An identity crisis, of two kinds
Cheese Louise. It’s been a while, no?
I’ve no good excuse for shelving this blog for so long. And less impressive: no concrete reason for bringing it back into use, except for maybe that I’ve felt restless for some time about not being able to put into words, whenever I wanted, something that’s inspired, irked or interested me about the way we eat. How selfless!
It’s not that I stopped writing about food. In that sense, it’s been a good year. I went mushroom hunting, learned a thing or two about small-town Chinese restaurants and met the world’s best chef. I even moved to that city I almost killed myself with foie in two summers ago.
So while I haven’t been bored, I have missed this space. I’ve just no idea what to do with it yet. It’s a blog about food, but what about food? What I’d written about here up to this point has been so jumbled and nebulous it’s hard to identify what to write about, or why. Which probably explains 90% of my unplanned hiatus.
Until that’s worked out, if it ever is, let’s talk about poutine.
For years there’s been plenty of hand-wringing about whether or not Canada has a real cuisine, and talk about poutine as a national dish. As if a national dish were a badge you could wear to prove your country had a cuisine. As if a cuisine—something so tied up in histories of immigration, class differences, geography, even religion—could be summed up in just one dish. As a former classmate and friend John McGrath put it a couple of days ago: “If the national dish of the UK is curry, then surely the concept has no meaning.” That may not be a popular take on what for some countries is the equivalent of a flag or beloved soccer team, but it’s one I agree with. And, foie help me, especially in the case of poutine.
The basics: it was invented about 50 years ago in rural Quebec, though like Caesars and nachos, exact ownership of the dish remains in dispute. From B.C. to Newfoundland, we’ve since come to love it—it’s on Harvey’s menus and diner sandwich boards everywhere—and at least a couple of high-profile restaurants have incorporated it into the 2010 pantheon of Comfort Dishes Made Fancy. It’s made of fries and gravy and cheese and stuff, though you probably already knew that. It’s by no means a health food, and by all means delicious. We get made fun of for it all the time.
That last point alone should be enough to tell you something’s wrong. When Calvin Trillin (a writer I otherwise admire) wrote about the dish for the New Yorker—Is a national joke becoming a national dish? he asked—the gist of it still felt that, though delicious, it was still something to laugh about:
“As a punch line, poutine has a lot going for it. Many Canadians believe that it is also good to eat. Their fondness for it is, in fact, often the basis of the punch line, since an outlander who hears a description of poutine in its basic form—French fries with cheese curds and brown gravy—is likely to think that it sounds, well, disgusting. Jokes about poutine on that level are the equivalent of jokes about the Scots eating haggis or Scandinavians in the upper Midwest crowding into church basements to feast on lutefisk—an ethnic ritual that my first taste of lutefisk moved me to compare to teenage circumcision.”
Watching Anthony Bourdain talk about it is sort of the same.
I realize these two examples is puts a lot of weight on what two Americans think of us—another supposedly Canadian thing to do. But we do this to ourselves, even when making fun of others.
And our other options, summed up in a recent Globe & Mail slideshow, either suffer from the same problem or are too specific to speak for a country of such diverse geographies. One thing Trillin had right in his piece, because it’s right of every country, was that as Canadians we don’t like to be defined by symbols, be it a moose or a canoe or even our godly, gut-busting mess.
P.S. A poutine image search came up with at least two pictures of a shirtless Vladimir Putin. Talk about unappetizing.
