From Tabusintac to Tokyo | Page 3

Easter.
My mother would borrow this grater that was about two feet long and
she and my grandmother would set to work. Generally, they started off
with an enormous paper sack of potatoes, about 25 pounds or so (We
used to buy potatoes by the cartload and store them in a 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