James is gone. It's achingly tough to write that, knowing I'll never pick up the phone again to hear his gentle, gruff voice, and I'm not alone. He's left behind a vast number of friends who already deeply miss him. James Barber (simply "James" as far as most people are concerned) was both a cook and a writer. He wrote the way he cooked, and he cooked the way he wrote: with simplicity, honesty, and abundant flavour. He had a way with words–and his way wasn't overly elaborate or pretentious; it was direct and uncomplicated–and his writing went down as pleasantly as the dishes he made on his TV show, The Urban Peasant (which aired in more than 100 countries, according to CBC News). He may have been born British, but James was a Canadian treasure.

We're inundated with food information these days, but it was markedly different when James started out, even though he came comparatively late to the game. Before he made food his full-time career, he had many other jobs. His books refer to cooking on boats and in logging camps. He saw active service in World War II. He was an engineer. Then, sometime in the 1960s, he switched to writing about his passion.

Like many, I first "met" James through his recipes. In 1980, new to Vancouver, I picked up an odd-shaped little book called Fear of Frying and was soon making my way through African chicken and "Immanuel Kant's Famous 2 Pork Chops, Some Celery and 2 Big Old Carrots Recipe". This was the '80s, remember, but the only way James believed greed was good was in having a lusty appetite. "My cookbooks," he wrote, "are blatant attempts to seduce, to encourage people to experiment and wander up the side­roads of their imagination."

He did the same through the restaurant reviews he wrote for several publications, including the Georgia Straight. Thirty years ago, Vancouver had only a handful of restaurants, but as more opened, and as the years went by, he introduced people to all of them–not just the posh expense-account places but also the little mom-and-pop holes in the wall that dished up fantastic noodles. Today we all know our way around different ethnic menus, but not back then. He was the guide who took us there, the trailblazer and the teacher. (James taught me how to review restaurants: "If there's a patio, make sure it gets the sun"; how to make notes: afterwards, when you've left the restaurant; and how, in dire straits, to tuck the menu down your pants for later reference.)

Long before it was fashionable to make a fuss about local ingredients, he was wandering urban lanes and foraging for greens, mushrooms, and whatever else he could find. One time I joined him, and as we ambled up and down West Point Grey's secret side, we came upon hazelnuts, ceps, and rose hips. You can make tea from rose hips, he said. He knew a lot, that man.

Years before the term comfort food became trendy, James was encouraging his readers to cook lamb shanks and risotto Milanese: "a care and nurturing recipe. A kind dinner." Kindness was an important quality in his cooking and in his life. He taught cooking to new immigrants, to schoolkids, and to people without a penny to bless themselves.

On The Urban Peasant, his face became known worldwide. (He was especially pleased to be dubbed into Tagalog.) There are plenty of "celebrity" chefs out there these days, but James was the first I can think of who made cooking so thoroughly entertaining and so accessible. It's not hard to make dinner if you have lots of time and money, but he told you how to cook something quick and tasty with what you had on the pantry shelf or could pick up at the supermarket.

The talents of this lovely man extended far and wide. He wrote opera reviews and enchanting poems for kids. (All kids loved him.) He was a master of comic verse who was thrilled that, only last week, thetyee.ca published what turned out to be his last poem (on the Mulroney "$300,000 mystery"). He was also, as his first cookbooks show, a whimsical cartoonist, not to mention a competent pruner of vines, a guitarist, a bocce player, and a tractor driver around his property on Vancouver Island.

Those of us lucky enough to count him as a friend knew him as a generous host. Long before duck confit was trendy, I recall an enormous, authentic cassoulet. For many years, he and his wife, Christina, hosted a Bastille Day party centred on le grand aioli and a lusty communal singing of "La Marseillaise". What else? Oh, yes, his Rabelaisian sense of humour. I still can't read a fortune cookie without remembering his advice to always tack "in bed" to the end of it.

James was part of our family for more than 25 years. My husband, Peter, was so delighted by his first attempt at re-creating James's Portuguese pork and clams that he has made it regularly ever since. When she was six years old, our daughter, Kate, appeared on TV with the "urban peasant". Together, they made bread, butter, and jam. This past summer, now 24, she visited him on Vancouver Island, where he showed her how to use a milk frother to make unimaginably good scrambled eggs, how to roast nuts in the microwave, and "how amazing corn tastes when you rub it with fresh lime, not butter". Not the smallest legacy he's left are the countless people whom he's taught to cook from scratch.

James himself always had the wide-eyed enthusiasm and downright glee of a six-year-old, whether it was over a new restaurant he wanted to tell you about or the donkeys that he recently installed on his farm. So many good memories. When he and Christina got married on Pender Island, guests played the wedding march on kazoos. At Expo 86, I watched him speedily make a dish of chicken wings and rice large enough to feed 30. You could see the crowd's thought bubble: "If he can do that, we can too." And they probably went home and did.

Back in 1971, these were the very first words that James wrote in his cookbook Ginger Tea With Friends: "Cooking is the simplest way of saying I love you. That may sound pretentious as hell, but if you accept it as essential, your cooking will improve–and so will your love life. There is so much mystique in the kitchen, all mixed up with social acceptance, and fancy linen, and the right kind of spoons. I learned how to cook in tin mess kits in France, and now I cook on a beat-up fifty-year-old stove in a kitchen covered with books, and a typewriter on the table, or on a sailboat at sea. I have a lot of pots and pans but mostly I use a heavy iron fry pan with a lid.

"I like candles, and I have a lot of saucers to put them on. I use a lot of herbs and I usually measure them in the palm of my hand. A tight squeezed palm is a teaspoon, medium a dessertspoon, and a really open one a tablespoon. Measure out some spoonfuls, see how they look in your hand, then forget the spoons and start feeling your food as you cook it. That's really the secret–touch it a bit."

Over the years, James Barber touched the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people and spurred them to discover the profound joy of feeding themselves and the people they care about. Godspeed, James. And from all of us whom you've taught to love to cook, a heartfelt thank-you.

Link:
Blog: RIP: James Barber, the Urban Peasant