Since I’m on my way there today, a recipe for Quebec’s own Poutine (French Fries with Gravy and Cheese)

The Waterfront is now an Esplanade on the banks of the St. Lawrence River

It turns out that Montreal, where I am headed today, has more restaurants per capita than we do.  In New York there’s one for every 1, 228 people.  Montreal, with over 5000 restaurants in its metropolitan area and a population of some 3,720,000, comes in at one restaurant for every 744 people! Take that, New York!  But as I set out today for my 50th ‘high school’ reunion, I can’t help but think back to my last stay in the city of my birth. We couldn’t get over how incredibly good the foodIt’s diverse, palate-pleasing and locally grown. Everywhere we went the settings were both charming and atmospheric.  And the warmth of the hospitality is phenomenal. The big question became how on earth hadn’t we been there a dozen times before?

Montreal is called a City of Churches

I was born in Montreal. But the Montreal we just visited was not the Montreal I was born into.  For years the city was divided in two.  There was English Montreal and there was French Montreal.  We English lived in enclaves so cut off from the French-speaking part of the city, my own parents never spoke a word of French.   To be honest, they didn’t have to.  Then came a revolution.  A distinct minority, English Montreal controlled much of the wealth and power.  But the French majority, sensing their culture slipping away, took a stand.  For a while it looked as if the province of Quebec stood a chance of becoming a separate country. Thus began an exodus of English-speakers who left the province in droves.  Frightened by language laws that forbid English signage and insisted that their children be educated wholly in French, they fled. My own family left after four generations of living in the province.  We went south to the United States.  Our cousins went west to Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. 

Back in New York, this is my take on Poutine, served here with a hangar steak and tomato

         I have absolutely no recall of “Poutine” from when I was growing up.  And yet it must have been around.  There’s a whole website devoted to its story, my favorite being how it got its name. At his restaurant Lutin Qui Rit (transl. “The Imp Who Laughs”) in Warwick, Quebec, Fernand LaChance recounted that he had a take-out customer who requested French fries and cheese in a bag to which M. LaChance responded “Ca va faire une maudite poutine” (That’s going to make a damn mess).  The customer, a man named Eddy Lanaisse, actually had the story included in his 2005 obituary: “ I wanted fries, but I saw cheese curds on the counter. I asked Fernand to mix them together.” But true poutine must have sauce and this was a later innovation.

A Palace to Poutine in Montreal

That invention was claimed by Jean-Paul Roy whose restaurant “Roy le Jucep” is still in operation in Drummondville, Quebec. M. Roy says that in 1964, he made a “potato sauce”, which he was slathering on his French fries. He also sold bags of cheddar cheese curds, a specialty of the region. He saw that his customers were adding his fries and sauce to the cheese curds.  He then made the combination a regular menu item.  But what was the ‘potato sauce’?  According to the review on www.montrealpoutine.com, it doesn’t score very high marks. It is described as ‘a corn-starch thickened base of stock, flavored by the sugary-sweet taste of tomatoes and a bit of onion.” Hardly the devine sauce we tasted.  But the reviewer wisely points out: “If this is the plate which inspired future poutiness…it did so largely as inspiration on the potentiality of sauce and cheese curds”.

Beecher’s Cafe and Cheese Shop