Tasty Tales of Cheesy Gravy Fries and Enchanted Poutineries.

As a young lad growing up in Canada, living centrally and coast to coast, I thought pouring gravy on top of fries was as normal as pouring milk into cereal. It wasn't until I witnessed an LA-based American friend recoil in horror one mid-1990s afternoon in a Toronto diner, when a kindly waitress doing her rounds, offered to pour fresh hot gravy all over his plate of chips. After watching me happily eat up and having with a quick think about it – after all, what could possibly be wrong with such a combination, he told the waitress he was sorry, it was a totally new concept for him and next time please - he'd love more gravy! The fries/gravy combination is said to have originated in rural Quebec in the 1950s. By the time the rest of Canada had caught on, the Québécois had already moved on, and were adding cheese curds into the mix – most likely due to the proximity of a plethora of fromageries producing cheese curds in Centre-du-Québec. I remember my first poutines from my frequent visits to Montreal in the 90s, but I didn't see it outside Quebec for another five years or so.

Today, Poutine is enormously popular and it is on nearly every fast-food and comfort food menu in the country; in Toronto, there is even an Enchanted Poutinerie Palace which pours rainbow coloured gravy over their Unicorn Poutine offering! Internationally, it is now spreading out and I've seen it on menus as far afield and Belfast and Berlin; even Tesco, in the world's most chip-loving country, now promotes the Canadian dish as a worthy chip-recipe contender! If you have not seen it in your part of the world, chances are it is just a matter of time. Modern servings can come with everything from bacon & basil to beef & barley added onto the pile. And appropriately so: the etymology comes to us from 'pudding' and is generally thought to mean 'messy'. The Dictionnaire historique du fran?ais québécois lists 15 usages for poutine in Québécois and Acadian French, dating back to 1810. The word 'poutine' in the meaning we now use as "fries with cheese and gravy" is the latest meaning and only dates back to 1982! Personally, I can take or leave the curds, but the gravy on the fry certainly sits up very high up on this Canuck's comfort-food chart! #poutine #etymology #canadianisms #wordorigin