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CANADIAN CUISINE


Canadian cuisine varies widely depending on the regions of the nation. The four earliest cuisines of Canada have indigenous, English, Scottish and French roots. The traditional cuisine of English Canada is closely related to British cuisine.

The traditional cuisine of French Canada has evolved from 16th-century French cuisine and the difficult conditions New France colonials and Coureur des bois faced. French Canadian cuisine is also now often divided into Québécois cuisine and Acadian cuisine.

With subsequent waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, South Asia, East Asia, and the Caribbean, regional cuisines were affected.

Although certain dishes may be identified as "Canadian" due to the ingredients used or the origin of its inception, an overarching style of Canadian cuisine is more difficult to define. Some Canadians such as the former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark believe that Canadian cuisine is a collage of dishes from the cuisines of other cultures. Clark himself has been paraphrased to have noted: "Canada has a cuisine of cuisines. Not a stew pot, but a smorgasbord."

While the immense size of Canada and the diversity of its inhabitants compounds the difficulty in identifying a specific Canadian food identity, Hersch Jacobs acknowledges that the lack of a hegemonic definition does not preclude the existence of Canadian cuisine. Lenore Newman argues that there is a distinctly Canadian creole cuisine. She identifies five key properties that together define Canadian cuisine, namely its reliance on seasonality, multiculturalism, wild foods, regional dishes, and the privileging of ingredients over recipes.

Indigenous food in particular is considered very Canadian. Métis food is especially so, since the Métis people played a particularly important role in the origin of Canada and Canadian cuisine. Foods such as bannock, moose, deer, bison, pemmican, maple taffy, and Métis stews such as barley stew are all either traditional Indigenous foods or originated in Canada with roots in Indigenous cuisines, and are eaten widely throughout the country.

Other foods that originated in Canada are often thought of in the same overarching group of Canadian food as Indigenous foods, despite not being so, such as peameal bacon, cajun seasoning, and Nanaimo bars.

There are also some foods of non-Canadian origin that are eaten very frequently. Pierogies (dumplings of Central and Eastern European origin) are an example of this, due to the large number of early Ukrainian and Polish immigrants.

Some regional foods are not eaten as often on one side of the country as on the other, such as dulse in the Maritimes, stews in the Territories, or poutine in the Francophone areas of Canada (not limited to Québec). In general, Canadian foods contain a lot of starch, breads, game meats (such as deer, moose, bison, etc.), and often involve a lot of stews and soups, most notably Métis-style and split-pea soup.

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking

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