On the Poutine Trail with my Dad

My story with poutine began on one of my last days in Quebec. It was January of 2013, and I was preparing to pack up my Montreal apartment to start a new job in Toronto as a reporter with The Globe and Mail. My Francophone dad came to visit me in the big city for a final hurrah before sending me off—but it was a deeply sad evening, with a sense of loss permeating the air. He asked me if I’d ever come back.

We’d grown apart since my childhood. He had often been absent for long periods, gone to work on far-flung industrial sites as a welder. In his absence, I spent many of my summers visiting my mother’s English Canadian family—the schism between Canada’s English and French solitudes wasn’t academic, it tore through the middle of my childhood. For years I’d kept a foot on both sides, but that evening in my apartment, my dad was worried that with growing time and distance, I might lose that final tether to my French side—his side.

In a quiet moment as we ate, I mentioned poutine—in retrospect, it makes sense that Quebec’s national dish came to mind just as I was about to leave the province. I told my dad I was interested in tracking down poutine’s origins. I was a journalist, after all, and it was a good story: where had it come from? How had it become a culinary symbol of Quebec? I told him what little I knew: that poutine was likely invented in the 1950s or ’60s, in the agricultural region south of Trois-Rivières called Centre-du-Québec. 

His eyebrows could have gone through the ceiling. He told me that when he was a teenager he’d lived there, working a milk run on the dusty back roads, picking up fresh jugs of milk from dairy farmers and driving them to a local cheesemaker. Sometimes he delivered the finished product, cheese curds, to restaurants and other shops. He’d lived in that region, at that time, making curds. He might know where to look or who to ask to find the origin of the first poutine.

This was all news to me. I took out some paper and we began working on a plan. He started describing his route from decades ago: we would need to go to Drummondville, Warwick and Victoriaville, he told me. While not exactly his cheese delivery route, it hit the main towns and cities in the area. That’s where we would start. The sadness of the evening was swept aside in the excitement of a shared journey: what could be more Quebecois than chasing after the first poutine?

I moved to Toronto later that year, and the planned poutine trip with my dad remained an idea that bound us together—and gave us a constant topic for our phone calls. At the same time, poutine was doing as I had done, leaving la belle province and becoming more Canadian in doing so. New poutine restaurants were opening nearly weekly across the English-speaking part of the country. Smoke’s Poutinerie, a chain founded in Toronto in 2008, was expanding from coast to coast, turning the dish into a closing-time favourite for bargoers. Far from the Quebecois roots we wanted to explore, poutine was settling in as a Canadian culinary staple. My dad was curious about the cheese. “Do they use real cheese curds?” he’d ask of the offerings available in English Canada.

All too often, they didn’t. English Canadian poutine is different from the original in Quebec. The fries are crispy instead of soggy. The sauce is beefy instead of chicken-based. And the cheese curds melt. Proper cheese curds in Quebec are fresh and moist and resist melting. Elsewhere they get gooey and drippy. They were curds, they were just unlike anything a Quebecker would serve you, so far from the original as to be unrecognizable. Each bite of those poutines was a reminder of home and a jolt to finally get our road trip going.

After years of delay, we set out in the summer of 2017 in search of the original poutine, driving across the Saint Lawrence River to Centre-du-Québec. We had a roughly sketched plan, and I had a few days off work for the adventure. How long could it possibly take to find the first poutine? 

Well, we hadn’t planned for the sheer profusion of poutine in the region. Nearly every small town has a restaurant, a chip wagon or an ice cream parlour that makes a top-notch poutine, heaped with squeaky curds and freshly cut fries. Quite a few of those towns also lay claim to first place in the poutine race. Many of the locals we spoke with were surprised, even shocked, to learn that poutine was popular outside of Quebec—let alone eaten as far away as New Zealand.

The evolution of a local food into a symbol of Canada recognized around the world seemed incredible to many in the Centre-du-Québec. Far more potent and real to them was the rivalry between the two main contenders for the original poutine: the city of Drummondville and the town of Warwick. Drummondville was our first stop. Near the small, industrial city’s downtown is a neon-lit diner called Le Roy Jucep. The story goes that in 1964, its young founder, Jean-Paul Roy, returned to his hometown after working in the kitchen of a luxury hotel in Montreal. He had a gravy recipe that he had, perfected and opened Le Roy Jucep. Soon, he found an appreciative audience for fries, mixed with curds and gravy, especially among the late-night crowd pouring out of nearby bars.

My father and I ordered a poutine—the sauce was uncommonly sweet, but the rest of the dish was hard to beat. We found ourselves sitting in a booth with Yolande Morissette, a waitress who started working at the Jucep as a teenager in the 1960s. She told us about the restaurant’s first years, and led us to a federal certificate, hanging by the restaurant’s front door. It’s a framed trademark from bureaucrats in Ottawa, certifying that the restaurant is the home of poutine’s inventor. While that might sound definitive, it turns out not to be. It doesn’t actually certify that poutine itself was invented there; it only says that the word, “poutine,” was first used to denote the dish here. There are older claims, especially down the road. “People in Warwick are pretty adamant, but it was Mr. Roy,” Morissette told us firmly as we left.

The logical next stop on our trip was Warwick. The following morning, with the sun burning brightly and cicadas welcoming the day, we set out. We expected our journey would take days, but it ended up taking years. We’ve eaten dozens of poutines at restaurants across Quebec, spoken with historians and experts on cheese. I took the poutine tour farther, across the country, without my dad, but he was always a phone call away with a word of encouragement, and answers to my questions—usually about the cheese. Our shared journey culminated in a book, Poutine: A Deep-Fried Road Trip of Discovery, which was released earlier this fall.

One challenge, whether writing or talking about poutine, is that it’s hard to make it sound appealing. The usual culinary language doesn’t apply. The fries aren’t golden and crispy; they’re brown and soggy. The cheese isn’t melted and gooey; it’s moist and squeaky. There’s a reason poutine shares its name with an old Québécois expression for describing a complete and total mess. But beauty can come from messy things: a flourishing national symbol, a bridge between cultures, or a newly mended relationship with a father.