When summer turns to autumn, every gardener finds ways to hold on to their harvest. Some pickle with vinegars, some add sugar and make jams, but for chef and food writer Victoria Walsh and her husband, actor Scott McCallum, the solution is to add liquor. The couple saw their garden’s plenty as an opportunity to experiment with creating unique ingredients for their home bar. The result is their new book, A Field Guide to Canadian Cocktails, which is full of their personal tributes to the country’s most notable drinks, with contributions from some of our best libation-slingers.
As individuals or as partners, did you have an “a-ha” moment that inspired you to learn more about cocktails?
Victoria: I would entertain a lot. I would do a 12-course meal, but I would be a terrible host. I wouldn’t even offer you a glass of wine. But when I met Scott, he was on top of that stuff. Scott actually proposed to me by building me a rooftop garden. Then he started making cocktail ingredients from all the stuff he grew.
Scott: I had grown so many herbs – I had no idea that I had a knack for it. We had more sage, marjoram and Thai basil than we knew what to do with. I started doing essential oils, soaps and shampoos, but then I started just throwing stuff into alcohol and I realized that was much better.
Was it the chemistry that attracted you?
Scott: It was more about using everything. It was amazing to find a use for every single thing we grew out there. We tried everything out. Some of it failed, some of it was amazing.
Can you give me an example of a failed experiment?
Scott: The shampoo was pretty bad but for drinks, I definitely had some failures with lovage. It is delicious, but it can be really intense. I’ve tried to make bitter liqueur with all things from the garden. [The lovage version] was pretty … okay. It was almost like making your own Chartreuse meets fernet. It was really bitter.
The intros to each chapter read like travel journals.
Victoria: We thought it was an important part of the book and it was a good excuse to go travel. We wanted the book to be a bit of a travel guide, too. Also, if you go to that city or province, we wanted to show where you can go to have amazing drinks.
Scott: We went to Prince Edward Island for a week and we went to every distillery and wine-maker. It’s fun to load up the trunk of a car with some liquid memories. For our honeymoon, we ate and drank our way through France. We hadn’t had that opportunity in Canada [until this book].
One of the recipes that stood out for me was the Yukon Sour Toe, which I am unfamiliar with.
Scott: It’s probably best to keep it that way. It’s one of the most gnarly things in the world. It’s an actual toe that’s been dehydrated, sitting on salt. It goes back to celebrating that kind of insane hard-core culture that goes with living up in the North. At some point in time, someone brought a severed toe to the bar and they decided to make it fun. They pull it out for you, you choose your whisky, you sign a pledge, the Captain recites a poem and throws a toe in your whisky. You take a shot and your lips are supposed to touch the toe. We really wanted to feature some kind of ode to it. We played around with using the Big Feet candy, but we wanted to find something that captured the gross factor around it. In the end, we did a pickled morel.
This interview has been condensed and edited.