Something to make: a salty-sweet-crunchy celery salad
Plus, Tate McRae and the rise (or comeback?) of Calgary Culture
Hello!
I am back from South Korea (some recommendations to come), and arrived desperate to cook in my own kitchen, over-cluttered and chaotically organised though it may be. (We are on the verge of instituting a “one in, one out” system for ladles, spoons and teapots.) I don’t know who would complain about eating South Korean food every night, but eventually I was craving non-pickled vegetables and soft, salty European cheeses.
It’s spring time here (it is borderline summer, in fact, for reasons we all understand), and it’s time for easy salads. Remember, a good salad is nothing to sniff at, and though the ingredients do not need to be complicated, they need to be thoughtfully combined. Salads are not the time time to scrimp on fat, salt, or crunch, and over years of diligent effort, I now find a truly good salad will generally outshine everything else on the table. Here’s my guide to good salads from last summer, plus a few summer salads I love. Through experimentation, the salad cookbook I now always recommend is Salad Freak, with the caveat not to get hung up on the Slightly Smug Aspirational California Farmers Market Vibe, and just swap in and out what you have, purple cauliflower and daikon and boquerones be damned. The core combinations are so good they’re worth it. (I swear by caesar salad pizza, crispy chickpea and avocado rice bowls, and honeydew and ricotta salad.)
Salad Freak alludes heavily to a restaurant in Brooklyn called The Four Horsemen, which I have never been to, but know as the source of a cult celery-date salad that periodically makes the rounds. No matter where it’s coming from, or how it’s adapted, it’s always a hit that makes you ask: who knew celery could be so GOOD? The restaurant’s recipe is here, but don’t get too stuck on following it precisely. Other recipes macerate a finely sliced shallot with the dates in the dressing (here’s a good one to follow), and I skipped the mint, swapped in peanuts for walnuts, microplaned an epic pile of pecorino, and added lots of black pepper. The essential combination of crunchy fresh celery, sweet sticky dates, and salty hard cheese (plus lemon) is what’s going to carry you through, and that’s a combination that you can do with your eyes closed.
As for what to serve it with, I added some smoked mackerel on the side, but I think any light chicken or fish would be nice (especially grilled). For a veggie option, have a salad party and include some bouncy focaccia—the most-requested meal when I have friends over for dinner.
Ever since I stumbled on Tate McRae’s video for Greedy, in which she gyrates in a hockey locker room and rides a zamboni, I and many other millennials have been nursing a question: what is this?!
It’s not that the combination of Sexy Dancing and Lots of Hair and Breathy Singing and Thumping Beats is new to me. It’s that it’s so deeply familiar. To an eerie degree, Greedy sounds like it’s lifted straight from my teenage years, circa 2003-2007, just with a little more autotune. In fact, it sounds like a high-octane version of Promiscuous1, sung by the Pussycat Dolls.
For me, there was also another element to the queasy, powerful feeling of deja vu, one that made sense once I learned that 21-year-old Tate is not just Canadian, and not just from my hometown, but probably from an adjacent neighbourhood, and a very similar background.
Tate McRae doesn’t just sound like my teenage years. Her music, her vibe, her whole thing—all of it—feels scarily specific. This is Calgary, Alberta, circa 2005.
It took me ages of squinting at her videos, trying to figure if I knew her somehow (did I babysit her??!), to realise this. The final realisation occurred during this hilarious podcast from Anne Helen Peterson, in which a Gen Z tries to explain Tate’s appeal as a “Dance Girl” to a bunch of baffled (American) Millennials, and Anne tries to explain her understanding of Canadian culture.
Anne explains that in Canadian Hockey Families, there is almost always a “Dance Girl.” Maybe the girl(s) in the family didn’t want to play hockey, or maybe the gender dynamics of the family meant they weren’t encouraged to. Irregardless, all the children are extremely athletic, and no extracurriculars are pursued lightly, but rather consume every waking moment and all disposable income for the family at large, “because all these families know is 24/7 sports.”
I laughed out loud at that. I don’t know if Tate McRae’s family fits this mould exactly (and she is a very good dancer), but the broader cultural analysis is extremely accurate. I went to a high school that had parallel intensive hockey and dance programs, marking the deep but gendered symbiosis of these two activities in Canadian life. In Calgary, where many families have traditionally had both high expectations for their children and oil money to throw at them, the intensity is only dialled up.
But it wasn’t just the cultural dynamic that was so uncanny, or even the specific class element. It’s the flat-ironed hair, the shiny lip gloss, the full-makeup-and-sweatpants, the occasional cowboy hat, the vocal fry and the sexy-jock vibes, the fact that the Greedy video gives me a full nasal flashback to the hockey pad stank of the local rink where my brother played for years. (It’s not a good smell.) It’s her Nice-ish Popular Girl Energy. It’s the strong feeling she personally owns a white SUV.
