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I'll start with this: poutine. I hope I'm not treading on anyone's toes here, but I find poutine to be a strange combination of ingredients. Let's be sure I have it straight: poutine is essentially french fries covered in gravy (ersatz gravy, obviously, for there aren't enough roasted chickens in the world to make the gravy needed to service all the poutine eaters). So: fries, slathered in gravy, and then the whole thing covered (or dotted?) with raw cheese curds. Fermented milk. Nothing wrong with cheese curds—or with fries, for that matter, or gravy. I'm a very big fan of gravy myself, when there's an occasion for it (e.g., when a bird or beast has been roasted or fried: red-eye gravy, southern-style milk gravy on biscuits, smooth brown turkey gravy on mashed potatoes, and so forth). You'll get no argument from me for any of the poutine ingredients.
But the thing about french fries is this: fries are square-cut potato strips deep-fried in oil so that they become crisp. The point of deep-frying is crisp. (The favourite North American "flavour" has been found to be "crisp.") When your fries come to the table, you eat the skinniest, crispiest ones first. Q.E.D.
Poutine: French fries slathered in gravy. Gravy is by definition wet. And wet destroys crisp faster than paper can wrap rock. If you put WET (i.e., gravy) on CRISP (i.e., fries) you get soggy.
Ergo you are paying a huge caloric price—a huge proportion of your daily fat allowance—for your deep-fried potato strips (presumably because you like "crisp") and you are not reaping the benefit. You get no crisp with poutine. If the gravy is so important, why don't they just boil up strips of potato and cover THOSE with gravy. Don't waste your calories on fries if you aren't going to get your "crisp" fix from them.
Ah, I know. You're going to say that poutine with boiled strips of potato just wouldn't be the same.
Many upscale (read: expensive) establishments now make their own snobby versions of poutine, with elaborate sauces instead of gravy, fancier cheeses instead of the curds. But the spoiler formula of poutine is still there, even in the hands of a great chef: crisp covered with wet = soggy.
While on the topic of poutine, I must segue to a recent highly publicized poutine-eating contest, during which the winner, who has won many similar contests, ate something like 29 kilos of poutine in 10 minutes (my figures may be exaggerated, but the statement is true in principle).
Now, I ask you. I really ask you. These contests are so mind-blowingly disgusting that one doesn't know where to begin. Health? I can't even comment on what such rapid stuffing does to one's stomach. So shall I comment on the level of popular culture in the twenty-first century? Oh, you don't want to hear me on that. Decorum? Manners? And then we inevitably come back to health.
Imagine training for those fast-eating contests. You learn to nullify the gag reflex so that your throat is simply a long tube to the stomach that will accept anything you pack in. Shove it down. Shove it ALL down. You are teaching your throat to stay open as you cram limitless amounts of food into your face with both hands, bits of food stuffing up your nose, getting in your eyes, your ears.
Imagine practicing every day so that you can eat fifty hot dogs (hot dogs!) in five minutes. Or maybe I'm not up to date here. Maybe it's now done in thirty seconds.
I seem to remember "pie-eating contests" at state fairs of my youth. I never saw one, but the name sounds familiar. I always imagined them as relatively sedate affairs, where contestants sat at a table, fork in hand, and ate pieces of pie. I always pictured cherry or blueberry—some dark-red or purple fruit. The idea was to see how many pieces they could eat in a given time. Or how much time it took to eat a given number of pieces. But forks were used. Pie was tasted and chewed. There were smiles at the end, and only a little indigestion.
Perhaps that was just my fantasy. Certainly current pie-eating contests involve whole pies and two hands. Shovels might be appropriate utensils.
What could be better, then, than to eat poutine this way? All those once-crisp potatoes are soggy with gravy, and the curds are just the right size to be shoved down an open throat. There's nothing there you'd want to taste, anyway.
I'd like to end this on a more pleasant note, but I can't get rid of that image of packing in the poutine. Sorry.
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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