Curtis LeBlanc recommends the cassoulet
The Vancouver author and amateur gourmand on why cooking for others is an act of compassion.
VANCOUVER – The first time I met Curtis LeBlanc, he told me he didn’t like Nirvana. It was 2006, and we were both enrolled in Paul Kane High School’s now infamous Pop & Rock class. The assignment was simple: partner up and play some music. I wanted to go grunge but Curtis, as he’s wont to do, had other plans. After dumping on Kurt Cobain, he suggested we try our hand with something, well, cooler: Against Me’s seminal classic “Tonight We Give It 35%” – which he eventually screamed in front of the class like bloody fucking murder.
Needless to say, the kid made an impression.
In the years since, Curtis traded our sleepy suburb of St. Albert, AB, for the bright neon lights of Vancouver, getting his MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Though his style has been described as prairie gothic, a quick scan of his social media paints a different picture. His Instagram is a carousel of colourful home-cooked food. Auburn pork belly rests alongside chartreuse coleslaw. A ring of panko crusted shrimp forms around a cup of chilli lime dipping sauce. Steak, smoked to perfection, sits clean plated and still slightly pink on the inside.
The contrast between these two sides of his creativity was so compelling, I had no choice but to request an audience with the chef. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, touched on Curtis’ love of the Food Network, whether Bobby Flay is an asshole (jury’s out), and why you can never go wrong with meat and potatoes. Bon appetit.
ES: I was going through Little Wild just to see if there were any references to food or cooking in it. And you actually mention both a fair bit. You even have a whole poem about steel cut outs. Was food a big part of your life growing up?
CL: Good question. My mom’s an insanely good prairie cook so we always had giant meals. But my family also doesn’t have a huge appetite, which is funny. So we’d have small portions of very rich things. At some point I had watched hundreds of hours of Food Network and still wasn’t really cooking. When I was in undergrad, I was still eating like a bachelor. [My wife] Mallory always jokes that the first meal that I made her was boiled pierogis. I used to make “meatball salad,” which was frozen Swedish meatballs on spinach with a bottled dressing.
ES: That’s so disgusting.
CL: It’s actually really good.
ES: Where’d you get the meatballs from?
CL: Safeway. But yeah, when Mallory and I got together I was really excited to cook for her because she was cooking these great meals. And all of a sudden I was like “Oh, I actually have an idea of how to do this” because of how much Food Network I’d watched. I had an inherent understanding of timing and what flavours go together. I just absorbed that stuff. And then I started experimenting and cooking a lot.
ES: I actually remember anecdotes of “Oh, my God, Curtis is watching nothing about the Food Network all day.” Who was your go-to celebrity chef?
CL: Oh, I don’t know if I ever had a favourite. I don’t really care about those chef personalities. But in terms of shows, Chopped is obviously the GOAT. Beat Bobby Flay. I’m not sure if he’s an asshole or not. I don’t know his whole story, but the show is just a great formula. It’s Chopped compressed. And you learn a ton. The competitor will come in with their signature dish – the thing that they’ve cooked a million times. And a lot of times Bobby Flay won’t know what it is, but he will combine the things together that he knows taste good, to make some approximation of that dish that ends up tasting better than the traditional one. And you learn a lot of those combinations through that process.
ES: It sounds like cooking is a form of self-expression for you, where you’re going into the kitchen and you have ideas, as opposed to someone like myself who still relies on cookbooks.
CL: I have a ton of cookbooks and I love cookbooks. But if I’m cooking something new I’ll go out and read 10 recipes on how to make that thing in 10 different but similar ways. And then based on what I think I know, I’ll come up with some sort of combination or spin on it that I think will taste good. And seventy-five percent of the time it does.
ES: As someone chained to Cook This Book, that sounds pretty cool.
CL: Yeah. I have OCD and the kitchen is a place where I can control all the variables. I enjoy that.
ES: When I’m in the kitchen it feels like everything is out of my control.
CL: I always liked strategy games and I don’t really feel cooking a meal is much different. You’re holding the entire thing in your head at once. And you have to have three tracks going at once. What needs to be cooked when? What’s going to burn? How do you make it so that it’s all finished at the same time? And I like that challenge. I don’t find it overwhelming.
ES: Wow. We are very different people. It’s funny because Leah is definitely the chef in our family. And I’ve gotten better at cooking for sure. But it’s very apparent, where she’ll come into the kitchen and there will just be that tension of me being like, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!!!”
CL: I kind of took after my dad in the sense that I can be a little hover-y. I’m not allowed in the kitchen when Mallory’s cooking because I’ll start peering over her shoulder, just making comments. And it’s funny because I find I catch myself doing it and I hate that I do because it always annoyed the shit out of me when my dad did it.
ES: I feel like people hovering is really part of what gives us this idea that the kitchen is the heart of any home. I remember we had a foreign exchange student growing up named Fabian, and he would always look in my mom’s oven when she was cooking and try to figure out what she was making.
CL: I don’t know if I was so much like that when I was younger, but now my parents have their place in Vernon. My mom loves cooking and she designed this big open kitchen. It’s got a huge butcher block island on it. So when we cook a meal there it’s super collaborative. There’s enough room to hover around each other without being in the way. It’s a far cry from the typical Vancouver one-bedroom where the kitchen is very utilitarian.
ES: I was going to ask, what is a Curtis Leblanc staple? I know you’re kind of meat and potatoes, for lack of a better word. But if you’re showing off what are you making?
