Eating and talking the Newfoundland way

The Serendipity B&B

Now we have arrived at the east of the island, we see more and more places offering Newfoundland delicacies on their menu, so we tried some on Monday night in Port Blandford. Elsie, our host at The Serendipity Bed and Breakfast, told us there was only one place to eat in the town, the Terra Nova Golf Resort. We headed over there not sure what type of food a golf resort might do, well the answer is good food – you can see the menu here. We began by the waitress bringing out some warm bread, rather than the ubiquitous bread roll this was a half sixed French stick, it was nicely cooked and Drew had the parsley butter that was served with it. For our starters. I opted to go for a local flavour and had cod tongues and scrunchions, this was delicious. The cod tongue was lightly covered with flour and cooked in the pan, they had a fleshy flavour reminiscent, at least to me, of pulpo when the Spanish cook it al la plancha, the scrunchions were an absolute delight, little crunchy bit of pork rind like little bombs of salt in your mouth, their crunchiness worked well with the softness of the tongues. Drew stayed with a sea theme by having scallops wrapped in bacon, which is also a delicacy on the island. Drew stayed with that theme and had pan-fried cod with scrunchions served with garlic roast potatoes and vegetables. I opted for something more traditional, a 24oz rip eye, which was cooked perfectly blue, something many chefs are scared of doing, and was so well prepared that it was soft to cut, sometimes blue steak can be hard to cut, but not this one, I had it with a baked potato, also cooked to floury perfection and veg. The veg for both dishes were sautéed courgettes, carrots, and suede. A real triumph of a meal, well done to the Terra Nova Golf Resort staff.
We had a good night’s sleep at The Serenity, only slightly disturbed by the alarm clock, which we had not set, going off at exactly midnight – having tried vainly to hint a button that would stop the noise, Drew got up and unplugged it from the socket! Still we went back to sleep soon enough and were up yesterday morning to blog, e-mail, check the accounts, shower and go down to breakfast which is served here at 8.00 a.m.

The view from our B&B across to Cloud Sound

The breakfast was another lovely meal, Elsie did us proud, we started with orange juice and then a plate of Canadian Ham and three pancakes served with orange, grapefruit and melon. On the table to accompany the pancakes were maple syrup, and a selection of homemade (by Elsie) jam, these were partridgeberry, strawberry and blackberry, there was also yoghurt cream and marmalade. While I don’t eat the sweet stuff, the fruit and ham were delicious and Drew loved the flavours of the jam and marmalade.
We were joined for breakfast by a young couple from the other side of the island who were touring their own land. Michael, Elsie’s construction worker son, and his wife Leslie, a HR officer in the nearby (26k) large town of Clarenville also arrived, so breakfast was interspersed by conversation.

It was great to hear the Newfoundland accent in its native environment, both Elsie and Michael had strong accents, very reminiscent of the soft tones of Ireland, not a Cork or Dublin accent, but the gentler rolling tones of Waterford or Wexford. The Irish traditional difficulty with the ‘th’ sound was here, so when talking about the thread it was ‘de tred’ we heard. Michael was talking about the weather and saying how he had been out fishing less this year because of unseasonal fog, but that the codfish (interesting that we use cod for the fish in the sea and the cooked version) where here the fish is called codfish, but cod once it is cooked. Anyway with Michael’s accent it sounded like cotfish. A pleasant half hour was spent in their company before it was time to pay, pack the car and move on – more about the rest of the day in my next post.