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Québécois cuisine

What better way to get acquainted with a strange culture than to try to eat what passes for a national dish, or what the locals try to disguise as food. Here's two recipes which you won't find anywhere else in the world (dey're not that crazy! In fact, the fabrication and consumption of poutine is outlawed in most countries, and is a felony punishable by death in Ontayrio, Manitoba and Alberta. Don't know about B.C. dough, check local laws)

Le poutine

You would tink the stuff came from outer space or someting.... No one is sure where dis recipe came from originally, but it's probably from the Charlevoix region (Saguenay people claim to have invented poutine, but don't listen to dem, they're always bragging about everyting). Legend has it that it was invented by somebody who had a drain pipe leakage and was looking for something to plug the hole, but my personal teory is dat he simply was inspired by watching some beavers working on deir dam; anyway, imagine his surprise when he found out de stuff was actually edible (non-toxic at least; well, barely toxic).

I'm la frog, you're la frog, kiss me...

De recipe is deceptively simple: take a portion of patates frites (french fries), put some "fromage en crotte" (turd cheese), and pour a lot of canned hot-chicken sauce, boiling hot. The heat coming from the sauce should be enough melt the cheese, which in turn should weld solid the whole ting into a gooey mess able to witstand 500 pound-per-square-inch pressure, and just about undissolvable even by sulfuric acid. To know if you did dis right, stick a fork in and pull it out: you should be able to pull a strand of melted cheese long enough to cross the room without breaking (some movie directors use the stuff as a substitute for latex in their special effects)

Variant: instead of hot-chicken sauce, try spaghetti sauce and mozzarella cheese: we call dis "poutine italienne" although it's even money dat any self-respecting italian would just sniff at the stuff and trow it to the dogs.

Dis may all sound somewhat awful, but you will have to get used to it; being able to eat poutine is considered a rite of passage around here.

La pâté chinois

Now don't ask me where dat one came from. And don't ask me why it's called "pâté chinois", I don't know why we call it "pâté chinois", nobody here has a fucking clue why exactly it is called "pâté chinois" as dere is noting even remotely chinese about it: it's the great québécois mystery (maybe the guy who invented it wanted to make fun of Christopher Columbus and his "Indians").

The simplicity of dis recipe is proverbial: brown out a pound of ground beef in an oven pan; pour 2-3 cans of creamed corn ("blé d'Inde"; Columbus again...) den top it wit mashed potatoes; the 3 layers should be more or less equal. Simple, no? Noting like rocket science, right? Any fucking moron could do it, right? Now bake at 350 for about 40 minutes, let cool and serve. Voilà, now you are a true québécois.