THE TASTE OF TRADITION IN QUEBEC.

• Author: Salloum, Habeeb
• Position: Recipe

"Peasoupers! Peasoupers!" Growing up in western Canada, I often heard my peers taunt our French Canadian playmates with this epithet. At that time, I did not know that they were referring to the famous Quebec pea soup--a delicious dish which I now often enjoy. Strangely, to this day, I still do not know why this soup, out of the wide larder of Quebec cooking, was so much associated with French Canadians.

The Quebec cuisine, more than any other in Canada, is truly a Canadian culinary heritage. The origin of these foods goes back to 1534, when the French first came to Quebec--some eighty-six years before the English pilgrims first stepped ashore in Plymouth. Even though many of the dishes have their bases in the kitchen of France, they evolved in Quebec to become that province's unique culinary art.

Along the St. Lawrence and other rivers, the French explorers found a land of great natural beauty. It was covered with thick forests, filled with wild animals and fowl, and dotted with thousands of lakes and rivers teeming with fish. The countryside abounded in bear, beaver, caribou, deer, duck, elk, moose, partridge, pigeon, porcupine, and rabbit, and the lakes and rivers overflowed with bass, eel, haddock, salmon, shad, and sturgeon.

In the ensuing centuries, this bounty of nature and the harsh climate set the boundaries for the development of Quebec's cuisine. To survive the cold winter months and the rugged life in the new land, a rich meat diet evolved based upon the abundant wild animals and fish.

This was augmented by the local ingredients, used for millennia by the indigenous inhabitants, like wild apples, beans, numerous types of wild berries, corn, dandelions, fiddleheads, squash, lamb quarters and, above all, maple syrup, the base of many of Quebec's culinary treasures. The soups and pies of French origin and the fried fish and puddings, popular after the British occupied the province, all incorporated some of these Indian-contributed ingredients and gave birth to the Quebec kitchen.

The hardworking explorers, hunters, settlers, and trappers developed a simple and rugged fare, flavorful but very heavy. Through the years, the French Canadians developed a distinct cuisine, different from classical French and other Canadian cooking. Traditional Quebecois cooking came to rely heavily on hearty, thick soups, meat pies, and other fat-saturated meat dishes that traced their roots to the farmers, woodcutters, and lumber camps. In today's...