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Michael Johansen, North West River
Dinner on the Empress

Funded Under: Professional Project Grants Program
Amount Funded: $1,815

As part of the research for his next novel, Dinner on the Empress, Michael Johansen of North West River is re-creating a dinner based on a ship’s menu he acquired several years ago. The document turned out to be the menu of a special meal served to 15 Great War veterans on board a Canadian Pacific trans-Atlantic liner in 1929. All the diners, including Newfoundlander Tommy Ricketts, had been awarded the Victoria Cross for valour.

Michael says living in Labrador, where Romaine lettuce and red bell peppers count as exotic produce, there's no chance of buying many of the ingredients for the menu items, and perhaps little chance of finding someone who has the expertise to cook them. So he approached Ryan Gustafson, head chef at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, who agreed to re-create the entire dinner in banquet style. Michael felt the Royal York was an appropriate venue for the dinner since the Empress of Scotland was a ship of the Canadian Pacific lines, and the Royal York was the flagship hotel of the CP company, and is featured prominently on the 1929 menu.

The dinner will be served to a party of invited guests on December 11 at 7 p.m. in the Epic Restaurant at the Royal York Hotel.

Background...

The following is an excerpt from Michael Johansen’s detailed project description which accompanied his application to the Professional Project Grants Program:

The dinner - for those who weren't feeling seasick - started with appetizers of Eggs Farcie aux Perles de Beluga, English melon Rafraichie, Ramequins au Gruyere, celery hearts, salted almonds, Queen Olives and, finally, radishes. It soon moved onto the soup course with a choice between clear green turtle, Amantillado and cream of tomatoes, Americaine. The first course of Brook Trout Meuniere, Empresse and Supreme of Brett au Chablis et Laitances, was followed by three more main courses that featured dishes like Braised Sweetbreads en Cocotte, Saddle of Lamb, Bouquetiere, Roast New Season's Partridge a l'Anglaise, and souffle pudding au chocolat. The meal was topped off with a cup of coffee.

The guest list of 15 men was equally impressive, although most of the diners had started their lives in some of the humblest circumstances early Canada had to offer. At the time they all sat as guests-of-honour at the Captain's table on board the Empress of Scotland, somewhere in the North Atlantic heading east on an early November evening in 1929, they were known as heroes and were among the most famous people in the country.

The 15 passengers Commander James Turnbull (C.B.E., R.D., R.N.R.) had invited to his table that night were all veterans of the Great War, all recipients of the Victoria Cross. They were men like John Kerr of Fox River, Nova Scotia who captured 62 prisoners in a solitary attack on German trenches in France; or George Mullin of Moosomin, Saskatchewan who took an enemy pillbox single-handedly at Passchendaele; Robert Shankland of Winnipeg who lead a desperate counter-attack against an overwhelming German advance during the same battle; and Tommy Ricketts of Middle Arm, Newfoundland who, alone with his section commander, captured four field guns and eight enemy soldiers while under heavy machine gun fire when he was still only 17 years old. These men were on their way to London, England, there to be honoured and toasted by the Prince of Wales along with dozens of other Victoria Cross recipients from all over the British Empire in what would come to be called a 'great national occasion'.

But first, only a few days before they were to land at Southampton, the 15 Canadian veterans gathered for a more private occasion, an evening of good food, good drink and, no doubt, fascinating conversation. A record of their talk may not exist, so I may never discover their exact words, but in my research for the novel, to be entitled Dinner on the Empress, I am learning about the veterans themselves: Where they grew up; how they were raised; how they became men who could act so selflessly in the face of such peril; and what happened to them after the war. How had the decade since they survived the hell of trench warfare changed them? What had they done in the years that passed until they shared a sumptuous meal in the middle of the Atlantic? What would they say to each other? Dinner on the Empress will be historical fiction, both a unique snapshot of Canadian history, but also a study of the forces that change people's lives - the extreme force of bloody conflict and also the moderate, perhaps healing force of the everyday world.

Michael Johansen

An Interview with Michael Johansen

The NLAC spoke with Michael about plans for the dinner and why it’s such an important component of his research for the novel...

