From Tabusintac to Tokyo | Page 3

wooden bin in the basement. Because we were cheap labour, the kids would be sent down to retrieve a few for the family meal. It was creepy to descend into the dank cellar, feel our way through the dim obstacle course formed by my grandfather's thousands of tools and bits of wood and locate the bin. After a time in storage, the eyes on potatoes began to sprout pale tendrils and it didn't take much imagination to visualize all kinds of unpleasant creatures waiting to bite our hands as we groped around in the bin. I never worried about the monsters under my bed; just whatever was waiting for me in the potato bin.).
With my grandmother peeling and Mom grating, they would work their way through half the potatoes until there was a mess of rapidly blackening potato mush in the bucket. The water had to be drained out of the bucket and the mush squeezed to remove as much water as possible. The other half of the potatoes were boiled until mashable and then both portions of potatoes were mixed together. Consistency was important: too wet or too dry and everything would fall apart.
At some point, my mother would have procured a cheap cut of pork (in those days, there was no other kind). Something with equal parts fat and meat was considered good. The meat was diced up and left to cook for an hour or so.
Once the potatoes were mixed, Mom would start making generous-sized snowballs, hollow out the centres, fill them with pork, cover it up and gently lower the poutines into boiling water. Several large pots were required for this step.
At this point, all Mom's work might go for naught. For reasons we never understood (is there a food scientist in the house?), poutines might rupture or explode during this step and we would be left with bits of pork and potato floating in the water. In later years, my mother started covering each poutine in cheesecloth and this tended to stop the exploding behaviour while making the eating of a poutine an exercise in sorting cloth from potato.
After the cooking, the pots were left to sit outside for a couple of days. I assume this was to let everything set and for the (negligible) flavours to mingle.
Think of the massive amount of work this entailed! Try grating a couple of potatoes and see what happens. It takes a long time and you have to contend with grating a knuckle or a fingernail. Today's full time mother wouldn't have enough time to put this kind of thing together between trips to the soccer field and then the emergency room to set little Billy's finger. And why do it, anyway; you can pick up far more nutritionally rich foods at your supermarket? The foods take less time to prepare, are far more exotic (McCain's pizza), you can put the wrappings in the garbage and your children will learn how to cook from your example using a microwave.
We kids were pretty excited when it was finally time to get the poutines out of storage. They weren't considered to be a supper meal; in our house, we usually ate them for breakfast (let's see General Mills figure out how to put these in a toaster). The poutines were once again heated and each kid would get one. I've already mentioned that they were generally the size of a baseball. The colour would have changed to an unattractive gray-white (heavy on the gray). The surface texture would be similar to a meatball.
When you cut into the poutine, you could tell by the texture whether Mom had done the job right. If it was like cutting a piece of cold camembert cheese, you'd feel like you'd eaten a pound of lead. If it was soft, but not mushy, then the poutine would keep you going until lunch with no upset stomach.
This is homegrown, poor people, comfort food. There was nothing better than scoffing a couple of poutines and heading out into a snowy winter morning to play hockey, jump off the roof into a snow bank or shovel the driveway (on the way to my first heart attack). Compared to some of the other stuff we used to eat, poutines were probably fairly healthy. They were mostly potato with a little pork thrown in to provide flavour. And when you're a kid, who knows that this is poor people food?
There've been times when I wish I had a couple, made with love by Mom, to give me a little boost for the day. And I know that Mom loved mea€|it's the last thing she said before she and Dad ran away from home.

Catholic and French
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