What to eat CANADA 🇨🇦 Poutine

Poutine

Poutine is the great hope of everyone who aspires to creating a national dish someday, as it is among the youngest of the national dishes around. Befitting of course of a new world nation and one with quite a few Frenchies, the francophone world has left its mark yet again on the national cuisine of a country not named France. O Canada!

Poutine is quintessentially a Québécois dish through and through. Its relative youth, given it was “invented” in the late 1950s or early 1960s depending on whom you ask, has frozen it in a sort of north of the border space of timelessness along with rock ‘n’ roll diners.

Before we even get into the history, let’s do the most north country thing and discuss the weather. It’s cold in Canada. Really cold. Draw out the O as you talk about the cold. That is for emphasis, so you know how cold it really is. Which is why you need food that goes with the cold.

The question becomes not why would you put cheese curds and gravy on French fries, or as the French call them, frites, but why wouldn’t you? Welcome to Canada, I hear there is a hockey game on.

Americans would have found a way to put bacon into the mix with poutine, somehow, ruining it. Poutine is not just about oil, sugar and carbs, the essential foundation of everything most Anglo North Americans find delicious. No, poutine is actually a complicated layering of textures and temperatures as a compliment to the flavors. This is why it is sophisticated enough to be inspired by the French part of Canada.

The origin story of poutine is a bit of a chicken and egg story. It also has a bit of business savviness, North American-style. In a country like Switzerland where no one has trademarked fondue or rösti, the idea of doing so might seem grotesque if not gaudy or ostentatious.

People want what they want and Canada’s national dish belongs to the people. It is a dish foremost about the democratization of tastes to match the lived experience of a people. The true origin of poutine seems to come with customer requests. People wanted cheese curds on their frites. They also wanted gravy. The people know what they want.

And then just like that, the first poutine wave occurred.

The year was 1957. There was a Canadian federal election and John Diefenbaker became prime minister. But more importantly for the future of Canada, restauranteur Fernand Lachance of Warwick’s Café Ideal, later renamed Le Ludin qui rit, added cheese curds to frites after a customer requested the dish. In 1962, gravy was added to keep the concoction warm.

A competing claim surfaces in Drummondville at a drive-in restaurant called Le Roy Jucep. There the formulation came to be through the inverse route: first the gravy on frites then some customers added the cheese curds. Owner Jean-Paul Roy began serving the combination in 1958 and by 1964, “fromage-patate-sauce” was added to the menu. This was shortened to “Ti-Pout,” local slang that was short for pudding in Québecois.

By 1969, the dish arrived in Quebec City in the form of a food truck run by Ashton Leblond that evolved into a chain known as Chez Ashton. By the early 1970s, La Banquise began serving poutine in Montreal.

Already by the seventies, the dish had crossed the border into New Jersey where it was known as “disco fries,” with shredded mozzarella used as a substitute for the harder-to-obtain cheese curds. In 1983, Burger King introduced poutine on its menus in Canada.

Until this point, poutine was viewed as a food for after a pub crawl, not anything fancy and certainly not haute cuisine. Further, it was more of a food for the kitchen staff after a night’s work than anything that would appear on a menu in the front of the house.

By 1982, poutine had passed into the dictionary of Québécois French, which shows other uses and different meanings for a word that had become slang for “mess,” the first entry dating as far back as 1810. The exact origins of “poutine” as Québécois slang for “mess” are wholly uncertain. One popular theory is that it was potentially Québécois for “pudding”.

But the 1990s were just around the corner, which would see the elevation of chefs and food generally to celebrity status and restaurants became a lifestyle marker. Somewhere between the advent of a generation of latchkey kids and fast-food poutine in the 1980s, and the explosion of cable television and the Food Network in the 1990s, a remarkable thing happened. Food was revolutionized, a foodie bourgeoisie became a mass culture phenomenon and the celebrity chef was born. Poutine passed into the realm of so-called haute cuisine.

