The guilty pleasures of Canada’s melting pot
Butter chicken poutine. Butter chicken poutine? The first time my daughter ordered some, I laughed out loud.
I couldn’t quite imagine a more ludicrously, splendidly, Canadian concoction.
Think of it. You cross traditional Québécois comfort food with trendy South Asian heat. An artery-clogging collision of Canada east and west, old and new.
Years ago, when I was a graduate student in the United States, my class decided we should have a potluck party, to which all the foreign students would bring their “national” dishes. My classmates from China and India and Britain knew exactly what to bring. We Canadians were more perplexed. We couldn’t decide what food represented Canada.
Twenty-five years later, with Canada more diverse than ever, it’s still hard to know what dish could possibly sum up a country. Timbits? Back bacon? Bannock burgers? Butter tarts? Lobster rolls? All fine Canadian traditions, but not entirely reflective of our continent-sprawling multicultural national mythology.
There’s ginger beef, a Chinese-style dish invented in Calgary. Pho noodle soup has become a national staple, and no Canadian potluck is complete without hummus.
But in butter chicken poutine, I think we may have found the ultimate cross-cultural Canadian dish, the perfect meta-Canadian snack for a postmodern 2013.
I’ve been unable to determine who invented it or where — the first media reference I’ve been able to find was a 2009 restaurant review in the National Post. But it has spread across the country, driven by the current trendiness of South Asian spices, and our historic affection for gooey poutine.
These days, you can get it everywhere from the New York Fries kiosk in your shopping mall food court to the Canadian Brew House to summer festival chip trucks.
Monika Kapur Lavelle owns the NaanOLicious naan bar, a hip urban South Asian restaurant on Whyte Avenue. While butter chicken poutine is Canada’s current “it” snack, Lavelle insists her house version is special, because her butter chicken is fresh-made, inspired by her biji (that’s the Punjabi word for grandma) Surjit Kapur.
“It’s my grandmother’s recipe, made with love and care. All of our spices are ground fresh and we make everything on the spot. It’s not just something out of a bag that we heat up and put on top of the fries.”
Lavelle gives customers the option of ordering their butter chicken mild, medium, or spicy hot. Instead of traditional poutine curds, she offers a choice of either grated cheddar and mozzarella or homemade Indian paneer.
She tops her gourmet version with chopped red onion, fresh chopped tomato and fresh cilantro.
I was dubious when Lavelle put two steaming plates of her butter chicken poutine in front of me. At the risk of having my passport seized, I’ll confess I’ve never been a big poutine fan at the best of times — and the combination of french fries and rich curry sauce seemed a stretch. But it was actually delicious. Sinfully so. A heart attack in a bowl.
Lavelle says her customers can’t get enough of it, especially during Fringe, when she sells it onto the street from the NaanOLicious takeout window.
“They love it. They say to us, ‘It’s fries. And butter chicken. Our two favourite things!’ ”
We’re talking populist fusion cuisine, not for foodies, but for the masses.
No earnest royal commission on multiculturalism could have invented such a dish. No dietitian could possibly endorse it.
It’s true Canadian street food, an exuberant, unselfconscious, deliciously decadent expression of national identity run wild. It’s certainly not “organic” in a health-food sense. But it has grown, organically, from a very particular Canadian matrix. It’s difficult to imagine it evolving anywhere else.
Not that butter chicken poutine is the only quintessentially Canadian pop-fusion dish. There are other contenders for the “most Canadian junk food imaginable” title.
Boston Pizza, for example, has been serving up perogy pizza for more than 20 years. For the uninitiated, the pizza pie isn’t littered with Ukrainian dumplings. Instead, the crust is topped with sour cream, cheddar cheese, bacon, green onions, and cactus cut potato wedges.
Perry Schwartz is the media spokesman for Boston Pizza. He says the perogy pizza was invented in the late 1970s by one Edmonton franchise.
From one Edmonton restaurant, it spread across the country.
“It’s one of our most popular pizzas,” says Schwartz. “It’s a top seller.”
While classic pepperoni remains the chain’s biggest product, Schwartz says the perogy pizza tops the sales of the company’s “gourmet” pizzas.
BP has experimented with other uber-Canadian options — a Montreal smoked meat pizza in Quebec, a butter chicken pizza in British Columbia. Nothing, though, has ever matched the coast-to-coast popularity of the perogy pie.
When the company moved into the U.S. market in 1998, it brought the pizza to an American market. It didn’t travel well, though, culturally speaking.
It’s no longer on the menu south of the border. But it remains a Canadian staple, the signature dish of an Italian pizza chain, founded by a Greek immigrant, in a city filled with Ukrainians.
Cheemo’s Frozen Perogies, by the way, has returned the cultural compliment, marketing the Pizzarogy, seasoned with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and oregano, along with a Greek-inspired dumpling stuffed with spinach and feta cheese.
None of these deliciously vulgar dishes represents haute cuisine, to be sure. We’ll probably never serve them to visiting royalty or touring heads of state.
But then, there weren’t designed to be fancy food for company. They were meant for us, our national guilty pleasures, unpretentious reflections of the weird potluck culture we’ve created here.
On Canada Day, newspaper pundits are often prone to launch into earnest essays about the wonders and limitations of multiculturalism, either to wax eloquent about the wonders of tolerance and diversity, or to decry the continuing failures of our not-so-just society.
But sometimes, a summer holiday just needs to be celebrated, and not with sermons. Sometimes, we just have to allow ourselves a minute to acknowledge that while our country is far from perfect, it’s still splendidly idiosyncratically goofy.
Monika Kapur Lavelle, meantime, has concocted her own Canada Day party snack: deepfriend naan, glazed with maple syrup, cut in the shape of maple leaves, reddened with natural beetroot juice, and served on a stick.
She calls them CaNaandians.