Alberta Food & Traditional Cuisine

Alberta eats what the ranch and the prairie produce, and beef is the province's pride: the open range of the 1880s made cattle country, and Alberta beef -- AAA steak and prime rib -- is the thing to order and the thing the province exports. Around it is a settler and immigrant table: the Ukrainian perogies, cabbage rolls and sausage of the parkland east of Edmonton, the plain hearty cooking of the Hutterite colonies, the saskatoon berries that grow wild across the prairie and go into pies and jam, and bison, elk and game where they are farmed. The two Alberta inventions are the Caesar, the cocktail of vodka, Clamato, hot sauce and Worcestershire that Walter Chell mixed at the Calgary Inn in 1969 and that became the national drink, garnished with celery and increasingly with everything else; and Calgary ginger beef, deep-fried strips of beef in a sweet, sharp sauce created at the city's Silver Inn and now standard in Canadian Chinese kitchens.

The cities have grown a real restaurant culture -- Calgary and Edmonton both punch above their size -- and Alberta craft beer and the odd prairie distillery have followed the ranch food. The great communal meal is the Calgary Stampede in July, ten days of free pancake breakfasts across the city and deep-fried everything on the midway, and the rodeo-town breakfast is the small-town version of the same. Farmers' markets in every city carry the beef, the berries and the Hutterite produce.

Alberta beef

AAA and prime steak, prime rib and burgers from the ranching plains, the province's signature and its export; ordered rare in a Calgary steakhouse or grilled at a backyard barbecue.

The Caesar

Vodka, Clamato (clam-and-tomato juice), hot sauce and Worcestershire over ice in a celery-salt-rimmed glass, invented in Calgary in 1969 and now Canada's cocktail, garnished with celery, a bean and, lately, half a brunch.

Ginger beef

Deep-fried strips of beef in a sweet, gingery, slightly sour sauce, a Calgary Chinese-restaurant invention that spread across the country.

Saskatoon-berry pie

Pie and jam from the sweet purple prairie berry, picked wild or bought at the market in high summer.

Perogies and cabbage rolls

The Ukrainian staples of the parkland east of Edmonton, sold at church suppers, festivals and the Vegreville area.

Stampede food

The free pancake breakfast served across Calgary in Stampede week, and the deep-fried midway everything -- from Oreos to butter -- that comes with it.

The steakhouse is Alberta's temple -- Calgary and Edmonton both keep the classic Alberta-beef rooms -- and the ranch supper and small-town rodeo breakfast are its rural forms. Farmers' markets run in every city: Calgary's and Edmonton's Old Strathcona market carry the beef, the saskatoon berries, the Hutterite produce and the Ukrainian baking. The Stampede in July is the great food event, with free pancake breakfasts across Calgary and a midway of deep-fried invention.

Ukrainian country east of Edmonton -- Vegreville, Mundare, the Heritage Village -- serves perogies, cabbage rolls and kobasa sausage at festivals and church halls, and Mundare's sausage is a provincial institution. The mountain towns of Banff, Canmore and Jasper carry the tourist end: après-ski, game and elk on the menu, and craft brewers. Chinatowns in Calgary and Edmonton serve the ginger beef the province invented.

Drink: Alberta craft beer in every city, prairie whisky and gin distilleries, and the Caesar, ordered anywhere with a brunch.

Alberta does not make wine. Its climate -- a short, dry continental summer, hard frosts and the swinging cold of the foothills -- is unsuited to the vine, and the province has no wine region and no appellation; the vineyards of western Canada are over the mountains in British Columbia's Okanagan and on the coast, not on the Alberta side of the Rockies. What Alberta drinks it mostly brings in or brews and distils: the province has a fast-growing craft-beer scene in Calgary, Edmonton and the mountain towns, and a handful of prairie distilleries making whisky, gin and vodka from Alberta grain, but the agricultural pride is cattle and wheat and canola rather than the grape.

The one wine connection worth naming is the glass it goes into: the Caesar, the clam-tomato-and-vodka cocktail invented in Calgary in 1969, is the drink Albertans reach for where others reach for wine, and Alberta grain spirits and beer, not local wine, fill the province's bars. No winery page was opened because the province has none to open; visitors after a vineyard cross into British Columbia.