IN MIKA'S KITCHEN
FROM APRIL/MAY 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Fresh press
Former owner of the Good Egg cookbook shop Mika Baraket launched a publishing company this fall with a recipe book called Blood – one the other publishers wouldn’t touch – that sold out in its first run. Now she’s using the pandemic as a cover, to grow the business deliberately in her own sweet time
There’s magic in an indie bookstore – Type, The Beguiling, the dearly departed Pages – the kind that can’t be captured in a big box, and certainly not online. The Good Egg, at 267 Augusta Ave., possessed that wizardry, in part due to its address. Kensington Market is a place for indies, and for a decade Mika Baraket’s jewel box of a store, stocked floor to ceiling with thoughtfully curated and bewitching cookbooks, was one of its darlings.
Baraket was born in Jerusalem but grew up in Toronto, between Little Italy and Chinatown. “We’ve lived a block away from Kensington Market since 1980. It was just through a laneway.”
She opened Good Egg in 2008. “I’d worked in bookstores since high school. I was managing a Book City location and got fired,” she laughs. “I suspect the owner wanted [me] to move on in life and not make a career managing one of his stores.” Her parents were split on the move. “My dad was probably the most concerned. But my mom gave me the money to start up in the business. She and my stepdad really pushed me to do it.”
Growing up, she says, “I was obsessed with any cookbook we had. I read The Joy of Cooking cover to cover.” As a seven-year-old, she practised her reading on the large-print edition of the family’s New York Times Cookbook. They also had a number of titles by Joy Warner, a friend of her mother’s. “She wrote a book about Chinese cookery that I loved. Growing up close to Chinatown, I was always fascinated by Chinese food. When I first learned to cook, or was pretending I could, that was the book I used. And I forced my family to eat my horrible versions of her recipes.”
The food on the dinner table was typical comfort fare – roast chicken, chili, lasagna – with Arabic influences. “My father grew up in a Sephardic home. Lots of spice. He kind of merged that with my mother’s cooking and we ate something in between.” Potatoes with hot peppers, a.k.a. bitata b’flfli, was her dad’s specialty. Romanian gvetch, a ratatouille-like dish, was always served with roast chicken, and shakshuka was a Sunday favourite.
“Growing up in the Market in the ’80s, most of my friends were Italian, Chinese, Korean and Portuguese. I loved going to their homes for lunch – pasta with escarole, fried rice with kimchee, octopus with potatoes.”
“I have no expectations for the books we publish. I’m not an aggressive salesperson. I love when people come to something honestly”
In her own kitchen, Baraket’s menu – influenced by her family, the Market and the cookbooks she’s surrounded herself with her whole life – is a mix of brightly coloured salads and veggie grain bowls, mejadra with crispy onions, stir fries, soft tofu stew, overnight oats and avocado toast. “I’m perpetually looking for ways to satisfy my lust for diverse flavours while staying true to the healthy maxims of the Middle Eastern diet that I was reared on.” She’s also been known to order in Maker pizza and dumplings from Swatow. “Lately, my favourite dish is right out of Falastin, Sami Tamimi’s excellent book. It’s an orzo ‘risotto’ with piles of wilted greens. The trick is to toast the orzo in a dry pan for about 10 minutes until it’s a dark golden colour.”
Good Egg was the place to pick up Lucky Peach in its heyday, and other specialty food publications like Cherry Bombe and Gather. “We always looked for magazines from independent publishers. Same with cookbooks: We looked for smaller presses and imports. Things you couldn’t find even on Amazon.” In a world where almost everything can be found online, this was a treasure trove of many things that couldn’t.
When the lease came up in 2018, Baraket closed the doors after a decade in business. She wanted to start her own publishing house. She’d taken the intensive publishing program at Humber before she even opened Good Egg and had always wanted to try it. With the shop closed, she could. But life got in the way and the perfect moment to pull the trigger never came, until the pandemic. Opening an indie bookstore at the beginning of a recession had worked out fine. Why not start a publishing house in a world gripped by a deadly virus?
“I am generally risk averse. I didn’t plan on opening a shop during a recession,” she explains over email. “When I signed a lease for Good Egg [in the spring of 2008], the economy was good and I had 20 years of bookselling experience behind me, so I felt pretty confident. As I was renovating the shop and compiling my orders, the recession hit.” Now, she’s using the cover of the pandemic to her advantage. “I am taking my sweet time becoming a publisher. I’m working slowly and deliberately and not feeling guilty about it at all. It has given me permission to obsess over the details and really think about what I want to do.”
