ACCOZZAGLIA

Last night, cheekybrit and I drove up to the far side of Thunder Bay Brampton to a traditional style Newfie jig’s* dinner, hosted by her brother and his wife (who is from Newfoundland).

I’d never heard of a jigs dinner [and ‘ere too bye!] before last week. I’d be willing to try anything once, though.

So while we lacked screech to wash it all down — the Newfie equivalent to moonshine — a jigs dinner generally comprises a main course of salt beef, which is then boiled in water for two hours to rehydrate and tenderize. Relatively speaking. The very salted water (pot liquor?) is then used to create the two starch-based puddings — one from turnips while the other from peas (split, I think). Boiled, skinned potatoes and carrots round off the root vegetable ensemble, and all of it is topped off by boiled, salted cabbage.

(There’s lot of boiling involved. Oh, and salt.)

chitah would have felt right at home. The jigs dinner is supposed to be salty. Some might argue that it’s actually a salt-delivery mechanism disguised as a traditional feast. And it delivered. In spades.

I used to think that eating boxes of Twinkies could preserve someone’s body for a long time without enbalming intervention. No more. Now I know the secret to long lividity after life (well, not lividity, but a sense of being intact long after the fact) is to have a jigs dinner once and have it often. Short of that, my I raised my blood pressure without getting even a little bit upset — all through the power of marriage.

Of sodium and chlorine, that is.

In fairness, the Newfie host prepared this feast with a self-deprecating wink and nod throughout the affair, and she insisted that she would not take it personally if I didn’t warm to it. Well, I’m here to say that I ate 70 percent of what was on my plate! And the only reason I didn’t finish was — okay, there were two reasons — in the hours preceding dinner, we stuffed ourselves with five different cheeses (including goat’s milk cheese, a yellow cheddar, a very aged white cheddar, fresh brie and herbed havarti) and various nuts. The other was that, in the cook’s blunt assessment, the cut of salt beef she bought was not the best, given how tough and stringy it proved being. Okay, there were three: the pot liquor was saltier than desired for preparation of the other vegetables.

Still, it did me great honour to be brought into this long-standing tradition hailing back to generations of hard-as-nails Newfies who had to ride out months of brutal, raw winter with the reserves of the previous summer. One way to do this was by preservation through salt. Not surprisingly, the maritime roots of Newfoundland were founded by those who made a living from the seas, many whom had ancestors who travelled to North America from Ireland, Scotland, Britain and Wales on ships whose provisions were stocked with, well, salted meat and hard tack (dried biscuit that can be used for building a home in arid climates).

For our good humour throughout, we were rewarded with a far less traditional (for Newfoundland) cranberry pudding, topped with a sweet butter sauce. That was nothing short of orgasmic and artery-attenuating. And after a four-month conspiracy, the cook and I hoodwinked cheekybrit into watching a very un-Newfie film she’d refused vehemently to watch under her own accord, The Matrix (Although, if you think about it, maybe Tastee Wheat actually tasted more like a jigs dinner, though they got it wrong when they made the Matrix and made it taste more like Tastee Wheat instead).

And to think that one week ago I was talking about how I contracted the clap (in the form of a gonorrhoea plushie), only to report a week later that I was cured. By salt.

In the spirit of all things Newfoundland, I leave all with the longtime meme classic, Windaz 2000 Newfie Edition.

* DISCLAIMER. This has absolutely nothing to do with yauvanzri whatsoever.