About

 JULIAN ARMSTRONG

Julian Armstrong

The subject of Quebec food is a saga with many chapters. Changing with the times, yet always staying true to its origins, it has been the favourite subject of veteran food reporter and cookbook author Julian Armstrong for decades.

She has been reporting on food for newspapers for the better part of five decades and has covered everything from gastronomy and food prices, from nutrition to food safety. She was food editor of the Montreal Star and then of the Montreal Gazette, for whom she continues to write each week, her current column Six O’Clock Solution, in which she reviews a new cookbook and provides a simple dinner recipe from its pages.

Julian is happiest writing about Quebec cuisine, where the latest developments in food and drink and centuries-old culinary traditions co-exist in harmony in a province in which residents carry on an enduring love affair with food that is perhaps unique in the world.

She is the author of Made In Quebec: A Culinary Journey (HarperCollins, 2014) and A Taste of Quebec (Macmillan, 1990, updated in 2001). She has helped to choose winners of national cookbook contests and chef’s competitions  in Canada and the United States. The International Association of Culinary Professionals appointed her honorary writer-in-residence at its 2003 conference in Montreal. She is a founding member of the Association of Food Journalists, which closed down in 2020 owing to dwindling food coverage in newspapers, and of the Cuisine Canada culinary alliance (now known as Taste Canada). One of her judging jobs was at the Gold Medal Plates competition, which raises money for Canada’s Olympic athletes.

Julian was born in Toronto and has a history degree from the University of Toronto. She moved to Montreal for love and embraced her adopted province with relish, travelling extensively along its back roads and discovering its regional cuisines. From the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean area to Charlevoix, from the Îles de la Madeleine to the upper Laurentians to the Beauce, she researched the ways in which the original dishes of settlers from France had been adapted.

Stories she uncovered and describes in her book Made in Quebec include: how Quebec’s first cow, the “vache canadienne,” is being bred to provide cheesemakers with extra-rich milk; how the lamb of Charlevoix has been awarded Canada’s first equivalent of France’s “appellation controlé;” how the 400-year-old custom along the Gaspé coast of salting and drying cod continues even today; and how top restaurants now serve a new and flavourful pork from the Laurentians with the price of filet mignon. One of her goals is to persuade more people to travel her food-loving adopted province.

As she puts it, “Quebec is a source of endless food discoveries. I have always felt fortunate, as a journalist, to have the key to finding out the whole story.”