NLAC: Tell us about the importance of the menu.

MJ: The idea (for the novel) came from the menu itself. I bought it while in Ontario, three or four years ago at a yard sale or a flea market – I don’t actually remember where I bought it. I bought this small bundle of papers – old newspapers, magazines, greeting cards – stuff like that, and this (menu) was in amongst them. But it actually took me about two years before I realized what I had, because it didn’t look at it that closely.

When I started looking at it and I saw that list of names with the signatures on it, it finally dawned on me what this was. It looked to me like a snapshot of this one single moment. These were 15 people, 16 if you include the captain, young men even at that time (1929), but they’d already gone through hell and back again to be worthy of being awarded the Victoria Cross. And all of them together there, I just wanted to write about it, it was such an incredible basis for a story.

So I started thinking about what research I should do into it. The obvious one is to research the men themselves. But the only record I’ve found of that dinner is the menu itself. So it occurred to me that since I didn’t recognize half of the food on it, that I should find out what it’s like.

NLAC: How will the re-creation of the dinner play out?

MJ: I knew this wasn’t going to be cheap, and I knew they couldn’t do this big elaborate meal for one person, so I decided to make a party of it, so I’m inviting a few people – they’re helping to pay their own way too. So I’ve got friends and family members coming, and a few guests. There will be 22 of us – I had more friends and family than I realized!

When the dinner happens, it’s not going to be a re-creation like a costume party or anything like that. The recreation is about the food – what it tastes like and what it looks like. And I’ll be interviewing the chef too to ask him about the preparation of it and stuff like that. I do hope to take from the ambiance of the dinner, that’s one of the reasons why I wanted more than just a couple of people there – I wanted it to be a fair-sized dinner so that there would be an interaction on that scale.

NLAC: Why do you feel it’s so important to become familiar with this food?

MJ: I love historical research, and when I write historical fiction I like to ground as much of it as possible in what was actually there and what actually happened. While I do make things up in my fiction, if I can actually see something, and describe it from memory, then I feel a whole lot more comfortable and it helps my writing process. I picture these people sitting around this table, and the food is being served to them, and I can only guess at this point what it looks like and smells like and tastes like – most of it – celery hearts and radishes I can do, but there are dishes on that menu that I can’t even pronounce in French. The appetizer was turtle soup – which actually can’t be reproduced any more – they don’t make turtles into soup now.

NLAC: In your grant proposal you explained that the action of the novel will follow the courses of the meal – tell us more about that.

MJ: The chapters will be structured around the menu items themselves – they will serve mostly as chapter headings. In terms of the narration, (at first) I played with the idea of flashing back and forth during the course (of the meal), going from diner to diner. But one of the things about the list of names on the menu that I’ve noticed is that everyone signed it, except for one person. At first I just assumed that that person didn’t come. But it just occurred to me a few days ago that there could be another explanation: if somebody’s got a menu, and he’s collecting signatures, he wouldn’t necessarily sign it himself. So when I realized that the menu might have been owned by this guy who didn’t sign it, it immediately occurred to me that here’s my narrator. So while I still intend to keep the courses as the chapter framework, it looks like it’s shaping into a first person narration. It’ll be this guy meeting these people, telling the reader what he knows about each person that he’s meeting and talking with during the course of the meal.

NLAC: How did you feel when you found this menu and realized what you had?

MJ: Well, I knew it was a menu, but I didn’t actually even know it was a shipboard menu until I looked at it closely. The outside cover is a picture of several hotels, the Royal York Hotel is there. The only indication that it was actually on a ship is at the bottom of the menu it says “Empress of Scotland”. When I looked at it and saw the names (and signatures are always interesting), and then I saw the “VCs” beside almost every name which was just fascinating, and then I saw Tommy Ricketts – his was the first name that I recognized. I thought my God...it was an amazing find.

NLAC: Do you think it’s a valuable document?

MJ: Yeah, probably. Maybe one day I’ll sell it, or donate it to a museum. But first I’m going to make it into a novel.