Imagine you’re really really really cold. You want to eat chips. Also cheese. If possible there should be some meat involved. And for this reason Canadians are beyond brilliant.

Canadian Poutine

Blessed with a climate that could freeze an eskimo’s snoo snoo they’ve invented poutine – a big mess of crunchy chips smothered in all that’s wrong in the modern diet.

It’s basically cheesy chips with gravy, but somehow so much more. The inspired choice of cheese is the rubbery white kind which squeaks across your teeth, and the gravy is only a shade meatier than a sauce of salt and cornstarch, carefully avoiding a pretention to flavour which could ruin an otherwise perfect bland medley of oily-salty-crunchy-good.

Better yet poutine comes in the kind of portions which you initially think you’re never going to finish, and end up wishing you’d gone large, particularly as it acts as a kind of internal radiator in cold weather.  As the equivalent of the Canadian kebab, you can buy it from fast-food style places, but it’s so popular (even Canadian McDonalds does a version) that there are gourmet versions and a place in Montreal even makes poutine with foie gras.

Personally I’m about ten plates of the stuff away from going experimental, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to miss it when I leave

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