Behold the majesty of poutine!
You want it, don’t you? Don’t worry. That just means you’re a right-thinking individual. Here’s some background about this wonderful food.
Poutine is fries (that’s chips, if you prefer) topped with curds and a meaty gravy. It is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest achievements of North American culture. It’s also very Canadian.
This delicious idea came from Montreal, apparently, but I like to ignore the facts on this one. I tell myself that poutine was invented by an angel sent from Heaven to reward Canadians for being polite and friendly. It was probably a sexy angel. A clever, sexy angel that also brought beer.
There are different varieties of poutine. For people who are wrong-headed, there’s chicken poutine. You can get it spicy. Sometimes people put soured cream on it. There’s even a vegetarian option if you know where to look, but that’s an abomination. Poutine is just perfect as it comes.
Because this is Canada, one of those places where people are always trying to make good ideas even better, you can even enjoy gourmet poutine with top-quality ingredients. There are special restaurants devoted only to poutine. They’re call poutineries and they’re surprisingly common. I love this country.
Of course, as a Scotsman, the idea of adding things to chips is not new to me. After all, I come from the race that put a Scotch pie on a roll then laughed at everyone who said it would kill us all.
I’m fond of telling people that I can’t believe poutine wasn’t invented in Scotland. Already we were adding gravy to chips, or eating chips and cheese in the street at 1am, but why did we never think of chips, cheese and gravy? I feel like we failed.
Thank Heaven for Canada and its culinary inventors. If you ever have the chance, grab some authentic Canadian poutine. You won’t be sorry.
I wonder if it can be washed down with Irn-Bru…