Still, her DIY fearlessness fits in well with her surroundings. The spirit of Kensington is freedom over everything, with a fiery adoration for the handcrafted and heartfelt. In building her publishing house she has taken inspiration from McSweeney’s, Sweden’s Fool Magazine, and the little French recipe books given out by grocery stores in Paris. She didn’t seek out boardrooms of investors, and when she began she only had one author in her stable (that the author is a four-time James Beard winner didn’t hurt).
Jennifer McLagan’s bestselling cookbooks, Odd Bits, Fat, Bones and Bitter have made her a household name in both professional and home kitchens. In 2019, the highly decorated author had written her latest book, Blood, and was looking for a publisher.
“I wanted to do a book that was way out there, even for someone like Ten Speed, who I love,” says McLagan of her long-time publisher. “I talked to them about doing Blood, but they didn’t want to touch it.” A book that opens with a recipe for blood brownies, followed by one for blood marshmallows, proved to be a tough sell, even for such a well-respected writer. Enter Good Egg Books. “It’s a local press, and I think that’s pretty exciting,” says McLagan. “Mika’s got a lot of experience with books, so I thought, if I want to do something I’ll do it with her.”
Good Egg’s first title was published in September 2020. There was no press release or social media campaign. With its pink cover splashed with blotches of red, Blood came into the world quietly. “Just an announcement on the old and not very popular Good Egg Instagram account, and that’s all, folks. I have no expectations for any of the books that we plan on publishing. I’m not an aggressive salesperson,” says Baraket. “I love when people come to something honestly.”
And they have. Many Torontonians, myself included, discovered the book through American channels. Both The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner and Bon Appetit included it in their 2020 cookbook guides. This strange little collection of blood recipes – “It’s no weirder than eating eggs,” protests McLagan – swiftly sold out of its initial run. The second printing is available now. And more single-subject cookbooks – Bread by Dawn Woodward and Limes by Cory Mintz – are in the works.
Baraket is much more than a bookseller and fledgling publisher. She’s the product of a neighbourhood – weaned on incense clouds, drum circles, barefoot sidewalk performers and free hugs – that allows one to wave their freak flag high.
“This neighbourhood is precious, and yet the people are decidedly not. The tone here is fiercely protective, and for better or worse, that comes with a high degree of criticism and skepticism of anything that is disingenuous.”
We live our lives online in many ways, but we still exist in reality, and our need for authenticity in that reality has become ever more pressing through the past year of uncertainty and turmoil. We have experienced the fear that comes from seeing empty supermarket shelves; we have felt the atavistic urge to line our pantries with non-perishables. We got a small taste of the possibility of life without convenience and it struck us to the core. We want to cook real things – sourdough bread, heck, maybe even a batch of blood marshmallows – and we want our recipes to come from trusted guides, not ad-filled amateur-hour recipes from dubious blogs.
Baraket has created something perfectly right for these times. A small, perfect book filled with trusted recipes and peppered with line drawings, created in the heart of the city.
Mika Baraket’s guide to the Market
“I always get the Grandpa ham at Sanagan’s Meat Locker and hide it in the fridge to avoid a lecture from my partner about how cute pigs are.”
“Rasta Pasta jerk chicken – how is it so succulent and smoky at the same time? The heat is perfectly calibrated too.”
“I spend more on fruits and veg than anything else, and toggle between the revamped Oxford Fruit [now run by Joe Rad and his family] and 4Life Natural Foods.”
“I’m really looking forward to a taco or two or three from Gus Tacos when this pandemic is more under control. Their tacos are straightforward and crushable.”
“Veggie D’Light is underrated. They do a tiny, reputable and virtuous West Indies menu. Plus they compost everything, which makes my heart sing.”
“There is a conversation right now about what Kensington Market should officially recognize as its boundaries. With a Heritage Conservation District study underway, city staff keep telling us that Dundas, Bathurst, College and Spadina are NOT part of Kensington Market. Could’ve fooled me! Ba Le 2 on Dundas, which is two seconds away from Courage My Love, makes a tender banh mi.”
“The debate of the century is always Café Pamenar or Ideal Coffee. I say both. But like a cat, I tend to favour one spot over the other and then arbitrarily favour the other a week later.”