Poutine

While there are close to a half a dozen stories that claim the actual ancestry of Canada’s national dish, poutine, they all agree that the plate of french fries with cheese curds and gravy originated in Quebec. The first time I had it was when I was 10 years old, in St. John, ME. To date, it is still my favorite meal. 

Duckfat, in Portland, makes a decent bowl of poutine, but because good restaurants believe themselves to be masters of the supply and demand parlor trick -- if they supply you with less food, they can demand more money for it -- then you have to place two orders just to get enough gravy for the first dish. I’m sick of restaurants purposefully giving you half the amount of sauce that a dish requires, and then charging you half the price of the meal extra, just to dish up what should have been portioned out to begin with. But then again, my last name is Soucy, which comes from Saucier which means . . . well . . . saucier.

There was a time, when I was traveling in the band Tree by Leaf that I would order poutine all over the country and take pictures of every plate. I thought the perfect coffee table book would be a photographic essay, compiling renditions of a pointedly northern dish, as performed by the deep south and the midwest. If only I were a person who finishes my . . . 

It was remarkable to see how many people would look at me cross-eyed when I’d order it, as if I’d asked for them to stir my coffee with the corner of their shirt sleeve. “If you’re sure you want me to do that, sugar,” was a common response. Cheese, potatoes, and gravy -- how can that possibly be a shocking combination . . . especially in the South, where people put cheese and gravy on their cereal?

In South Carolina, the same state that brought me a tall glass of Coca Cola with ice when at 5:oo am on a chilly morning I asked for a cup of cocoa, my description to them of what poutine was produced a hot white plate with crinkle fries ornamented by orange squirt cheese. 

During the formative time of transitioning out of adolescence and into the teenage years I lived in St. John Plantation, in Aroostook County. I was there just prior to moving to Canada for a year. Aroostook County was the perfect primer for the next move, because the cultures bleed back and forth on those edges, despite the check-points.

My father was the pastor of a small Bible church that sat next to the parsonage. The St. John River was 20 yards or so behind the house. The gradual slope of the embankment was partitioned by an exempt railroad track. My brother and I walked those tracks for miles and miles, collecting everything from birds nests to coyote skulls. In the winter, we would shovel off the river and play hockey against one another; he, guarding the Canadian bank and myself the one in Maine. 

Poutine was the staple of all the kids we knew. “Make it wicked snotty,” was a regular direction for the kitchen. When we make it at the house, we tend to not have curds on hand and so we use cheddar. The nice thing about cheddar is that when the gravy is hot, the cheese will melt into the liquid and there will be no chunks, just glue . . . or snot. It’s a perfect dish.

The name of this blog is Tribute. The idea is taken from the tribute offerings which God requires of believers in every era. They may look a little different in the New Covenant, but the principle is the same. Listen to Peter Leithart speak to this:

The tribute offering, however, represented not only the property of the worshiper, but his labor. The worshiper expended time and energy in producing the materials that were offered as tribute to the Lord. Grain was not offered in its raw state; it was either ground into flour, baked into bread and wafers, or roasted in the fire (see Lev. 2). Oil, not olives, was spread on the wafers or mixed with the flour that was turned into smoke. The libation that accompanied the tribute offering was not an offering of grapes, but of wine. What was offered as tribute, then, were the products of man’s transformative restructuring of the original materials of creation. What was offered as tribute to God was not creation per se, but creation developed, molded, transformed, glorified by human labor.

When believers are commanded in the New Covenant to do all that our hands find to do as unto the Lord, we are being commanded to pay tribute. When it is commanded that the one who used to steal should steal no longer AND work with his hands that he might have more to give to those in need, the tribute offering is doing something like un-stealing. The death and destruction of sin is being undone by the mercy of Christ motivating a saved sinner to undo-sin with our own offerings. Faith in action. Cooking is not merely an aspect of the Imago Dei, it is the glorified undoing of hunger.