The woman behind a popular new baloney cookbook in Nova Scotia admits she’s usually “not a big baloney eater.”
Megan MacLeod does social media and photography for Pharmasave stores in Cape Breton. So when the franchise decided to print a book of local baloney recipes and stories, it was her job to photograph them.
“In order to photograph them, I also had to make them. And I said, well, if I’m putting these all together in a cookbook, I need to know that they’re good. So I went ahead and ate them all as well,” MacLoed told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
“I was pleasantly surprised.”
The book, Full of Bologna: A Collection of Cape Breton Classics, is on sale now at Pharmasave stories in Cape Breton, with all proceeds going to local food banks.
It features 33 recipes, whittled down from more than 100 submitted by shoppers during a summer blitz of baloney sales.
“Here in Cape Breton, when baloney goes on sale, people are lined up out the door and around the corner,” MacLeod said.
“We noticed that they were swapping their recipes for baloney and swapping treasured baloney backstory memories as well. So that’s kind of where this project came from.”
Baloney or bologna?
Like many Cape Bretoners, MacLeod consistently says “baloney” when referring to the deli meat, not “bologna,” like the book’s title.
Baloney is also the CBC’s preferred spelling, both for the meat and its more colloquial meaning, nonsense.
MacLeod says Pharmasave went with bologna because it’s what Maple Leaf, the food company sponsoring the cookbook, uses.
The book features recipes for baloney mac and cheese, baloney sliders, baloney chowder, baloney roast and, MacLeod’s favourite, baloney stew.
“I had initially turned up my nose at it, thinking there’s no way that this is going to be any good. And I made it and could not believe the flavour in it. It was absolutely astounding to me that, you know, that baloney was the protein source in it,” she said.
“It was so good I couldn’t get enough.”
As Erin Pottie reports, the proceeds from Full of Bologna are being used to support local food banks in Sydney and Glace Bay.
She says the roast baloney, cooked in an air fryer, was also “phenomenal.” She ended up shaving off slices of meat to use on a pizza.
“I will probably never go back to pepperoni if I’m being honest,” she said.
The taste of nostalgia
The book costs $20, with proceeds going to food banks in Sydney and Glace Bay. With inflation driving up the cost of food, Canada’s food banks have seen a huge uptake of users in recent years.
So far, she says, they have sold 130 of their initial order of 200, and are hoping to print more soon, as well as figure out a way to sell online to folks outside Cape Breton.
The book’s popularity came as no surprise to Michael McDonald, a language and communications professor at Cape Breton University. He told CBC News that Cape Bretoners have a deep and meaningful history with baloney, which is also a staple across Atlantic Canada.
“People really saw it as part of growing up and part of their life and part of their family,” he said. “It didn’t matter what political group you were from or what religion or where you were from in Cape Breton, baloney was something that people enjoyed.”
Originally, he says, that popularity could be credited to the simple fact that baloney was cheap. These days, he says, not so much.
A two-kilogram roll goes for $11.99 or $12.99 at Pharmasave, says MacLeod, who says that’s one of the cheaper options in the province.
“Now, baloney isn’t so cheap, but it’s nostalgic,” said McDonald. “And you can’t really put a price on something that makes you feel all of those feels.”
MacLeod, meanwhile, says she hadn’t eaten baloney in about 10 years before she started cooking meals for the book.
Now, she says, she’s a changed woman.
“I will never be the same.”
