Matty Matheson - Matty Matheson Home Style Cookery

To Rizzo Louise Matheson

I never thought Id have the opportunity to write a cookbook in my life, let alone two.More than a decade ago, my sous chef at Parts & Labour and I used to talk for hours and hours about food, chefs, and everything else in our industry, but one of the things I remember the most was seeing Canadian chefs with huge food icons on social media. It would completely freak us out every time we saw any big-name chef come to Canada. How the fuck could that ever even happen? Daniel Boulud hanging out in the woods with the guys from Joe Beef or Anthony Bourdain eating at Martin Picards Au Pied de Cochon. The fact that Americans were eating in Canada and people were posting about it was insane. Then, the tables started turning. Through the restaurants of Montreal, the world started recognizing the bountiful food of Canada and giving opportunities for younger chefs to shine.

Still, it was unfathomable for a normal Canadian chef to have a cookbook. I only knew of three chefs from here that ever had one. Fellow Canadian chefs and I used to talk about what we would do if we ever had the chance to write one of our own: what would be in it, what the pictures would look like, what stories we would tell, who wed includeour farmers, our staff, our food. I thought that there would only be opportunities for chefs to write restaurant cookbooks. I never thought anyone would be interested in a home cookbook from anyone in my country.

In the days before social media and Amazon, we would search actual cookbook stores for copies of books by these titans of food to read. It was a lot like searching for new punk music. Finding a bookstore with a good cookbook section was hard, but when we did find them, it was like discovering Valhalla. When I discovered The Nouvelle Cuisine of Jean & Pierre Troisgros, it was like the first time I listened to Victim in Painby Agnostic Front. Finding and reading Letters to a Young Chefby the master Daniel Boulud in a bookstore was like the first time I listened to a tape of The California Takeover... Livewith Strife, Snapcase, and Earth Crisis. And I stole The Complete Nose to Tailcookbook by Fergus Henderson of St. John restaurant from an Indigo store in Ottawa (Im sorry Indigo!) because I was on tour with my friends band and had no money. Reading the first lines of that book was like creepy crawling to the Cro-Mags Seekers of the Truth, the nastiest riff of all time. All those experiences with food and music were life-changing and made me the chef that I am today.

Honestly, I never thought that I would be a chef. I never had that moment of falling in love with the craft before I went into my career. I only wanted to cook to make money because I genuinely loved being a cook. It never really clicked that it would be my path or that I would become a Canadian legend.

Now, when I started thinking about writing my first cookbook, it took me a long while to figure out what it would be like. Would it contain all my drug stories? My fucked-up cooking stories? I didnt know if it should reveal the twisted mental stories of kitchens that I lived through and am very happy I made it out of alive or stories about farmers and fisherfolk. In the end, I decided to put myself out there because your story is the easiest one to tell, since no one else has that story. It is yours and yours alone.

I wanted to tell that story of my life through a culinary lens, and I think I did a pretty bang-up job. Its so fucking scary to write and put something out there, like I did in that book. I made a book proposal, and when I started having meetings with publishers, they all told me that I needed a cowriter to tell my story. I asked several writers to work with me, and every one couldnt do it for legitimate reasons.