Maison Maitland
Just an hour by car from Ottawa, there’s a culinary destination that will transport you from Canada to any one of the four corners of the Earth. Pick your place. Do you want to travel to Morocco or the Mediterranean, Thailand or Vietnam, Tuscany or Spain, India or France? In the kitchen at Maison Maitland, a magnificent Regency Neoclassical stone house on the banks of the St. Lawrence River as it flows between Eastern Ontario and upstate New York toward Lake Ontario, you can visit them all while sharing a true passion for fine food with chef and owner Cynthia Peters.
Maison Maitland was built in 1827. With soaring ceilings, chandeliers both period and contemporary, original decorative plaster mouldings featuring leaves and fruits, expansive sash windows that allow sunlight to flood the rooms, fine Georgian, Regency and Art Deco furniture and wallpaper showcasing hydrangea, this is Peters’ home. But it is also her cooking school. Maison Maitland is the second iteration of From the Farm cooking school, a business she launched on a heritage farm in Prince Edward County in 2010. Feeling that she had reached the end of her journey in the County, where she was deeply engaged in the community, Peters and her husband, Brian Ford, bought Maison Maitland, a former inn and wedding venue, in the spring of 2021. After a minor kitchen renovation, the cooking school opened in its new abode in 2022, and, following a larger renovation to create two apartments, the Villas opened in 2023.
“It had always been my dream to open a European-style cooking school experience,” Peters says, “one with on-site accommodation.”
Maison Maitland offers a pair of villas in the carriage house at the back of the property, featuring whitewashed ceiling beams, a black, white and gray colour scheme, glass-walled showers, comfortable sofas, fully loaded kitchens and cupboards stocked with essentials such as tea, coffee, olive oil, spices, mayonnaise, butter, milk, jam and bake-your-own croissants for breakfast. She also offers Bonjour Meal Kits, cheese and charcuterie boards featuring local cheese from Ontario and Quebec, delivered to the villas.
“People come here for quality time,” she explains, “and I offer these things so that they don’t need to haul food about, can just arrive and relax.”
Most guests come for a cooking class, which Peters hosts in her expansive kitchen.
“It’s more of a gathering spot than a cooking class,” she says. However, the space boasts three electric ovens, eight gas burners, an induction cooktop, a generous island and a pair of marble-topped tables on wheels, which can be moved around to create worktop counters. Peters keeps things moving along, much like a conductor with an orchestra, asking one person to chop peppers, mushrooms and herbs while another sautés onions and garlic and adds spices. There’s something to keep everyone busy. The class trots along at a steady pace. At the same time, Peters dishes out kitchen tips, such as scooping one’s onions from frying pan to plate rather than tipping them out to save fat dripping down the edges and staining the sides or leaving one’s mushrooms undisturbed in the pan so that they develop a crispy side when frying.
Chef Peters has a deep well of food-related knowledge, which she is delighted to share. While she began her career in communications and marketing in the corporate world, she chucked it all in at age 40 to retrain as a chef and pursue her passion for food. As a pioneer in the Slow Food movement in the County, she has been involved with the Food Bank in Toronto and the County, has owned and run a private chef company called Spice Sisters, is the author of a cookbook, The Art of Herbs, is the host of annual cooking tours to the Languedoc region in France and is the proud owner of more than 700 cookbooks. But clearly, what she loves most is bringing people together in community over food.
“We’ve all got to eat,” she says, “so we might as well make it interesting.”
Delighting in dumplings
While she’s well-versed in the international language of food, her favourite is Asian dumplings.
“I love teaching people the joy of these explosions of flavour,” she says, “so that they know it’s not that difficult and can go home with new knowledge.”
When she has time, she enjoys delving deeply into an ethnic cookbook that allows her to really understand the flavours and techniques of a cooking tradition not her own. With cooking classes that traverse the globe on offer, Peters’ shopping list is long. She’s an ardent supporter of local producers and rattles off a long list of specialist providers from not too far afield. She knows charcuterie makers near Belleville and Spanish Serrano ham importers in Prescott. Italian olive oil comes from a friend’s estate in Tuscany. She buys fresh handmade toffees in Merrickville and apples from Hall’s, just a stone’s throw away.
She chooses proteins produced as close to home as possible and points to a grocer in Kemptville, B & H, that has an inhouse butcher and stocks local beef, lamb, pork and chicken. Organic salad leaves come from Golden Creek, just down the road in Brockville. For more exotic needs, such as fresh spices and Asian flavours, she makes a pilgrimage to specialty shops in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. And when she can’t find what she wants, she partners with local manufacturers.
Peters has created a vibrant citrus-verbena soap in both liquid and bar form and a linen and room spray with Charleston Botanicals in Landsdowne, Ont. She has collaborated with Toronto-based Pluck Tea to create her own Earl Grey-style tea, studded with dots of dried orange peel. It’s a naturally sweet and creamy tea that needs no sweetener, milk or lemon. All these private-label products are for sale, beautifully packaged with Maison Maitland black and white branded ribbon. She also builds partnerships with other chef specialists and complementary local businesses. A two-night, three-day stay includes spa treatments in nearby Brockville, while Paula Naponse, owner of Beandigen Café in Ottawa, teaches visitors how to make an Indigenous celebration feast.
Cooking classes, which must be booked in pairs, start at 10 a.m. with a cup of coffee or tea and a short presentation by Peters of the recipes that guests will prepare. These come in a Maison Maitland folder. In this kitchen and dining room, attention to detail is everything. It ensures a smooth-running class, but also raises the game; you are in the hands of a professional. Even if your kitchen experience is limited, you’ll leave with a sense of accomplishment, new skills and a full stomach.
After a morning spent on your feet, you’ll sit down to enjoy what you have prepared, along with a glass of wine, likely from a producer in the County. This is the crescendo of three hours of work; the table is elegant and the water glasses are beautiful, etched with summer flowers. Even the salt pot (salt flakes only) and pepper grinder have character. End-of-meal tea arrives in individual glass teapots decorated with gold leaf accents, poured into bespoke Maison Maitland cups. You’ll never want to leave. But when the time is up, the carriage will turn back into a pumpkin, and Cynthia Peters will want her kitchen back.
Maison Maitland Cooking School and Villas
1258 County Rd. 2, Maitland, Ont.
maisonmaitland.com I 613.922.9194 | @maisonmaitland