CL: If I have all day I’m making a cassoulet. But I also make a great steak. I don’t have a grill, but I do have a great cast iron pan that I love. I will sous vide my steak with butter, garlic and rosemary, and then finish in the cast iron. You can turn a six dollar steak into a thirty dollar steak doing that.
ES: I don’t even know what a cassoulet is?
CL: It’s a French bean dish. It’s supposed to be with duck confit, but I’m not confit-ing any duck, so I just do braised chicken thighs. And you basically layer chicken thighs, pork ragu, white bean and garlic sausage over and over again, and then bake it all together in a Dutch oven with a breadcrumb on top at the end. You bake it for a long time so it almost becomes like a French bean lasagna. It tastes awesome.
ES: Is it a stretch to say that your taste in food seems very influenced by Alberta and [our hometown of] St. Albert?
CL: Probably not. I think I make the kinds of dishes that I liked eating growing up. The first time I tried a lot of cuisines was when I moved out to Vancouver. Generally Asian food is my favourite. Vietnamese is my go to whenever I want a meal that tastes amazing and won’t give me heartburn. Just super neutral and delicious. Japanese is my favourite cuisine but I find it tricky to cook at home if you don’t have the pantry. A lot of the ingredients are really specific.
But, like you said, I do fall back on meat and potatoes. A lot of the time, my favourite thing to eat is steak. And a lot of people have come out against steak. They don’t like them and I totally get that. But I think that’s also because maybe you haven’t had a really good steak. Or your vegan or vegetarian and that’s totally fair, too. But a really good steak. Oh, that’s good.
ES: Your poems are dark and depressing, but your food often looks bright and colourful. What’s the deal?
CL: I cook for other people, but I write poems kind of for myself.
ES: Oh, shit. That’s a great answer.
CL: I always call writing a selfish pursuit with compassionate results. Like, at the end of the day, anyone who’s writing, if they’re going to be doing a good job of it, they really have to like look inward, I think, and sort of like focus on what they want to do and what they want to say, because that’s how you’re going to get the most authentic work. The bonus of that is that if you make something authentic, that feels real, people are going to connect to it. And in the end, you’re going to help people out. If I’m eating alone my lunches are just applesauce, cheese string, crackers and some like tapenade. If I’m cooking for other people, I want it to look nice. I want to make them happy.
ES: It’s nice to hear you’re still slumming it with the occasional applesauce. Remind me again what happened with your project about hockey, because you went and traveled and did that, right?
CL: Right. That was my thesis novel. I shopped it around, nobody really wanted it. It was my first novel, so that’s not strange. I might revisit it at some point.
I am working on a collection of essays that explore hockey, and it’s cultural consequences from a layman’s point of view. Most of the non-fiction we get about hockey is from the point of view of coaches or players or media guys. I’ve always loved the sport but I’ve also had a bittersweet relationship with it. I quit playing when I was in junior high because my coaches were assholes and I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted to listen to punk rock and skateboard. But then I started playing again in grade 12 and continued on in beer leagues or wreck leagues at university. I’ve reffed, I’ve worked concessions and I have written about the NHL for some publications online and I’ve been a fan. So I was like, “Oh, I actually have this lifelong, tumultuous relationship with the game that I can write about.” That might be interesting.
ES: Are you doing a follow up to your second poetry book, Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation?
CL: I haven’t written much poetry. It was hard releasing a book during the pandemic. It came out in April and things locked down in March. That was sad. Me, Mallory and our friend Sean were going to go on tour: New York, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa. Obviously that fell through. So that was hard and kind of sad. A lot of the things that are enjoyable about putting on a book are getting to promote it and getting to meet people through it and read from it. And then the creative energy kind of slipped away as I was filled with anxiety and dread.
ES: I think there were two paths creatives could go. You either say “I’m only doing creative stuff just to distract myself”or “I’m just taking a break and just kind of sitting with all of this right now.”
CL: The problem with me being creative, I think, is that I need to be distraction free to be able to do it. So it’s definitely not a distraction. I can’t use it as a distraction. I won’t do anything. I’ll just sit there, look at the blank page and get more anxious.
ES: Was cooking somewhat of an outlet for you, though?
CL: Definitely. Cooking felt good, and I tried a lot of new things as well. I got some new cookbooks. I started cooking more Korean food, which is delicious. Trying to perfect my bibimbap. I was also working the whole time, which was nice. Throughout my life I’ve always kind of dreaded work. But it was a real source of stability for me. The kids I tutor and teach are great, nice people to talk to. They also put my life into perspective. A lot of them are graduating into this new world. Everyone lost something [during the pandemic] but they were missing out graduating, this milestone that has been thrust at them through popular culture forever. They didn’t get to do it. If I was that age, I would have a hard time with that.
ES: Would you ever revisit the book tour later? Or is that just kind of like off the table?
CL: I would like to go out east and hopefully do some events while we’re there, but any sort of official launch would be off the table.
The process of putting a book out into the world is so long that, once it’s finally there, it’s been like two years. You don’t really want to look at it anymore. Or talk about it. Or think about it. You’re probably working on something new, or thinking about working on something new. And that book that people are just seeing for the first time, to you, is not even indicative of your best work. Like, “Oh, man, I’m way better since I wrote that sucker.”
Curtis Leblanc is a is a poet and writer residing in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. His debut novel, Sunsetter, is forthcoming from ECW in March 2023. You can find on Twitter, Instagram or his personal website.