And the Dichot

Today is the first night I haven’t eaten lamb in five nights. 1/Braised shoulder with bacon and purée of parsnip, Brussels sprouts on the side. 2/Un petit gigot of agneau de Charlevoix in rosemary jus, perfectly roasted in foil, muscle segments tumbling away from the bone. 3/Leftover braised shoulder, reheated, all that hard fat limpid and lovely in a bowl with a spoon. 4/Leftover braised shoulder again, this time un-reheated, bored, out of the tupperware, all that hard fat kind of hard and fat under my fork—ick, get it out of my mouth—and three-day-old gremolata, missing its original perky charm. (For what it’s worth, Day1/ saw grapefruit peel and rosemary with Québec garlic and fresh mint, some Maldon flakes…)

I’m not saying I’m not lucky to live in a province where the most majestic of young meats is readily available and rampant with quality, either small or large or from here or there. But lambiliarity breeds contempt, even with the most tempting of breeds. So tonight’s roast cod, for all its OMG-that’s-so-unsustainable, was a welcome and flaky relief. Too bad it came with little rosettes of parsnip purée….

How would I like my kidneys? she asked.

As the chef prepares them, of course, I replied. (Turned out that would mean perfectly pink in the middle.)

At Ô Thym a few nights ago, I realized that eating organ meat is not only good, it’s good for Québec. (“Les abats dans un plat, c’est bon pour l’état!” I chanted. Jean suggested that it sounded too governmental. I liked my rhyme anyway and sulked.)

Although offal is part of the gastronomic heritage of this province, it is one of the “low” foods that has spent a lot of time on the outs because wealthy society prized bland muscle meat over the dark and earthy tastes of animals’ squishy bits. Recently, perhaps in a confluence of economics, international taste migration, and regional pride, restaurants around town seem to be offering more rognons and ris, and of course foie, gras and not. Cervelle de veau is often available, and Le Canard Libéré across the street from me does brisk business with its vacuum-packs of duck hearts. (Yum!) Lung is always available at Sakaris, and of course tripe never really went away. I am, however, still holding out for fresh pig uterus to be as available at Provigo as it is at Nanaimo’s Fairway market.

This is all good, because it means we’re eating of our own culture, and broadening our tastescapes without having to reach beyond the borders (not that that is necessarily bad). In theory it could be environmentally beneficial, too, by eating animals more efficiently. Unfortunately, given the complexities of large-scale farming, it probably just means that our dogs and cats are getting fewer organ-grindings in their pet chow, and more beaks and feathers. Ultimately, the best scenario would be to eat small-scale producers’ organs (well, their animals’ organs), economically valuing these products as human food, rather than making them sell it off as low-price quasi-waste. Just one more task for the food list.

Now I have to go. Gotta pop down to the Old Europe to pick up some slices of pig-tongue-in-blood sausage.

As an anglo-québécois, I always feel that I’m in an odd position, gastronomically. True, I am more technically an anglo-montréalais (sorry, “Montrealer” isn’t in my lexicon, as isn’t “Quebecker”), but because I carry a RAMQ card and a driver’s licence, I claim both statuses, among others of course.

I came, I went away, I came back. I had a little starting distance, and then some separation, and now a renewed closeness to the province. My lens, évidemment, is food, and because of this mix of perspectives, I see Québec food culture both more and less clearly. I sometimes just don’t get it, but then I realize that pures laines often don’t get it, either. I sometimes see great shame in our gastronomy (voir: poutine) and sometime a defensiveness and valorization that is based purely on pride of heritage (voir: poutine). In smaller places, identities are so closely tied to regional culinary variations that the two cannot be separated, yet highly processed non-local food pervades the hillsides; the cities, par contre, are so pleine à craquer with Thai takeout and overpriced Italian infusions that a ragoût de boulettes cannot be found, yet no one knows how to use chopsticks.

Somewhere in this muddle is a need to re-remember the long and windy road of Québec history. There is no pre-post-modern Québec to return to—the place and the space have been in constant evolution since the C&C discovery factory came to town 400-and-something years ago. Our coat of arms’ proposes that we nous souvenons. Okay, mais de quoi? In 1883, when it first appeared in stone, it might have referred to the timeline of our province until then. In 1978, the year it bumped La belle province off our license plates, it caused more than a ripple of confusion and debate. Historians and culturists argue and posit, but today I suspect that few québécois have a strong sense of those three words’ meaning(s), other than as an exhortation to remember a vague, fabricated past. One thing is clear: nothing stays the same. And never has this been more true in the realm of our food.

