For food-preneur Maryse Lapalme, it’s a classic story of vocation yielding the right of way to avocation when she changed lanes from her career as a Chartered Professional Accountant and into the kitchen working with food and teaching others about it.
“It was probably around 2009,” says Lapalme, who says food and cooking is a true passion. “I decided I wanted a change, so I started the Academy.”
Located on Notre-Dame Street in Embrun, Académie du gourmet provides a wide range of foods, kitchen tools and services that, according to Lapalme, the community around her has embraced.
Passion and demand have intersected. Lapalme says that 15 years ago, there was a gap in the range of healthier ready-made foods that were then available, noting, however, that there was mostly an abundant supply of deep-fried foods consumers could buy.
But times changed and so did peoples’ awareness of the importance of a healthy diet.
“It has gotten a lot better now, including at grocery stores, but we focus on making healthier foods and prepare our menu from scratch,” she says.
The Academy’s meals-to-go, made weekly in the Academy’s kitchen and with a relatively small staff, feature local ingredients and avoid preservatives and additives whenever possible.
Citing what she discovered was a “need” in the community for healthy and convenient ways to feed a busy family, in the freezers and fridges at the venue are ready-made meals including roughly 15 soups in rotation, shepherd’s pie, salmon dishes, pasta sauce, beef Bourguignon and a variety of baked goods, among others dishes.
Tradition plays a role in her cooking, and Lapalme, who is also a certified holistic nutritionist, says her meat pies are very traditional, “very French Canadian.”
“It’s Christmas time stuff,” she says. “But I make the meat pies year-round.”
There is also a selection of bulk foods for purchase with customers bringing their own eco-friendly containers including nearly two dozen oils and vinegars (such as balsamics) and various grains, spices, cheeses and locally roasted coffee.
Lapalme loves her electric smoker, too: she smokes scallops and duck, but smoked salmon is a favourite for both hot and cold smokes as well as candied. It’s then vacuum sealed and has a good shelf life, she says.
“People come in just for our smoked salmon. It’s very tasty,” says Lapalme adding that her kitchen will be smoking spareribs this week and making an accompanying home-made barbecue sauce.
Twice a week, Lapalme and staff prepare a full meal – soup, main course and dessert – for the local Meals on Wheels organization that delivers supper to elderly people and people with limited mobility.
Just about everyone interested in food loves some sort of culinary equipment, and it’s another of Lapalme’s passions to offer a selection of kitchen tools as part of her retail line. As Lapalme describes it, she “really likes” good kitchen gadgets.
The store also carries a number of personal care products like soaps, shampoos and lotions.
Despite the word “academy” that is part of the business’s name, implying as it does a sense of institutional rigour and formality, it’s easy to tell that Lapalme’s approach to food and cooking is casual and accessible. When she talks about the Academy’s services, she does so as educational but also entertaining and engaging.
“We are not a place where you come to get a title, or papers, or anything like that,” Lapalme says. “It’s for the fun of learning about cooking and food which is my passion.”
And that leads to the instructional element: a good part of that passion around food derives from teaching: she gives demonstration classes for groups as large as 24 people and hands-on cooking classes for 12. On occasion, guest chefs from Ottawa visit to teach Thai or Italian cuisine.
After a having given adult cooking classes and doing kids’ birthday parties, participants asked Lapalme about teaching kids some of the basics of the kitchen – it’s now a key component of her business that she’s been doing for about a decade.
“We start the classes for eight-year-olds. They come on Saturday for a two-hour class and start with knife skills. We make soups and move on to chicken cordon bleu. I have high school students helping us out.”
Lapalme confesses that her love for food and making a variety of dishes for her customers – often from family recipes like her mother’s shepherd’s pie – is satisfying, but at the same time the classroom continues to inspire her.
“I learned years later when I started this business that I really like to teach,” she says.
To take a page from a Martha Stewart cookbook, sharing knowledge is a “very good thing.” The traditions of culinary skills and local foodways being passed down to the next generation both connects people and contributes to community building.
Food writer Andrew Coppolino lives in Rockland. He is the author of “Farm to Table” and co-author of “Cooking with Shakespeare.” Follow him on Instagram @andrewcoppolino.
