Quebec - How I made Poutine

It's surprising in many ways that poutine has become the dish that's most associated with Quebec. Indeed, when I was looking at the different options of things I could make to represent Quebec, I kept coming across poutine again and again.

Despite its historical connections to France, food in Quebec seems to be fairly 'down-to-earth' and, in many ways, poutine encapsulates the different traditions of Quebec. It's also versatile enough to lend itself to other culinary traditions and these days you can get all kinds of poutines with Greek, Italian and TexMex flavours. I actually tried a real poutine when I was in Quebec, at Rimouski bus station - my poutine was Italian-style with a Bolognaise sauce.

My first experience of poutine at Rimouski bus station

With dubious origins as a 1950's late-night snack to accompany beer, poutine is now gaining a reputation as good hangover food and, if this Guardian article is to believed, Quebecois poutine is poised to take over the world!

Posh chips and gravy?  Perhaps.  All I know is that it's one of the least healthiest dishes I've made for this blog and I can only describe it as a real carb attack.  Tasty though, in a guilty pleasure kind of way. Not to mention, easy-to-make.

The ingredients

I looked at lots of different recipes when researching for this blog post, then made up my own recipe based on what I could remember and what I could get my hands on. The hardest ingredient to find was cheese curds and, unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands on any, but substituted with paneer, an Indian cheese which has a similar consistancy.  Anyway, here are the ingredients I used to make my poutine.

Ingredients for Quebecois poutine

5/6 baking potatoes
Unsalted butter
Paneer
1 onion
1 garlic clove
Worcestershire sauce
Cider vinegar
1 cup beef stock
1 cup vegetable stock
1/2 cup flour
Pork lardons

How I made Poutine

Preparation of poutine started with the potatoes, which I peeled, then sliced into chips and immersed in a bowl full of water. I then put these in the fridge for a couple of hours before coming back to finish the preparations for this dish.

I usually prepare all of the ingredients before starting to cook

The next step I took was to fry the pork lardons. To be honest, I could have done this at the end, but I thought I would be too busy with the chips and gravy, so it would be good to have one less thing to worry about.

The main challenge with poutine is timing it, so the all of the ingredients, except the cheese, are hot when they arrive on the plate.

Most traditional poutine recipes are vegetarian, but I decided to add some meat, as I wanted to have something in there that wasn't purely carbs! In a way, lardons are quite French, so I guess I was gallicising this otherwise very North American dish.

Fry the pork lardons

My next step was to prepare the gravy, which I did by first frying the onion and garlic, then adding Worcestershire sauce and Cider vinegar. I went a bit mad on the old vinegar which I wouldn't recommend as it influences the taste of the gravy. Once the onions had softened a bit, I added the beef and vegetable stock and let whole thing come to the boil.

Fry the onion and garlic in Worcestershire sauce and cider vinegar

Once the mixture had cooked for a bit (about fifteen minutes), I took them off the heat and strained the liquid into a bowl, discarding the onions. I'm not a great believer in discarding food, but I wanted to stick to the original idea of poutine. If I were making it again, however, I'd probably keep the onions and garlic in the gravy.

Strain the mixture, discarding the onions and garlic

Using the same pot, I added the butter, letting it melt before stirring in the flour. This made a kind of batter, known as a roux. Before the roux fried too much, I started stirring in the rest of the gravy mixture and whisk it, until the roux dissolved completely, thickening the gravy/sauce.

Melt the butter

Add flour to the melted butter

Mix the flour and butter to make a roux

Stir in the onion/stock mixture and whisk to make a yummy grave which looks like butterscotch

Next I deep-fat fried the potato chips, by heating half a pot of vegetable oil and putting the chips into the oil in batches. I've always wondered how to get crispy chips and now I know - you need to deep-fat fry them, drain the oil off on paper, let them cool and then fry them a second time. It's the first time I've done this and the second frying made my chips really crispy!

I was a bit disorganised in general and had no kitchen paper to drain the chips, so I resorted to good old newspaper, which is actually great at soaking up the oil - I'd recommend it, better than paper towels!

'White' chips after first deep-fat fry

Greasy spoon on newspaper

Brown chips after second deep-fat fry

Once the chips had browned, I transferred them to a plate, adding the pork lardons (cold by now, but that didn't really matter). I then took the squares of paneer out of the fridge and sprinkled these on top, before pouring over the gravy. The key to a good poutine, I guess is thin gravy, so it seeps down through the cheese and chips and also chilled cheese, so it doesn't melt immediately, but retains a rubbery consistency when the gravy is poured over the top.

Chips

Chips + lardons

Chips + lardons + cheese

Chips + lardons + cheese + gravy = poutine

The gravy was yummy - I was a bit worried about the colour, but more than one recipe stated that it should look like butterscotch, so I guess my gravy was fine. It certainly tasted good - a warm and filling dish on a cold winter's day!

Quebecois poutine

Image credits:

All images were taken by me on my trusty Canon EOS 1100D.  Feel free to re-use these images with the Creative commons license:

- Attribution (especially to this blog post)
- Non-commercial
- Share alike

Quebec - The Empress of Ireland

I first read about the sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland when I was travelling through Rimouski last October. The RMS Empress of Ireland sank in the early hours of the 29th of May 1914 and last year saw the centenary of this maritime disaster on the St Lawrence River. I was surprised to learn about it, as it's not something I'd ever heard of before, although it was Canada's most serious peace-time shipping accident.

