronto, when his family would have their Christmas dinner at the King Eddy or the Royal York, a bright spot in an otherwise challenging year.
• Twinkie 1972 – Dwight would have been 11 at this date, and I think part of the subtext here is that Twinkies were not generally available in Canada in the '60s, so although we would have been bombarded with advertising for them during shows like Captain Kangaroo and Huckleberry Hound, we couldn't actually buy them. It's likely that 1972 was the first year we went down to visit our New York cousins, and thus Dwight's first bite of this hitherto unattainable pleasure.
• Peach with cigarette 1983 – What can I say? Dwight also said that an apple and a cigarette was a perfect combination of flavours.
• Roast beef Winter 1974 – My mom tended to cook a roast beef every Sunday night. This may have been the last winter that Dwight felt happy to be part of the weekly family ritual. And those roasts were great, both on the night and later, as sandwiches.
• Chateau BBQ ribs 1985 – This was also a frequently patronized west-end Montreal delivery choice, but I don't think it still exists. It was an employee breakaway from the next entry.
• Chalet BBQ 1967 to present – We did actually hold the memorial for Dwight at this iconic west-end Montreal restaurant.
• Breakfast King Edward Hotel 1975 – This was the year my cousin David got married and we drove up en famille from Montreal to Toronto to attend the wedding. My dad had a nose for urban evolution, and he decided to stay at the King Eddy, which was at that time in a state of relative neglect. "One of these days they're going to diddy it up, and then we won't be able to afford to stay there," he said. "So we should enjoy it now. It's got a lovely lobby." He was of course right.
• Silverwood Ice cream Sandwich / Fudge monster QPC 1980?? – How many ice cream sandwiches did we buy as kids, at 10 cents a pop, from local depanneurs on the way home from school? I don't recall Fudge Monsters, but John says they were a malted fudge frozen bar with a gumball for a nose. QPC = Quarter Pounder with Cheese (see next entry).

• Egg McMuffin?? – McDonalds began to spread out in Montreal in the 1970s, when Dwight was in high school, and it quickly became popular with many of us. Whatever else one might say about McDonalds, the food has the charm of always being exactly the same.
• C.N.E. Bacon Butty – The British-derived sliced bacon-on-a-bun sandwich, which Dwight would have tasted on one or more of our annual family pilgrimages to the Ex as a tween and young teenager.

Looking the list over, it's hardly a list of fine dining experiences; in fact, it's dominated by fast-food burgers. Dwight was never really happy in his body from birth, and I think a large part of his life was spent trying to find moments of comfort. Even the fancier items are certainly comfort food.

Significantly, most are intimately tied up with the accrued memory of repeated pleasant family experiences. I guess what the list illustrates is that, if one is being honest about food, one may have to admit that it's the emotional resonance more than the cost or quality or even taste that makes it memorable. And decoding the list tells me – if I ever really doubted it – that my brother, who was not always easy to get along with, had a profound connection to our shared family life. After all, he called it "Top Memories", not "Favourite Foods".