Initial attempts to elevate the dish were made using baked potatoes or gravy made with duck stock. Then in 2001, Martin Picard of Bistro Au Pied du Cochon offered a version with foie gras. Chefs in Toronto and Vancouver were inspired to experiment. Mark McEwan’s Bymark restaurant in Toronto offered a variation with lobster, another Canadian favorite.

Montreal’s diversity also brought new flavors and traces of new cultures into the Canadian national dish. The city’s global immigrant populations were inspired to offer their own variations. This is heartening given the vocal traditionalists on social media that the efforts of this project encounters with every experimentation on a national dish. Given the dish is an amalgam of textures where temperature is vital, the gourmand is given much to play with.

But one noteworthy word of caution before you begin to experiment with the wonders of exotic poutine manufacture: sans cheese curds, poutine is merely “frite sauce” to the Québecois. Remember: layered textures.

Recipe

Ingredients:

For the fries:
3-4 potatoes per person, depending on size and hunger
Light cooking oil (sunflower seed oil works well)
Salt

For the gravy:
1 tablespoon of butter
1 Knorr meat bouillon cube
3 tablespoons of flour
1 tablespoon sharp mustard with or without grains or seeds
2 tablespoons shoyu sauce

One of the following:
Mozzarella cheese, dry not wet in any way
Moité moité fondue cheese
(these are substitutes for cheese curds, if you can of course find them, go right on ahead)

Step 1: Slice your potatoes into long strips. Keep in cold water until all potatoes are sliced. Then dry with a paper towel.

Step 2: Get the oil frying. Once it is hot, sprinkle potatoes with salt and add to oil. Keep turning every 30-60 seconds with a mesh ladle.

Step 3: While potatoes are frying add butter to a separate pan and allow to melt. Once melted add 1-2 cups of bouillon dissolved in water and stir together, beating with a small whisk if necessary. Add one tablespoon of flour and whisk together.

Step 4: Pull all the fries from the oil when they are done and place on paper towel to absorb excess oil. Cover with a paper towel to keep warm.

Step 5: When all fries are completely done frying, add one tablespoon mustard, two tablespoons shoyu sauce and two more tablespoons of flour to the butter and bouillon for your gravy. Whisk until smooth but thick and thickening. Add cracked pepper.

Step 6: Add more salt to potatoes and return to frying for a second time. Pull from fryer when done and place on paper towel to absorb excess oil.

Step 7: Place French fries or frites in a bowl. Add cut up mozzarella or make fistfuls of cheese balls with the fondue cheese or, if available, simply use cheese curds, above the French fries.

The reason for the fistfuls of cheese if using fondue cheese is that the results will get soupy as it is designed to and fast over the fries, but clumping it together will slow down this process.

(Note: there was disagreement in our house as to whether the mozzarella or moité-moité fondue cheese was better. Switzerland being based on compromise and consensus, we advise a democratic route to collective decision making in your household, preferably by way of popular referendum. Be sure to collect the requisite number of signatures.)

Step 8: Lastly pour on your gravy, hand out forks to your guests and bon appetit!

Consume as if it is forty degrees below zero outside and you cannot wait for those forty days of summer to come around.

Tips, tricks and notes:

As a North American, I was tempted to do to everything a North American would conceive of in the test kitchen. I made the gravy with chicken bouillon, I floured and baked the potatoes, I added all the cajun and sazón seasonings one can imagine, and I tried Gruyère cubes in lieu of mozzarella and moité-moité fondue cheese.

This recipe is the outcome of those experiments and decades of years of Canadian history. Sometimes a classic is a classic for a reason and the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle is best abided by.

And no, you cannot sheet pan poutine though you could put it on a sheet pan, do not put that sheet pan in the oven.

You can substitute non-dark soy but not sesame oil or any other kind of oil for the shoyu sauce in the gravy. It’s the salt that makes it so you do not salt your fries so much and offsets the mustard in terms of flavors in the gravy.

Learn where to eat Canadian food in Switzerland.

Follow our social media pages @swissglobaldining on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube