{"id":10880,"date":"2015-04-22T05:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T09:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=10880"},"modified":"2015-05-24T11:56:26","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T15:56:26","slug":"what-is-and-what-isnt-poutine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/10880","title":{"rendered":"Poutine: What It Is, and What It Isn&#8217;t"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let me take a moment to talk about something\u00a0extremely serious for once on this blog.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday morning, a good friend shared the following tweet with me:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">You will need ALL your utensils to finish off French Onion Soup Poutine. <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/kZBtT39FFU\">http:\/\/t.co\/kZBtT39FFU<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/FWx?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#FWx<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/6d1QVtsSqX\">pic.twitter.com\/6d1QVtsSqX<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Food &amp; Wine (@foodandwine) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/foodandwine\/status\/590477728379314177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 21, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Now, most of you probably know that I am French Canadian. And most of you probably know that poutine is a French Canadian dish.<\/p>\n<p>As someone who discovered poutine growing up&#8211;I remember tasting it for the first time when camping with my maternal grandparents when I was five and my grandfather offered me a bit of his&#8211;and has consumed all kinds\u00a0of it (as recently as last weekend while in Montreal for a wedding),\u00a0I told my friend who sent me the above tweet that this was\u00a0typical of Americans trying to make poutine and inevitably screwing up the dish&#8211;often voluntarily so.<\/p>\n<p>That is something I have been asking\u00a0people when I tell them that I am French Canadian and they almost inevitably tell me that such-and-such place in town serves poutine: &#8220;Do they serve real poutine, or a fancy American version thereof?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Poutine is a simple dish, you see. It should really only consist of three ingredients&#8211;French fries, cheese, and gravy.<\/p>\n<p>Even when American restaurants do just that, they manage to screw it up. The cheese has to be fresh cheddar cheese curds (luckily, they make and sell\u00a0those <a title=\"Ellsworth Cheese Curds\" href=\"http:\/\/store.ellsworthcheese.com\/p-13-16-oz-natural.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">in Western Wisconsin<\/a>, very close to where I live in the Twin Cities). The gravy has to have that unique flavor that is pretty much only found in Canada (a fish and chips joint close to my house has an almost perfect poutine&#8230; except for the awful gravy;\u00a0<a title=\"St-Hubert Poutine Gravy\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B008MOC11M\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B008MOC11M&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=marfbel-20&amp;linkId=T6PUQXOQB4SOKXBI\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> is what one should ideally use for their gravy).<\/p>\n<p>Worse is\u00a0when American restaurants completely screw up (what they irreverently call) poutine by heaping tons of unnecessary ingredients onto the dish. Foie gras on poutine? Sacrilege.* Ground meat in the gravy? Blasphemy! A French onion soup poutine? BURN THE WITCH!<\/p>\n<p>This is what real poutine should look like:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Poutine.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10885\" src=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Poutine-580x496.jpg\" alt=\"Poutine\" width=\"580\" height=\"496\" srcset=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Poutine-580x496.jpg 580w, https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Poutine-940x803.jpg 940w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Pretty simple, eh? And no trace of foie gras or ground meat or Gruy\u00e8re or any of those fancypants ingredients.<\/p>\n<p>All joking aside, what I wanted to highlight is this obsession&#8211;a seemingly distinctly American obsession&#8211;to want to fancify and academicize what isn&#8217;t fancy to begin with. Much like how jazz improvisation is now taught\u00a0as a major at accredited\u00a0four-year colleges, food is one of those things that hipster\u00a0American chefs\u00a0seem to be unable to leave alone&#8211;when I lived in North Carolina, the hipster\u00a0chef obsession seemed to be with making either mac and\u00a0cheese or Carolina barbecue as complicated as possible.<\/p>\n<p>But some things should not be tinkered with. Could it be that I am becoming a traditionalist? Maybe. I don&#8217;t know. But I certainly\u00a0have a better understanding now of how, beyond the obvious rent-seeking reasons, in some regions of France and Italy, <a title=\"Immaterial Civilization\" href=\"http:\/\/m.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2001\/09\/immaterial-civilization\/376426\/\" target=\"_blank\">certain people\u00a0want there to be a strict definition of\u00a0certain food offerings<\/a>. I would be only half joking if I said that maybe it&#8217;s time for an official UNESCO definition of what poutine is&#8211;and what it isn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>* To be fair, this is something I&#8217;ve had in Montreal at Au Pied de Cochon, but the point still stands: Even <em>that<\/em> wasn&#8217;t really poutine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let me take a moment to talk about something\u00a0extremely serious for once on this blog. Yesterday morning, a good friend shared the following tweet with&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/10880\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Poutine: What It Is, and What It Isn&#8217;t<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2Pu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10880"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10964,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10880\/revisions\/10964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}