Ottawa is the coldest capital in the world, a fact reinforced during my visit in the late 1980s, when nightly temperatures dipped to -30 degrees and the days never climbed as high as zero. The place was enchanting nevertheless, a crowded city of snow piles that surrounded museums, restaurants and walkways like little white hills, looming over iced-over cobblestones that forced most visitors to shuffle-step their way along the streets. People dangled skates over one shoulder, tying them together by the laces, as they ping-ponged from shop to pub. The skates would come in handy throughout the day, while traveling the Rideau Canal – the world’s longest public skating rink, measuring more than 5 miles, and a popular shortcut for crisscrossing the city during the frozen months.
Canadians embrace winter in a way that most North Americans hailing from below the border will never understand. Even in New England, where the three northern states and the city of Boston have established their winter bonafides, the passion for sledding, skating, snowshoeing, skiing, snowman-making, snowball-throwing and fireplace-gathering doesn’t hold a candle to our neighbors from the Great White North. The same holds for drinking. Beer, wine and spirits are essential ingredients in the overall Canadian winter experience. During this season, the lungs of the locals burn with cold air and cocktails.
After a quick warm-up pint in The Laff (The Chateau Lafayette), an Ottawa pub that is older than Ottawa itself, I carried my skates to the canal, shoved my walking shoes into my backpack, and began to tentatively glide along the route of the Rideau, stopping at food vendors and heated huts for foot cramp breaks. While waiting in line at a portable canal café for a cup of hot chocolate, the man in front of me opened his coat and pulled out a couple of miniature bottles of Canadian-made De la Tierre Maple Tequila. “You’ll be needing one of these,” he said, handing me a bottle. “They don’t serve alcohol here.”
“How much,” I asked.
“I ask only that you say kind words about Ottawa when you leave,” he said.
The truth of Canada’s love of winter, the man told me, is that it’s a great excuse to combine healthy, fresh air with the warming sensation and feel-good, heady buzz of liquor. “Most of the year, drinking’s a guilty pleasure,” he explained. “In winter, it’s considered necessary for survival. So, no guilt.”
Two of the more famous Canadian drinks are Moose Milk and Caribou. I first tasted Moose Milk in Toronto, while waiting at a hotel for the arrival of my sister and brother-in-law, who were coming to celebrate New Year’s Eve. People were staggering out of a large ballroom, the men in sloppy tuxedoes, the women in dresses that couldn’t contain their cleavage. I sat on a nearby bench and read, looking up occasionally to watch drunken couples grope each other, and every once in a while fall on their asses. When the party had thinned out to almost nothing, I asked a servant walking by, “What are they drinking?”
“Moose milk,” she said. “There’s still plenty left. Help yourself.”
I nodded OK, and resumed my chapter. She returned with an empty punch bowl and a ladle, and a glass filled with white liquid.
“There’s more inside,” she said. “Help yourself.”
It was delicious. I would find out later that Moose Milk is essentially made from some combination of five basic ingredients: hard liquor (Canadian whisky, dark rum, or sometimes vodka); coffee (in liqueur form, like Kahlua, and also prepared coffee); dairy (which could be whole milk, cream, condensed milk, eggnog and/or vanilla ice cream); sweetener (usually maple syrup or sugar); and spice (traditionally nutmeg, sometimes with cinnamon).
Over the years, I have experimented with my own combination (using Rhode Island’s Thomas Tew Single Barrel Rum, Old New England Egg Nog, Sortilege – Quebec-made, derived from an old French word meaning “Magic Spell,” blending Canadian rye whiskey and pure male syrup – Newport Creamery or Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream and locally roasted coffee in the mix). Every taste brings me back to Toronto and the memory of frigid winter nights, horny rich tourists, friendly hotel workers and bonfires burning around public skating rinks at midnight.
All Canadian military know Moose Milk, a hotel concierge told me later that week. The Army, Navy and Air Force all claim to have invented it, and each have their own secret recipe. The Royal Canadian Air Force even states that the original drink was made with milk from lactating Alces alces (the North American moose or elk), explaining the name’s origin. Moose Milk is also the drink of choice served free at Canadian Legion Halls during the New Year, a holiday tradition that emphasizes the drink’s importance to warriors of ground, sea and sky.
No drink, however, is as closely associated with Canada is Caribou. Every February, during Quebec City’s Winter Carnival, people walk around in the bitter cold, watching artists carve ice sculptures, eating and drinking at outdoor bars made of ice, lining streets for costumed parade marchers, all the while drinking a strange liquid from a plastic red hollow stick capped with a screwed-on snowman’s head. The snowman is Bonhomme, the official mascot of Carnaval, whose face decorates every part of the city for two weeks.
According to legend, Caribou is derived from a drink made by mixing whisky with caribou blood and used by early pioneers and Colonial-era hunters, trappers and loggers to fortify themselves. (They claim to have inherited the drink from indigenous Canadians, who would ritualistically drink hot reindeer blood after a hunt.) Now, it’s officially only sold by Quebec’s Liquor Board, which keeps its recipe secret. Most of the 60,000 bottles sold annually are consumed during the two weeks of Winter Carnival.
Essentially, Caribou is made by combining red wine with hard liquor (usually Canadian whiskey, but also sherry, vodka, spiced rum or brandy, or a combination of any or all) and maple syrup (or sugar). The proportions are essentially 75 percent wine to 25 percent spirits. The wine can be mulled, with cinnamon sticks or anise or allspice or orange rind or anything that mulls your fancy. Since Caribou is a trademarked name, like Champagne, homemade versions are often called Reindeer’s Blood or Caribou Blood.
Whatever the particulars of flavor or name, the drink is one of the lasting impressions of any visit to Old Quebec during carnival season. As one of the Canadian sculptors taking a break from working on a giant snow clock said to me, “Without coffee and Caribou, we wouldn’t get through the night.” As he spoke, words came out in frozen bursts that condensed and formed icicles, lengthening his beard.
“What we’re celebrating here is the impossibility of our survival,” he said, making that Reverend Jim Ignatowski “blecchh” face every time he took another sip of Caribou. “We’re crazy for being out here in this cold. But we’re trying to prove that the cold can’t beat us. It can’t make us miserable. We’ll still enjoy ourselves. And that’s all true. But if they took our drink away, then we’re screwed.”
Clams Got Legs 