Eventually, this feeling was so strong and so undeniable that my question morphed from why Tate McRae was popular, to why her look and music is so popular right now, when it feels completely lifted from 20 years ago, and a sports-obsessed mid-sized Canadian city with next to no cultural cachet2. Is 2005 really long enough ago for this whole vibe to be vintage? Or did nothing ever really, well, change? And is the “can’t put their finger on it” aspect of Tate’s personality simply—as I believe it is—Calgary’s niche cultural stamp?
The podcast, above, goes pretty deep into whether McRae’s style is purposively nostalgic, and whether that nostalgia really works for anyone over the age of 25.
The era it probably evokes for Millennials had some great pop music, but it also wasn’t, to put it plainly, the best era for young women, even while we were told that feminism was so entrenched and “over” that the word was (at least at a suburban Calgary high school) socially unspeakable.
It all gives me a little twinge of discomfort. Who am I to say we shouldn’t bring back push up bras and sweaty hairography? But let’s not forget the crippling harassment by the paparazzi, the constant revenge nudes for pop stars and teen girls alike, and the kind of body shaming that compelled Jessica Simpson to draw her own abs on with an eyebrow pencil3, which was sort of the least terrible thing that happened to her.
This exact period and my teenage years have been on my mind, because I just finished Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic. I tentatively recommend this book, even though if you are 35, your reaction to it might include quite a lot of impatient huffing. “Yes, I know this already,” I thought, every three pages or so, whether she was recounting Britney Spears’ treatment by the paparazzi or the debate over Lena Dunham’s Girls. “I was there!”4
To really remember that era, and the way teenage girls remained complex and thoughtful, even as they were pitted against each other and compelled to perform a kind of cheerful chauvinism dictated from on-high (and shaped, undeniably, by porn), I once again recommend Holly Bourne’s Girl Friends. Or you could read my expansive teenage journals, where I both obsess about my favourite books (the Jessica Darling series), my all-consuming goal to be a foreign correspondent, my various crushes at Model United Nations Camp—and also repeatedly refer to other girls as “sluts”5.
This isn’t to be snarky about Tate McRae. Even if you don’t like Greedy, you’ll still find yourself singing along to it6. And even if you feel about 100 years old recoiling in horror at the sight of these X-O booty shorts in the Exes video (or, conversely, 16 years old again7), we have thankfully entered an age where we don’t shame young women for the way they dress or dance.
Let Tate gyrate, I say, after a weeks-long examination of my own deep-seated and conflicted feelings about women’s performance of sexuality in the late aughts. She’s 21, and that isn’t her era. (This one has it’s own issues, unfortunately.) It took a bit of thinking to try and remind myself that it’s possible to take the good—the hair, the epic dance routines—and leave the bad.
My Mom, after all, had to come to the same conclusion when I was obsessed with the 1970s as a teenager, an era she remembered mostly for unflattering corduroys, constant sexism, and being stuffed under some guy’s armpit for a very extended slow dance to “Stairway to Heaven.”8 The idea that I would glamourise it was baffling to her.
And yet, that’s the prerogative of every younger generation of women: to take inspiration where they want, and go somewhere new (and hopefully more equal, and more fun) with it. I wouldn’t want to go back to Calgary, Alberta in 2005, exactly. But I will admit I’ve now had Revolving Door stuck in my head for a week9.
I love love love Nelly Furtado and always will, to be clear. Say It Right is a classic, but Try is devastating. We recently went through a big Nelly revisit, and I loved her Tiny Desk.
Other than Feist. She went to the high school across the street from mine, a few years earlier.
I highly recommend Jessica Simpson’s autobiography, written by Kevin Carr O’Leary, which I devoured while covering COP26. Read into that what you will.
This also meant didn’t always agree with her exact interpretation, or I saw her point but felt like things were a bit more complicated. I also couldn’t get on board with being so hard on the Spice Girls . . .
I was in my second year of university when I suddenly realised with abject horror how often my classmates and I were calling girls “sluts” for things that boys had done to them, very frequently without their consent, and then told everyone about. And so, essentially, we’d all participated in mass victim blaming for endemic sexual assault.
I’m more conflicted about Sports Car, which is like the modern-day “Buttons” by the Pussycat Dolls.
I cannot overstate the extent to which “sexy cowgirl stuff” of the Exes video, particularly in combination with the hockey theme of Greedy, is Calgary coded. My literal high school prom party took place at a Western-themed party “barn” (it was a field on the city’s outskirts) in which girls were encouraged to “ride the automatic bull” and an ambulance was parked on location the whole night for the inevitable alcohol poisoning.
As a teenager, I used to proclaim that I wanted “Stairway to Heaven” played at my funeral, which upset my Mom to no end. Not only did she not want to think about my funeral, she pointed out (fair), she didn’t want a song she associated with polyester armpit smell played at any funeral.
That said, a pop post-script. My favourite Calgarian pop star is 25-year-old Devon Cole, who reminds me a lot of my friends from when I was a teenager, but doesn’t remind me remotely of 2005. I love her. I like Hey Cowboy, and especially Dickhead.