Tradivore
True, there is no shortage of culinary trends: locavorism, raw foodism, vegetarianism… But we’d still love to start up a new movement: tradivorism, the opportunity to reconnect with traditional Charlevoix food culture in 6 dishes our grandmothers used to make!
Ooooh! A house from a bygone time, in a Charlevoix village. Hundred-year-old apple trees in the yard, freshly washed laundry on the line, dried by the summer breeze. A covered porch, a screen door leading to the heart of the home: the kitchen! A wooden table big enough that the whole family can sit around it. Maybe even a wood–stove, an icebox and a churn, depending on the era… But especially (especially!) that strong, maternal, comforting figure, wiping her flour-covered hands on her apron while the scent of nostalgia wafts through the air: : the Charlevoix grandmother! Let’s keep tradition alive, and revisit Charlevoix's food culture in 6 dishes our grandmothers used to make!
1. Vegetable stew
When the harvest is in full swing, and vegetables are plentiful in the garden, it’s time for a good stew! A summer dish that puts the spotlight on the flavours of traditional, almost plain vegetables added at different times during the cooking process to the light stock made by cooking a chuck roast immersed in the largest pot or casserole you can find! Onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage, new potatoes, little piles of yellow beans, and corncob halves: no question, you need something bigger to let all that simmer! With a dash of vinegar or Dijon on the plate, or even pickled beets, this is the kind of dish we're happy to see come around again at the same time, every year! So much the better that it can be eaten over a few days as leftovers, the flavours taste even better when reheated…
-Fill up on seasonal vegetables at Jardins Echo-Logiques and buy a piece of meat from Bovins Charlevoix at the Viandes Bio de Charlevoix store.
2. "Gourganes" (Fava bean) soup
This green legume has earned its spot in Charlevoix’s culinary identity, though with the exception of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region first settled by Charlevoix’s inhabitants, it is less well known elsewhere in the province of Quebec. But what exactly is this local bean? It’s actually the lima bean, also known as the broad bean, originally from Peru. It looks different here because we get it fresh and unshelled, rather than dry. It’s customary, as summer comes to an end, to get a pocketful of beans to shell, maybe while swinging on the porch, to reveal the big green, tender bean inside. And how is it eaten? Traditionally in a bone - or pork - based soup (a broth will do very nicely) with finely chopped vegetables (onions, celery, and carrot); some families add more herbs, some add pieces of ham, sometimes noodles, sometimes pearl barley, sometimes nothing else. Whatever the case, the grayish soup that results is hearty and gets right to our Charlevoix hearts! Not sure you’ll like the texture of the big bean? Run a blender through it to make it slightly creamy.
- Broad beans are available all year long, shelled and vacuum-packed, in the freezers at the Les jardins du centre farm at Les Éboulements.
3. Tourtières
Remember what we told you, above? The 21 settlers of Clermont, in Charlevoix, having been the first to clear and inhabit the land in what would become the Saguenay region brought several traditions with them, including tourtière. No, we’re not talking about the meat pie we love, whether in a pie, from a muffin tin, or even shaped into pockets (Isle-aux-Coudres’ famed pâté croche), but rather, the real thing, made locally. Big enough to fit into a deep-dish casserole or roasting pan, it's made with a thick layer of shortcrust pastry which is filled with meat cubes that have been marinated overnight in a mixture of onion, salt, pepper, and five-spice mix, or a dash of cinnamon. Sometimes a mix of pork and beef is easier, though families that hunt like to add moose, or simply prefer a mix of moose, hare, grouse, and venison, depending on what's been brought home! Add a good quantity of cubed potatoes to the meat already in the pastry shell. Before closing up the pastry, add a bit of water, cooking it a long time, over a matter of hours, in anticipation of (yes!) New Year’s Eve, but not just New Year’s Eve… Tourtière is a classic for any occasion! Don’t be surprised if two people fight over the same piece for the hare’s head, as some families place it in a corner of the dish, and eat the offal.
-Want to taste this iconic meat pie and not have to hunt the animals yourself, or spend hours in front of the oven? Chez Truchon à la maison makes a good one, filled with traditional flavours and made using chef Dominique Truchon’s family recipe. It's waiting just for you in the freezers at Boutique Charlevoix, right beside the Chez Truchon inn.
4. Cream salad
Curly, crunchy, tender lettuce leaves abounded in the gardens of Charlevoix’s many families. They were refreshingly cool and were a nice contrast, after months of root vegetables softened by time spent in the cellar. They were eaten with crème fraîche, chives and chopped green onions, sometimes with a splash of vinegar, which curdled the cream slightly, and always a good shake of salt and pepper. The typical grandmotherly touch? Small cubes of boiled carrots and new turnips, peas, tomatoes, cucumber and finely chopped celery.
-Visit the public markets you’ll find from one end of Charlevoix to the other to fill your bag or basket with prime market garden produce!
5- Strawberry-rhubarb pie
Where there's a grandmother, there's pastry! If sugar pie is a Quebec classic that also has its place in the sun in Charlevoix, the field berry-filled meadows were also a great source of inspiration for desserts way back when! Our grandmothers collected empty containers to go fill them up in the fields or woods with blueberries, raspberries, wild strawberries (what a treat for those who had the patience for it). Households often had their own little plots of strawberries and rhubarb plants, inspiring the classic pie that balances the acidity of the rhubarb with the sugar of the well-ripened little red fruit! Once a number of pies were baked, leftover pastry was made into cheekily named pet de sœur [literally, Nun Farts] treats that everyone loved! These little rolls of baked dough and brown sugar were surely meant to distract from the wait for pies cooling on the window sill because, as the stories go, pies getting stolen from window sills didn't just happen in cartoons… It happened in the old days, too!
-For pies, pets de sœurs, and meat pies of all kinds, it’s at the Boulangerie Bouchard on the Isle-aux-Coudres, where the really good, old-fashioned flavours can be found!
6- Fruit ketchup and green ketchup
To prepare for the long winter months, one of the ways to make sure people still got all the vitamins they needed was, of course, to can as many fresh and colourful ingredients of summer as possible. As summer begins to come to a close, the harvests are at their most abundant, and pots full of various flavours boil on the stove before being put into Mason jars. For vegetables, plenty of vinegar is used; for fruit, plenty of sugar. And, in between the two, there’s that strange sour-sweet chutney, homemade ketchups. The red version is nothing like Heinz versions, as large pieces of tomato, onion, and celery mix in with fruit from the orchard, peaches, for example. With its sidekick, green ketchup, it's an accompaniment to pies, tourtières, pork roast, and other roasted dishes. Delicious canned foods that once piled up in the cold room with pots of beets and jams, the latter a year-round treat for those with a sweet tooth, spread on bread fresh out of the wood-fired oven!
- The Jardins du centre at Les Éboulements offers its various traditional Charlevoix canned foods in their store on the rang des Éboulements centre.