Of course, we're all familiar with the RMS Titanic which sank two years before the Empress of Ireland.  Celine Dion, perhaps Quebec's most famous daughter, famously sang the title song for the 1997 movie starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslett. 

As I've researched more about these maritime disasters, I've begun to wonder what was it that made the sinking of the Titanic so famous, whereas the sinking of the Empress of Ireland has been more or less forgotten? I've come up with a few possible reasons:

Primacy

Although both disasters saw the loss of large numbers of lives (over 1,500 for the Titanic and over 1,000 for the Empress of Ireland), the sinking of the Titanic happened first and, in 1912 it was the biggest maritime disaster in living memory. There were quite a few maritime disasters in the early 20th century (e.g. the loss of the Camorta in the Bay of Bengal in 1902 claimed more than 700 lives and the loss of the General Slocum in New York, claimed more than 1,000 lives in 1904), however, the sheer number of people who died in the Titanic sinking shocked the general public and meant that the event really stuck in people's minds.

Timing

Whilst both ships sunk during peace-time, the sinking of the Empress of Ireland happened only a few months before the outbreak of World War 1. Although the sinking of this ship was a great tragedy, the loss of life soon paled into insignificance when compared to the many millions who died in Europe and elsewhere during the First World War.  Whilst the sinking of the Titanic had several years to influence public opinion, the sinking of the Empress of Ireland was obscured by the outbreak of war.

The unsinkable maiden

Even before the Titanic set sail, her builders and promoters had pronounced her unsinkable.  All the more tragic then, when the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage.  The Empress of Ireland, by contrast, had been plying the North Atlantic since 1906 and had made the trip between Liverpool and Quebec quite a few times before she sank.

Dramatic retelling

Although much of the 1997 movie Titanic may be fabricated or exaggerated, we all enjoyed the re-imagining of the passengers' experience aboard this ship.  More than 700 people survived the sinking of the Titanic and the three hours that it took the ship to sink left some leeway for dramatic retelling of the disaster.  The Empress of Ireland also had survivors, but the ship sank in just 14 minutes which, I guess would be more difficult to build a drama/story around.

Location

Rimouski on the St Lawrence River

As sea-travel was the most important way of getting around in the early 20th century (and indeed the centuries before that), I'd imagine that maritime disasters really captured the public imagination at that time.  Having said that, the location of the disaster would have played an important role in terms of how interested people in Europe and North America were in disasters of this kind.

For example, a Japanese ship, the Kiche Maru sank during a typhoon in the Pacific, just four months after the Titanic disaster, with a loss of more than 1,000 lives, but it was too remote for most Europeans and Americans to relate to. Similarly, The Empress of Ireland sank in a slightly obscure corner of Canada, rather than the more dramatic location of the icebergs in the North Atlantic and this may have influenced the public imagination and re-telling of these stories.

Numbers

It's interesting to note some similarities in terms of the numbers involved in both disasters. Bizarrely, in both tragedies 68% of passengers lost their lives and 32% of passengers survived.  This is a weird coincidence and I wonder if anyone has ever done a study into average survival rates in shipping disasters?

Less surprising is the fact that, in both cases, the survival rate was much higher amongst first-class passengers (41% on the Empress and 62% on the Titanic) than amongst third-class passengers (18.5% on the Empress and 25% on the Titanic).

Out of the 138 children aboard the Empress of Ireland, only 4 survived.  By comparison, 56 children survived the sinking of the Titanic out of a total number of 109.  All of the children who died in the Titanic disaster were third-class passengers, except one.

The Empress of Ireland story

I'm sure there must be some interesting stories from the Empress of Ireland disaster which have yet to be dramatised.  The St Lawrence River is wide at the point where the Empress sank and you can't really see the far shore, as the river is already opening out to become the sea.

To this date, there is a lot of controversy around the cause of the disaster and I watched a documentary called Last Voyage of the Empress of Ireland (available on YouTube) which questions the original verdict that the Empress of Ireland sank because she was rammed by another boat. The documentary calls into question the actions taken by the Empress' captain, Henry Kendall, and hints that there was an element of big business v small business during the original enquiry into the sinking of this ship.

Disasters today

In case you think large-scale maritime disasters are a thing of a past, it's worth noting more recent events like the Le Joola ferry disaster off the coast of Gambia in 2002 (1,864 lives lost) or the Doña Paz ferry disaster in the Philippines in 1987, the biggest peacetime maritime disaster ever, with the loss of 4,386 lives!

In the past few weeks, we've had our fair share of travel disasters, with the loss of AirAsia flight QZ8501 in Indonesia and the Norman Atlantic ferry fire off the coast of southern Italy. Air and maritime disasters seem to be a constant theme in the 21st century, where our seas and skies are full of boats and planes. Given the large number of ferries and planes that are travelling every day compared to the relatively low number of accidents that happen, I can't help but hope that these bigger disasters will continue to be few and far between.

Image credits:

The image of RMS Empress of Ireland is from the Library and Archives Canada and is in the public domain.

The image of Rimouski was taken by me, feel free to re-use this with the Creative Commons license: Attribution, Share alike, non-commercial.