French fries, cheese and gravy. What's not to love?
Poutine, Quebec's greatest contribution to roadside gastronomy, has been around for at least 40 years and, while on select menus from Halifax to Vancouver, it's never as plentiful and sinfully good as it is when tasted around the place of its invention.
In the area between Quebec City and Montreal known as Centre-du-Québec, cheese-making has long been a source of pride and, more than anything, it is the region's abundance of squeaky, fresh cheddar curds that gave way to the obvious logic of poutine. This historic area of Appalachian piedmont -- triangulated by Drummondville, Victoriaville, and the Bois-Francs region -- is a dairy land where the love of cheese is prominent in both highbrow and lowbrow forms; celebrated in festivals and evident year-round in its large, state-of-the-art fromageries.
Of course, culinary adventurers can be foiled when looking for the true birthplace of a common snack. One may easily find the source of Capon à la Chef Rocco, but it's harder to discover just where and when somebody decided to put a frozen banana on a stick. Poutine (pronounced "poo-teen," and definitely not "poo-tayn") similarly lacks an official pedigree, but almost all tales of its genesis lead to this humble area of Quebec's South Shore.
Coming through the farmlands of the east into the downtown square of Drummondville, where there is a summer public market that features local cheeses, it's hard to mistake the sturdy makeup of an old, established Canadian town. While the suburban outskirts resemble the secular drive-thru culture of most of North America, the centre of town speaks of a Victorian age.
On Boulevard St-Joseph toward Autoroute 20 is Roy le Jucep, one of the places that claims to have first wed curd and fry. Proprietor Jean-Paul Roy says that at the request of customers, his place started adding cheese to orders of patates-sauce in the 1960s. In effect, the cheddar-loving citizens invented poutine. The name, Roy asserts, comes from a mix of the word pouding (pudding) and "Ti-Pout," a cook's nickname.
The word poutine has long been used in other culinary contexts, including the traditional Acadian dish poutine rapées, a kind of potato dumpling. In fact, on a recent drive through a distinctly Acadian town in northern Maine, I noticed a menu that distinguished cheese, fries and gravy as "Quebec Poutine."
At Roy le Jucep, there are, to my count, at least 17 different kinds of poutine on the menu, including the daunting "smoked meat poutine" and the almost Fear Factor-sounding galvaude, which includes chicken and peas (a noted British chip-topper). The regular poutine itself is excellent: chunky fries, lots of fresh cheese and a gravy that would make an aerobics instructor faint.
Up the road on Route 122, in the small community of St-Cyrille-de-Wendover, is Fromagerie Lemaire, where warm cheese is available daily and where visitors can get a view of their cheese-making operation. I picked up some morning-fresh cheddar and some cheese twists that had been pickled in brine -- a strange snack I hadn't tried since I went to college in Quebec's Eastern Townships more than a decade ago.
Farther northeast, in the town of Warwick, is a similar resto-laiterie run by the Côté company and featuring the Kingsey brand. Here you can get your first crack at one of the small bags of curds you can buy in nearly any Quebec dépanneur.
While cheddar curds may rule the economic fortune of Warwick, the region is very proud of its more specialized products, particularly its sheep and goat cheeses. Every summer, Warwick hosts a well-attended cheese festival that features the best the area has to offer.
The town is also home to the other great claimant to poutine's invention. Fernand Lachance, starting from a restaurant called Le Lutin Qui Rit (the laughing goblin) and then his own place, called Café Ideal, claimed Kingsey curds and fries were often served in bags that customers topped with ketchup as far back as 1957. The sauce would come later. When Lachance died, his credible claim to be the true père de la poutine was given needed attention. Le Lutin Qui Rit is no longer around, but its spirit, I believe, is everywhere in the Bois-Francs.
I stopped for a quick, saucy plate of the good stuff at Restaurant Le Café Show, a smoky local's local with a good view towards the fromagerie. I am not enough of a cheese-and-fries historian to know exactly where poutine was born, but I do know most claims are delicious. Pack your bags
Le Festival des Fromages de Warwick is held June 18-20 in Warwick, Que. For more information, visit .
Fromagerie Lemaire: 2095 Route 122, St-Cyrille-de-Wendover; (819) 478-0601; fromagerie-lemaire.ca.
Fromage Côté: 80 Rue Hôtel-de-Ville, Warwick; (819) 358-3300.
Roy le Jucep: 1050 Blvd. St-Joseph, Drummondville; (819) 478-4848.
Restaurant Le Café Show: 1 Route St-Albert, Warwick; (819) 358-5400.