Susan Musgrave’s A Taste of Haida Gwaii will make your belly roll with laughter and rumble for food. In 2016 this cookbook won the gold medal in the regional/cultural category of the Taste Canada Awards, and the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award of the B.C. Book Awards. A celebrated writer of poetry, fiction, journalism articles, and children’s books, Musgrave understands that recipes are most enticing and meaningful when shared with a story. The cookbook is part culinary memoir part community portrait, relating everything from Musgrave’s childhood memories to her role as innkeeper at the Copper Beech Guest House near Masset on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago of over 150 islands located off the coast of British Columbia’s mainland. Musgrave purchased the bed and breakfast in 2010, so a large portion of her cookbook focuses on her guests’ meals, including an “Off-the-Continental Breakfast” and Beets Margaret Atwood, a recipe cited as a favourite of Atwood and Graham Gibson (25). I have tried a number of the recipes, and the beets are beyond belief. In addition to sharing delicious food, Musgrave imparts important historical and present-day lessons tied to the creative pleasures of the kitchen. Situated within these broader historical, cultural, and ecological contexts, the cookbook’s central plot is one of humble culinary apprenticeship. Musgrave’s trial-and-error cooking in the kitchen, foraging in the woods, and harvesting along the seashore connect with readers, the majority of whom reside on the continent and have likely never visited Haida Gwaii. Good-humoured lessons abound in picking springtime spruce tips and netting amorous Dungeness crabs. One of my favourite anecdotes “Shucking a Scallop: How I Did It” ends with Musgrave’s guilt-ridden cries as the improperly unshelled body “pulses its way across the kitchen counter” (230). She follows up with the correct method. Citing Julia Child’s cooking advice that “you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude,” Musgrave knows, as both writer and cook, that kitchen mishaps are memorable, and that storytelling is an essential ingredient for any cuisine if it is going to enter the collective imagination (4-5). The cookbook is divided into eight chapters showcasing Musgrave’s culinary and literary skills as she plays with the genre’s conventions. Chapter one, “For Starters,” is not about appetizers, but about introducing the book’s main characters: Musgrave and Haida Gwaii, which has undergone numerous name changes because of colonization. In 2010 the islands were officially named Haida Gwaii, “meaning ‘islands of the people’” to recognize the Indigenous peoples and their history (9). Musgrave has long described these islands as her “‘spiritual home,’” and her cookbook makes this unique place and its communities tangible. The stories, recipes, numerous quotations (from Indigenous residents, chefs, poets, guests, and even placemats), and visual content (a map, photographs, and illustrations), offer multiple ways for continent-bound readers to encounter Haida Gwaii’s daily rhythms. Chapters two and three highlight breakfast recipes vital to Copper Beech House, including Musgrave’s famous sourdough bread. Particularly entertaining is the description of sourdough starter as a “pet” that needs to be fed and watered daily. Musgrave literalizes the simile by including several photographs of friends’ pets and her own cat, Boo. The commitment necessary to care for a living starter may seem daunting to urban dwellers with hectic commutes or landlords who don’t allow pets, but the whole process still inspires. The Moon Over Naikoon Bakery’s recipe for cinnamon buns also calls for “traditional, island-time (not fast-rising) yeast” (88). Apparently this bakery’s shortbread cookies were so popular that they stopped making them. In Haida Gwaii it’s not about chasing profits, but about slowing down and savouring life’s processes. Chapters four and five provide practical …