The cake that got away (and other delicious things I ate in Montreal)
I like to think that I lived a cosmopolitan life in Montreal. By that, I mean I lived downtown and ate a lot of delicious things from nearby bakeries and restaurants. Food is love, has always been love in my family, whether that is my mother making bone broth and stewed green beans enough to feed every one of my sisters and our husbands and our children, or my father taking us out to Tim’s for an Apple Fritter and a French Vanilla Cappuccino.
Food is love, but my experience of food changed when I arrived to Montreal. You see, I arrived to Montreal just after getting married, which meant I was now responsible for dinner. This was a heady experience. The rush of spending time in the aisles I had overlooked at the store, considering cuts of beef and lamb, trays of chicken, salmon steaks lined up so perfectly behind the grocer’s display glass, selected by hand, wrapped up just for me.
The first few months, we played house. Got our fresh fruits from the Atwater Market, our cheap but delicious veal cuts from Akhavan in NDG. I made Mediterranean Chicken and Thai noodles from the cookbook our friends and family had given us at our engagement party. I looked up new recipes online to widen our palettes. Cauliflower lentils with toasted cumin seeds. Spinach, strawberry and feta salad.
I have always found French dessert overrated. Why does it get to be the standard that all others are measured against?
But I also discovered that making dinner every night is a slog, even if you double up portions and eat leftovers on the second night. How had my parents fed us for 25 years? I remembered the Lebanese neighbour my mom had hired to help with weeknight dinners in high school. Her buttery rice, her grape leaves and fried chicken. The time she’d looked at my sisters and I, too skinny for her liking, as she handed over the tray of food - Rah asamminkom!1
M had lived in Montreal for a few years before I got there. He knew where to get late night fatayer if you were studying late. Where to get shawarma (the Chateau Kabab at the corner of Sherbrooke and Guy, or the Basha on Sainte Catherine). Where to get roast chicken (the Torrinos in the Eaton Centre food court).
Now, we were two foodies with our open schedule and our excited taste buds. Now he could walk me through the joys of the Montreal food scene. We could order the bison burgers at Toi, Moi et Cafe. Get increasingly absurd specialty poutines from La Banquise at the end of a bike ride that took us to Parc Lafontaine. Walk up to Concordia for the elaborate juices at Cocktail Antabli. But nothing, nothing compared to Premiere Moisson.
I have always found French dessert overrated. Why does it get to be the standard that all others are measured against? With its tartelettes and macarons and madeleines. There is so much tastier out there. I refuse to kowtow to the idea that just because something is French, it’s better.
And yet, Premiere Moisson, the bakery I found everywhere I turned in Montreal, converted me. Nobody did chocolatines like they did, the pastry still flaky, the chocolate filling just sweet enough but with the slightest bitter aftertaste. Then there was the chocoframboise, an exquisite dark chocolate raspberry mousse cake, with a raspberry coulis on top. This was the thing that turned me, the thing I went back to again and again. The thing that convinced that French pastry really had no equal.
There was a Premiere Moisson on my walk to work, and I am embarrassed at the number of times I would stand in the ridiculously long lines and fork out the $4.95 — a steal! Really — for the single portion version of this pastry. First, I got addicted, and then my younger sister Soraya, who lived up the street at the time, got addicted too. And then my whole family got addicted. It got so bad that if we were going to Ottawa for the weekend, we would buy a family-sized chocoframboise cake on our way out of town and I would balance it on my lap the whole way.
You need to understand how much we loved the chocoframboise so that you know, when I tell you that Sammy’s cake was better, just what I mean. M’s cousin, Sammy, was studying nearby. We used to have him over every few weeks for dinner. Sometimes — this time — Soraya would also be there.
I have no idea what we ate for the main course. Maybe the Mediterranean chicken? It doesn’t even matter. All that matters is that Sammy brought a cake and it was also dark chocolate and mousse-based and it was divine.
We ate and had tea and everyone went home and then the next day Soraya came over and we polished off the rest of the cake and we raved and we stuffed our faces. “This is better than the chocoframboise!” she said. “I know!” I replied as we ate and ate until the cake was done.
Later I asked M to ask Sammy where he’d gotten the cake from. We needed to know. We needed more of this cake. He said sure and then we went about the rest of our lives, and every few days I’d nag, “did you call Sammy?” and he’d say something like “Oh shoot! I forgot. I’ll call him tomorrow,” until a few days or a few weeks had passed. I really don’t know because it’s been 14 years since all of this happened.
You know where this is going, right? When M asked Sammy, he didn’t remember. And that was that. We looked back through our memories for clues. The box it had come in (white, unmarked). The bakeries in his neighbourhood (too many to count.)
There’s a Premiere Moisson in Ottawa now. The chocoframboise isn’t always on the menu, but sometimes it’s there and we order it and live our past and reminisce. But it’s lost its shine, too. Because Sammy’s cake is the one that got away.
Every cake I’ve eaten since has been held to this impossible standard, to Sammy’s cake, which is a cake that he has nothing to do with. And yet, it is his cake the way it is Schrodinger’s Cat, or Pythagoras’s Theorem. They will always be intrinsically connected.
Sammy himself moved away long ago. Every one of us in this story left Montreal. For all we know, the bakery shut down. Or worse, it’s still there, and if we tried the cake today, we’d discover that it’s nothing special, a little too sweet, a little too milky. That it was a confluence of one special day and our memories that made it magical bliss.
*Names have been changed for privacy.
This piece is inspired by this delightful post from
about food-based poetry.
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I am continuing to share resources, links, and information that I have found helpful regarding the crisis in Gaza and the West bank. I know that it’s hard to continue paying attention, and that we’re all exhausted, but I also think that as tired as we are, we can’t give into our privilege to look away. Palestinians can’t look away as they continue to be starved, bombed, and besieged.
This week, I’d like to share a post from Israeli whistleblower group, Breaking the Silence Israel.
“In May, a group of 42 IDF reservists who were sent to fight in Gaza since Oct. 7 decided to write a letter in which they state their refusal to continue serving.
Last week, a few of them went public, telling Liza Rozovsky of @haaretzcom some of what they were sent to carry out. While many in Israel debate the legitimacy of refusal, barely any are dealing with the reality those soldiers described.”
The psychological toll on surviving Palestinians is unimaginable. I think about the post below everyday. I cannot fathom what this does to a person.
This translates to the Lebanese dialect in Arabic for, “I’m gonna fatten you up!” Our thinness was perceived by this lady as a sign of bad health. She had no idea how often I looked at myself and thought I’d look better if I just lost 10 pounds - but that’s a topic for another day.
Noha,
That is the most tragic dessert story I've ever heard. Talk about invidious comparisons. One cake to rule them all. In Search of Lost Cake. Now a little part of me wants to taste Sammy's cake. Can we put him under hypnosis?
Makes me want to drown in the kind of memories that taste like chocolate and lost chances. Thanks for the ride through your cravings and regrets.