So theres all this talk about poutine and when I first heard talk of it I got excited BECAUSE about 4 years after John and I met and we had Evangeline, Horatio, and Gwen--I dont think Jacqueline had been born yet--John showed me a variation of potato rapee called potato poutines. What was being touted as poutine and french canadian didnt resemble the labor intensive meal my husband prepared for me that day long ago in our Winslow kitchen. After seeing a post by a friend of mine tonight regarding poutine, I decided to investigate. To backtrack a bit, my husbands father, my father in law, is 100% Canadian French, and my mother in law is at least half if not more. John grew up hearing his many relatives converse in French when they got together during the holidays. A popular dish among French Canadians and their children was potato rapee which is potatoes peeled and grated on the fine side of the grater so that the potatoes are mushy and there is lots and lots of pink liquid mixed in with the mushy. Its awesome! You slide mush and liquid into a baking pan and bake mush for about an hour. What you get is a rubbery sort of congealed panned potato loaf. Oh, I forgot, dang! You also fry up salt pork and put pieces in the mush before baking--John and I stopped doing that and just added lots of salt. Anyway, you cut portions out of the pan for yourself, serve it on a plate and top the slices with butter. OMGosh, one of the most delicious things Ive ever tasted. One of the criticisms of this dish is its blandness but I LOVE it!!! Poutine Rapee is rapped or the mushy grated potatoes mixed with mashed potatoes and formed into a ball with a pc of salt pork right in the middle and then wrapped in cheese cloth to keep the mixture from falling apart and boiled--I cant remember for how long. When they are done, you have a sort of potato dumpling with the consistency of the baked rapee. Again, soooo delicious, even better than rapee. Again, also bland but, geez, bland can be goooood is all I have to say! Making poutine rapee or potato puttins as my husband calls them is an incredibly labor intensive project. Its why we never repeated the ordeal but Ive always wanted to. Anyway there is a bit of etymology for the French word poutine. Sometimes it is used to indicate a mess. Sometimes something related to the English word pudding. I like mess and speculate that is what it refers to with the dishes my French American husband turned me onto. What? Whites not French. Ya, but LeBlanc is. The English oppression of the Acadians and their children in Maine is a whole nuther story.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 19:59:43 +0000
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