If we are to grow and grow strong, and have our culture remain strong in a highly content-filled surrounding, we need to focus on our food past and present and future, as strongly as we do on our language and arts. How about, instead of perpetually glancing back in hazy memory, we re-remember with clarity, and fierté, and forward-looking, and, yes, perhaps some shame. It’s probably a more realistic and productive endeavor, and after all, you can’t be honnête without a little honte.

I’m frankly getting a little tired of poutine being “discovered.” Most recently, it seems, New York has discovered it. It’s like 1492 all over again.

Specifically, I’m tired of “news” reports on poutine (which come around in waves every 10 years or so), smug orange-hued smiles unsuccessfully masking facilely flapping tongues in cheek. It seems that Rachael Ray and the other geniuses at the Food Network have lowered the food-coverage bar so completely that now the news media don’t feel they have to reach at all to get over it. I thought even puff was supposed to be mildly journalistic.

Two days ago the CBC ran a story about the new spots around NYC where poutine is now on the menu, also citing a recent report on ABC News and Calvin Trillin’s piece in the 11/23 food issue of the New Yorker. I am disappointed to say that my former food-writing hero Mr. Trillin was only moderately more insightful than the dimwits reporting on TV.

Both the CBC and ABC talked about the impossibility (or at least, extreme improbability) of Canada (Québec) possessing a distinct food culture. Both found it laughable that an element of such a food culture could be exported to that bastion of civilization, New York. Both reinforced, either explicitly or obliquely, that Canada and its culture are dismissable. And both completely miss the point, as does Calvin Trillin, that poutine is fundamentally no different from cheese fries, chili cheese fries, or even, deconstructed a bit, pizza. (Carbohydrate, sauce, cheese.)

What’s saddest, ultimately, is that a man who has been as interested in regional food culture as Calvin Trillin missed a lot of the richness and historical detail that’s readily available around poutine. (The depth of his anthropological analysis stops at the pronunciation: is it poo-TEEN or poo-TIN? Though even that misses the more interesting question about when and why the T is hard vs. when it is soft.) The subject has been reported on, in print and in electrons, over three decades, and stories about the etymology, regional variations, international parallels, and comtemporary updates abound. His angle—that poutine is a gastronomic joke—grows flatter and duller as it become apparent how little work he seems to have done on the subject. By the time he delivers his zinger, it’s about as bland as brown gravy from a can. Makes me wonder about all the other local food stuffs he’s covered in his career, and whether they were as shallowly treated as poutine was.

What mystifies me most is that poutine captures so much attention and yet so little real examination. It is unusual neither culinarily nor culturally, and analogs abound around the world. It is also hugely popular, yet no single brand pours marketing dollars into its promotion. It holds a top position on the fast-food chart, yet gets dolled up with fond de veau and foie gras at PDC, and lightened with veg and salad at Patati Patata. It is very specific and also a blank slate, and though it shows up in various places outside this province it is uniquely and typically québécoise. That bears investigating.

If only there were a journalist around when you needed one.

Two nights ago, Jean looked in the frying pan I was stirring things about in and laughed. “Mr. I-don’t-believe-in-fusion-food seems to have a lot of different stuff going on in there.”

It was true—onions sautéed with pieces of n’duja as a base for Portuguese sardines that would eventually go onto a bed of shredded iceberg and chopped watercress. The dressing was to be a warm reduction of green onions, vermouth, sherry vinegar, mustard, sesame oil, and Mexican honey. We would eat it with a bottle of Québec-produced red wine (l’Orpailleur) at Jean’s Japanese-inspired low dining table while seated on Indian-print cushions.

Eep. Had I gone to the dark side?

I often make fun of fusion—an overtly studied mash-up of culinary differences that is meant to demonstrate cultural cleverness while shocking and giving pleasure. The trend is often traced back to 1970s California with the merging of Asian and Californian tastes and ingredients. But Tex-Mex is equally fused, as are the cuisines of numerous regions where two distinct and identifiable cultures border each other. Once a community reaches beyond itself to satisfy its food needs (either through product or tradition), a degree of exchange is bound to happen. From exchanging to sharing to combining to merging, fusion just takes a quick toss of a marketer’s tweet-encrusted stone.

I mock, and yet in my consulting and education and gastronomy work, I preach that forcing connections between seemingly disconnected ideas is playful and valuable and leads to creativity and innovation. And, clearly, I practice a fair amount of this kind of cooking myself. In fact, one of the main reasons I returned to Montréal after coming back from Italy was because dinners like this are normal to me, and this city easily enables them. As I was growing up, Asian sauces were my front-line condiments, and soy and mirin were just ways of adding salt and sugar to a dish. Garlic, lime, and chile didn’t mean Mexican to me, just a standard system of flavors that are appropriate to many dishes. Vindaloo paste warmed up leftover meatloaf and rice, so why wouldn’t you use it?

