A quality display of first people clothing, inter alia, nicely illustrating the way that the customs prevailing before our arrival changed after our arrival, both with our industrial goods, such as beads, and with our appetite for collecting first nation artefacts. Also reminding us that it was not just a tale of disease, depopulation and marginalisation. For some time, the first peoples were interacting and trading with the newcomers, on something more like equal terms, this being nicely illustrated by a blow up of painting of important members of the first nations wearing top hats along with more traditional items. We may have seen the original at Chateau Ramezay.
Like the Tudor aristocracy in England, the first nation aristocracy in Canada wore their wealth. Unlike the Masai in Kenya who herded theirs.
Montreal is gradually sinking in, so the display of miscellanea from Montreal was entertaining, particularly as regards the drive among the monied classes in the second half of the nineteenth century to emulate, if not ape, the customs of their betters in old world. I wonder this morning how much snobbery there was about old money and new money, considering that there must have been a good deal of the latter. There was also an early example of a maid powered washing machine, illustrated,
Our visit closed with the galley devoted to Ben's deli, which we learned was famous, in some part because of his smoked meat sandwiches, in the middle of the 20th century, before drifting to a rather sad ending in 2006, with the catering workers of today not being prepared to work the sort of hours in the sort of conditions which had brought the place to fame in the first place. After a heritage wrangle, a larger version of the sort of thing we have in Epsom, the place was demolished in 2008.
The museum café was said to be doing Ben's smoked meat according to the original recipe, but it looked both crowded and expensive so we settled for the new to us Pannizza along the road where they assemble and cook your pizza or panini while you wait, in 2 minutes 15 seconds to be precise, the pizza base being part cooked to get the time down this far. Not bad at all, although the pizza top had a tendency to detach from the pizza bottom, certainly much better than the slices of ready made pizza one can buy from hot cupboards in Leicester Square.
We did slightly better in the evening, taking poutine with smoked meat topping from the Lester's attached to our hotel (the Days Inn on René Lévesque), with Lester's being alleged to be one of the chains who had taken up Ben's mantle. The smoked meat turned out to be chopped and rather salty bacon and the poutine had rather too much rather strongly flavoured gravy in it. Not bad, but not a patch on the poutine which we had had on 15th October.
Reference 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bens_De_Luxe_Delicatessen_%26_Restaurant.
Reference 2: http://www.pannizza.com/.
Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/poutine.html.
PS: according to wikipedia there is something in the Quebec language laws which prohibits the use of apostrophes in words like 'Bens'. Certainly the famous sign outside their shop does not appear to have one.
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