A Part of My Heritage

Times are good here in Saskatchewan. If the rest of the country is heading into recession, you wouldn't know it from looking around here.

Premier Brad Wall just announced a huge paydown of the provincial debt, big infrastructure spending to fix our miles of craggly, roadkill-strewn highways and the single largest income tax cut in the province's history.

Believe me as a local journalist - when the ruling Sask. party is seeking out reporters and interviews rather than running from them, things are going really well.

As I was making my daily news rounds on the internets I came across this article by Kevin Libin in the National Post. Mr. Libin outlines Saskatchewan's recent good fortune and lays out its plan to sell itself to the rest of the country. This line gave me pause:

"There may not be many Saskatchewanians left who lived the Dirty Thirties firsthand, but the province's institutional memories, preserved in family recipes for gopher stew, bred a deep cautiousness in Saskatchewan bones."

I was so startled at this line that I almost dropped my banjo. My forbears have been farming the prairies since the turn of the century and I've never even heard of gopher stew, let alone seen a recipe in grandma's cookbook for it.

Worked into a tizzy and ready to send the obviously elitist Mr. Libin a piece of my mind (we do have the e-mail out west), I decided to do a little bit of research. A quick Google search for "gopher stew" turned up this recipe on cooks.com:

"6 lbs. gopher meat (a gopher is a land turtle)
1/4 lb. salt pork, cubed
3 Spanish onions, diced
5 stalks celery, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
3 (16 oz.) cans sliced tomatoes
10 c. water
2 datil peppers, whole
Salt and pepper to taste
3 potatoes, cubes
5 tbsp. brown flour
1/2 c. water"

Ok, so people do eat gopher stew and. . . wait, what the hell? Land turtle? Maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. Expanding my search to "gopher stew" + Saskatchewan, the first thing that turns up is the Post article. Go figure.

Just as I started to feel vindicated, I came across this article from a 1997 issue of the Canadian Legion's magazine. It appears that we did eat gophers after all.

"But the one thing there was no shortage of in southern Saskatchewan was gophers. There were reports of gophers being stewed, canned, pickled, smoked and fried"

And if that's not enough our former Premier, father of universal healthcare, and the Greatest Canadian himself, once sat down for a steaming pot of gopher stew.

"Tommy Douglas, first elected to the House of Commons in 1935, described having supper with a family near Weyburn in 1933: “We had a supper of gopher stew. We had bread made from some frozen wheat that had been crushed with a grinder, and we had coffee made from roasted barley."

So I guess you're off the hook for now, National Post. But I'm keeping my eye on you.