There’s little shame in poutine
It’s not that I thought, oh, you’re from Austria, you must try poutine, our national delicacy. It started with braising about four pounds of beef cheeks. There were a couple of litres of rich stock left over. And if my freezer were any more full, it would have a no-necked doorman telling me, “Sorry bro, we’re at capacity.”
So I reduced the stock and gravied it up with butter and flour, a difficult thing to do at 2 p.m., when one is trying to enjoy a lunch of Brussels sprouts and wanting instead to chug the meat juice like it was Gatorade.
In the market, I found some B-list curds at Global Cheese.
But I make up for it with the fries. The potatoes, already blanched, are going to have to be fried in two batches. If they’re dumped into the pot of oil all at once, the temperature will drop and they won’t get brown or crispy. My guests will be fine if I abandon them for the stove. They’ve already had a first course and a bottle of Grooner 2010 Gruner Veltliner, an Austrian wine brought by Rainer Prohaska, who is talking about how the Google map of Toronto’s cycling routes looks like a labyrinth that goes nowhere.
Prohaska is at the table with local street food impresario Suresh Doss, girlfriend Nina Popovic, and my friend Emma Segal. He is here from Vienna to oversee his installation for the Luminato festival.
From June 9 to 17, Prohaska’s 15 “mobile kitchens” will be at the Brickworks, the Distillery, Pecaut Square and other locations. The “kitchens” are shopping carts outfitted with chopping surfaces, knives, frying pans, ingredients and cooking instructions. The audience will participate by preparing and combining the ingredients into different dishes, including some Austrian foods such as grostl (dumplings fried with onions and eggs), mohnnudel (potato dough noodles with poppy seeds and confectioner’s sugar) in volumes that can be shared with a large crowd. Participants can also sign up on advance at carretillainitiative.net.
“I used to use very sharp knives,” says Prohaska, confirming that yes, participants occasionally cut themselves at his food installation events, but never badly. “When you want to cook proper, you need a sharp knife. And I found out that most people, they’re not used to sharp knives.”
As I watch the fat sticks of Yukon gold potatoes dance in the hot oil, taking forever to brown, I have plenty of time to reconsider my decision not to buy a deep fryer. I do manage to own a large collection of whisky and a small collection of chocolate hazelnut spreads, without anyone staging an intervention. By the time they’re all cooked, we’ve nearly finished a bottle of Vineland 1999 Pinot Noir, brought by Doss. I layer the dish with fries, curds and gravy, then repeat. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with poutine representing our cuisine. Canada is too vast a country to have a year-round supply of much produce beyond beets and squash. Anything delicious that grows here makes no more than a cameo appearance. Despite the success of a restaurant like Keriwa, indigenous cuisine is hardly reflected in our diets. We don’t have a national culinary identity. It’s understandable that we stand on guard for poutine. Here is evidence of the dish’s place in our collective experience: I forget to put out forks. A cry goes out across the table. My friends, who are from Nova Scotia, Sri Lanka and Bosnia, all declare that poutine must be eaten with forks, with an assertiveness that only comes with ownership.
But, as pleasing as the dish is, it’s a little shameful that visitors should think we’re all that proud of adding gravy and cheese to french fries. It seems like a permutation of ingredients that Louisiana cooks would have happened on eventually.
We often hear that our multiculturalism is all lip service. Yes, in downtown Toronto, some cultures (southeast Asian) are highly represented while others (African) are not. But the tapestry of our food choices was written by generations of immigration patterns.
In the past three years, poutine shops have become a staple in Toronto. But despite their popularity, they still can’t compete with the genuine diversity of our food. To me, Toronto’s cuisine is represented by my ability to find a good bowl of pho, ramen or pozole just blocks from my home. Though I still can’t get grostl or mohnnudel. mintz.corey@gmail.com twitter.com/coreymintz