Movements like Slow Food seem to take particular issue with fusion, instead promoting the opposite: fission food, that cleaves non-traditional combinations in order to re-find cultural heritage in products, ingredients, and culinary systems. This includes using red peppers from here to make the dish, not just remembering to use red peppers instead of zucchini…. The idea is that “returning” to pre-fusion ways will protect our culture and preserve biodiversity and tradition. The question looming, however, is whose tradition?

If access to my condiment rack were to be blocked from me, and I was disallowed from making use of my UQÀM student’s extraordinary chile-cured pork salami, and Chinatown-bought watercress disappeared from my diet, I would lose a significant part of my identity. I would cease to eat according to the traditions I was brought up in, according to the taste system that I recognize, according to the foods that, to me, go together. Eating Scottish and English and Viennese dishes as they were prepared 80 years ago would be foreign to me—a kind of falsely constructed combining of ingredients that would smack lightly of something called fusion.

Félix Guattari, a French psychotherapist and philosopher, talks about a process of “continuous resingularization,” that is, an ongoing evolution from whatever state we are currently in. This means not a return to something we imagine existed in the past, but a productive, forward-mutation of what we are into something else. Perpetually, so that there is no there, we just keep going. His book The Three Ecologies concludes with the idea that individuals “must become both more united and increasingly different.”

Fusion, or at any rate the practice that begat the term, is just this: a way to make our food increasingly different, while simultaneously uniting those that eat it. We eat this crazy, mixed-up food, and we become it; we do so together, and we become different together. It is hardly simple, and it certainly introduces other associated problems (con-fusions?), but it may be both more practicable and more enjoyable.

Yum. Pass the sriracha.

He had a good publisher, that’s all. Physiologie du goût has been in print since it was published in 1825, keeping his name on our collective tongue. Doesn’t mean everything he says is right, nor definitive.

In matters of food, his aphorisms are fun to play around with, but anyone can write an aphorism, and they do. And since B-S, there has been an industrial revolution, a green revolution, a culinary revolution, a media revolution. Think any of those affected how we interact with food, and perhaps, therefore, some of the absolute truths that we credit him with?

Don’t get me wrong, the man and the book are a critical part of the foundation of gastronomy. But the ever-expanding architecture over that base has continued to grow over the years, and we urgently need to check the authority over our contemporary food systems that we give one man’s writings.

A couple of times now I’ve felt like a bottle has had its way with me. In December in San Casciano with Suze at the cartoleria, when K&G kicked in for the biggest baddest Brunello I’ve ever had, and just this weekend when I got double-teamed by Messrs. Mondavi and Rothschild. What a corking.

Sure, in December we were building a first-night-of-Chanukah, and the spectacular 2001 riserva blah blah was a brick in the two Jews’ Tuscan wall. We also had leaden latkes and some awfully good eggplant parmesan. (A couple of time-warped candles—last year’s leftovers but enough for a mini-menorah—rounded out the yid-fest.) It wasn’t the only element of the dinner and it didn’t decide what we ended up eating, but it did serve as a pretty central focus of our planning and thinking, and it was decidedly the star consumable of the night. Talking, researching, buying, reading, photographing, opening, pouring, more talking, smelling. A lot o’ verbs for one beverage.

Half a year later, Michael shows up in Montreal with a 1998 Opus One. I simultaneously giggle with glee and cackle with horror. The first in anticipation of a yummy wine; the second in memory of the mausoleum that spat it forth. Oh, the twin pleasure and horror. We nonetheless have to re-shop. Organic coop-free chicken breast and québécois-slaw with fingerling potatoes and chipotle-quark dip just wasn’t going to pair well.

So there was pleasure in finding cheese and chocolate and lamb and smoked trout that would balance the event of the wine we planned to consume. (We also had to rearrange dinner reservations a bit. But that was fun, too.) There was anticipation, certainly, about drinking a celeb wine. (Michael had been waiting 5 years.)

The wine merited event. It had a story, a bit of expectation. There was potential for mundanity, as well as a certain anxiety. (I have had a rather dull Opus One, of another vintage, that was about as remarkable as an Australian merlot with a quirky animal label.)

But why? When you plan a meal around a bottle, doesn’t that put the horse tartare before the à la carte? Isn’t wine supposed to make food more delicious and women more beautiful? (Trust Homer to get the sexes wrong.) As my Tours-based ex-colleague Gary would ask, when did sour-grape-juice-with-ethanol become important? (Okay, I know when, as does he.)

Suffice to say, dinner was yummy. The wine also. I even took a picture:

xx and oo to Robert and Philippe from David and Michael