My Food History and Poutine
More than ever before, Americans frequent local farmers markets, plant kitchen gardens, explore new cuisines, and attempt to recreate dishes prepared by TV celebrity chefs. Eager to live a healthy lifestyle, we rarely prepare the heavily salted meat, potato and gravy dinners that were favorites of my maternal grandfather—son of German parents who immigrated in the late 19th century to Schenectady, NY. We’ve become a nation with an increasingly mindful consciousness about food and exercise.
When I was growing up, family dinners prepared by my mother Alice included meat, potatoes or rice, vegetables, salad, and occasionally a roll, served at the family dining room table at 6 p.m. sharp. Dining out as a family was a rare treat in the 1950s, and America hadn’t yet turned into a fast-food nation. Today, though I still prefer cooking meals at home, I do love dining out from time to time at one of our favorite restaurants in Nevada City or Grass Valley.
As a teenager I enthusiastically sampled almost everything stocked in our family’s refrigerator, with one exception. I avoided the big jar of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise that loomed large over the other condiments on the refrigerator door. Ironically, eggs, white wine vinegar, lemon juice, and light oil—the main ingredients in this early 19th century condiment with Spanish origins—are all staples in my kitchen today. But when spread on a sandwich, the oily condiment becomes unpalatable. Even day, I have a hard time dealing with mayonnaise unless its slightly slimy, viscoelastic physical properties are masked in a tuna fish or egg salad blend.
Fresh fish rarely made it to our family table during the 1940s and 50s. Frozen fish sticks were available for those of us who didn’t live near a river, bay, sea or ocean. I tasted my first fresh flounder while on a family trip to Quebec in 1954 and again when my father caught a flounder while we vacationed at Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. Not until I traveled abroad on my own in the late 1960s and experienced Southeast Asian food did my culinary horizons expand beyond those found on the dog-eared pages of mother’s classic Good Housekeeping and Betty Crocker cookbooks.
Thai backstreet food markets were a masala of curries, spices, exotic fruits and fresh seafood I’d never tasted before let alone prepared. Soon fish became a daily part of my diet. A Thai dish with baby squid and rice was among my most exotic cooking challenges. Preparing it required that I remove each squid’s beak and ink pouch. That done, the squid (pla muek) were sliced and stir fried with scallions and red curry paste in fish stock until tender. Then cooked jasmine rice and cilantro are stirred in, heated through, and served. This was definitely new territory for me as a novice cook, and the delicious adventure remains as indelible as squids’ ink can be.
More recently in my continuing culinary evolution of food likes and dislikes, I was introduced to a dish that I hadn’t expected to find in an American restaurant and never expected to ingest. Poutine is a national dish beloved by Canadians in the way American’s love French fries with ketchup. But there the comparison ends. Poutine served as fast-food is a mushy mess of French fries covered with a fondue of squeaky white cheddar cheese curds and brown gravy—an excessive looking concoctions to be avoided that one poutine pundit described as “a heart attack in a bowl.”
But to my surprise and delight, Kit and I found poutine on the menu at Columbia, Missouri’s not-to-be-missed Flyover Restaurant in 2017. There Chef Adam Wells-Morgan imagines and prepares an ever-changing selection of “No appetizers or entrees—just food.” Unable to resist, we ordered his “Poutine”—made with Cavender’s spiced French fries, aged Swiss Cheese and cognac fondue, wood oven roasted pancetta, oil-cured oven-dried tomatoes, and fresh scallions. It was fabulous!
Writer Calvin Trillin—a New Yorker writer since 1963 who is a Kansas City native—first encountered poutine while summering with his family in Nova Scotia, Canada and categorized it as “funny food associated with unhealthy eating and excessive drinking.” But after investigating Montreal’s rich poutine restaurant scene, the epicurious magazine critic became a convert. “Funny Food”—Trillin’s hilarious New Yorker article on this oft-maligned Canadian nosh—remains a Trillin classic (11/23/2009).
Thanks to Columbia native Chef Adam Wells-Morgan, you needn’t fly to Canada if you have an unexpected hankering for poutine or feel like expanding your culinary horizons. Calvin Trillin will be delighted to know this “funny food” he wrote about with such delight a few years back has now made it to flyover country.