“Poooutine!” screamed the rapper in the Brooklyn Nets jersey. “Pou-pou-poutine!” a crowd of thousands shouted back.
A good MC knows how to motivate a crowd, so when Acadian hip-hop duo Radio Radio sought to pump up the audience with a call-and-response during its set in Drummondville, Quebec, on Saturday, it invoked the name of a concoction of fries, cheese curds, and gravy. That’s how you rock the party at the Festival de la Poutine.
The festival marries two major tenets of Québécois pride: its music and its food. In addition to the many restaurateurs who come to Drummondville to compete for the Golden Fork Award for the best poutine at the festival, popular artists (Coeur de Pirate was a big draw this year) perform during the weekend.
Drummondville says it is where poutine was born, with local shop Le Roy Jucep claiming credit (but don’t say that in nearby Victoriaville unless you wish to reignite a particularly greasy rivalry). Wherever it was invented,poutine has become a ritual meal since the 1950s, a unifying force of pride across the province.
“Poutine is a religion,” said Gregory Hubert of Smoking BBQ, a restaurant in nearby Bromont.
Added Catherine Lefebvre of Drummondville’s Fromagerie Lemaire: “It’s what unites us as a family.”
Though poutine is beloved for its simplicity, the competitors worked just about every food into their various dishes. Steve Gauthier, a Quebec-born chef living in Switzerland, unveiled his version of Alpine poutine with raclette and gruyere.
The dessert poutine from La Poutine of St-Jérôme replaced fries with julienned apples and gravy with salted caramel. And though it didn’t appear at the festival, multiple attendees praised “inverted poutine”, a cheese and gravy mix surrounded by a potato shell invented by Danny St-Pierre of Auguste Restaurant in Sherbrooke. Auguste has recently partnered with food service company St-Hubert to make a frozen miniature version of the dish, “Poutine Bites”, hitting supermarkets across Canada in September. Americans can only hope it will come down south to dislodge Hot Pockets from the freezer aisle in short measure.
The 2015 Golden Fork, however, was deservedly awarded to Montreal’s German-themed DAS Food Truck, which ambitiously included chicken schnitzel, bratwurst and a heaping of sauerkraut.
While Quebec proudly proclaims poutine as a national dish, the poutiniers at the festival also welcomed the dish’s growing success in US restaurants. Some attendees at the festival said they believe this international celebration is due to the dish being embraced by acclaimed Quebec chefs like Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon.
“When you respect the product, you can be creative with it,” added Annie Clavette of DAS, encouraging foreigners to have a go at experimenting with the dish. “I think its popularity is a very good thing, because when they talk about us, they’ll thank Quebec.”
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