Every year we buy a food-related calendar for the kitchen. I’m not sure why – in this age of personal electronic devices, wall calendars are pretty much obsolete, and the selection becomes more and more sparse each year. But we have this one section of wall that needs something, and it’s kind of fun to mark the passing of the months by flipping the page and enjoying a new picture for 30 days.
This year, our kitchen calendar is a collection of vintage food ads. None of them are exceptionally remarkable, but they meet the criteria of being food-related and vaguely retro. Like most calendars, we don’t really look at the pictures as “art”; that is, we just enjoy the image and don’t really analyze it too much.
On new year’s day, we opened up the new calendar and flipped it open to January, where the ad is for a brand of foie gras; Edouard Artzner of Strasbourg, France, a company which has been around since 1803.
Brian Morin grew up in Toronto, where he studied at George Brown College, and then moved on to working in small restaurants like Napoleon and Truffles. In the 1980s, he moved on to work in hotel kitchens such as The Four Seasons, Sutton Place, and the Intercontinental. He then became the executive chef of Prime restaurants, and in 2003 opened his own restaurant, 