Poutine's name may come from a cook's outburst about a damn mess
A regular at a café in rural Quebec reportedly asked the owner to toss cheese curds into his bag of fries. The owner is said to have warned it would make a damn mess, a maudite poutine. Whether or not the story is true, that mess went from mocked backwoods snack to a dish Canada now calls its own.
At least three places in Quebec's Centre-du-Québec region claim the invention, all from the late 1950s. In Warwick, Fernand Lachance's café put poutine on its 1957 menu and added hot gravy from 1962 to keep it warm. In Drummondville, Jean-Paul Roy's drive-in sold fries, curds and gravy together from 1958 and put it on the menu in 1964, and it still displays a copyright certificate. A food researcher splits the prize, calling Warwick the birthplace and Roy the true inventor, while the Oxford Companion to Cheese credits the customers who mixed it themselves.
The squeak is the point. Fresh curds, ideally less than a day old, have an elastic bite that makes them squeak against the teeth, but as moisture and air escape they turn dull. That tied poutine to dairy country for decades. Busy poutineries may go through 100 kilograms of curds a day, and some too far from a dairy make their own every few hours. Hot, thin gravy goes over room-temperature curds just before serving so they soften without fully melting.
Respectability came slowly. Poutine reached Quebec City by food truck in 1969 and Montreal soon after, but cheap imitations with poor cheese cemented its image as junk food for after the bars. Chefs made it for their staff and would not dare list it. Then in 2001 Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon served a foie gras version to rave reviews, and restaurants in Toronto and Vancouver followed with lobster and braised beef.
Today poutine festivals run from Drummondville to Chicago, and Montreal's immigrant kitchens reinvent it with Haitian, Indian, Lebanese or Japanese flavours. Some argue it has become a category like dumplings or sandwiches: something crisp, something creamy and a sauce binding them. Others object that calling it Canada's national dish takes a symbol away from Quebec.
Source: Poutine
