A Taste of Quebec

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

This is as much a cook’s tour of Quebec as it is a recipe book. Food
writer Armstrong has done a fine job of researching and presenting
snippets of history, geography, and culture, both general and culinary,
and of collecting recipes from restauranteurs, innkeepers, and local
residents of la belle province.

The emphasis is on regional cuisine, using, as far as possible,
ingredients indigenous to each area; thus, the arrangement of chapters
by region lends itself well to the format. Each section gives a brief
history of the particular area paying special attention to local food
customs. For example, Saguenay/Lac-Saint-Jean features fish and
blueberries; Beauce, maple syrup; Charlevoix, fish and lamb. As well,
interesting sidebars about some Quebec dishes accompany the recipes. We
learn that pвté chinois (shepherd’s pie) is named for a Maine town
called China, where many nineteenth-century Quebeckers worked in the
mills, later returning to Canada with the recipe.

In addition to recipes for popular and traditional dishes such as
tourtiиre and sugar pie, the book supplies a wide variety of
instructions for new, marvelous-sounding food: fish pie with
smoked-salmon dressing; maple-baked chicken; leg of lamb flavored with
juniper berries. However, these recipes do not necessarily conform to
the current low-fat (and particularly non-animal-fat) fare, especially
considering the preponderance of dishes using pork and/or lard.

But for those times when cooks want to throw caution to the winds, A
Taste of Quebec offers recipes (in both metric and imperial
measurements) that are easy to follow, attractive photographs of many of
the dishes, a map of the province, and microwave methods where suitable.