Pasty, Poutine, Cipialle – Time for Dinner!

Food history. Food stories. I’d hazard a guess that many foods have an interesting, but little-known history. We’ve tried a few local favorites recently. Here they are in the order sampled.

Pasties. The pasty (rhymes with nasty) is a firm meat pie you can pick up and eat by hand, a staple in Michigan’s U.P. (Upper Peninsula. See the previous Michigan post.) The filling is beef, pork or vegetarian, with potatoes and bits of carrot, turnip optional but more authentic. Everyone has a favorite place to buy their pasties for a quick lunch or dinner. We tried our first when we saw so many signs along Highway 2. Dobbers, a local chain, also fills mail orders – by Fedex if a distant UP’er is so homesick they’re willing to pay big bucks for a quick dozen. Order online!

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                              Good with wine!

The U.P. hills are rich with copper and iron. European immigrants came to this wild country to work the mines, and founded the many little towns that simply sprang up around mine shafts. The Cornish came first, in the early 1800’s, bringing their mining skills and traditions from  the old country, including a miner’s staple lunch, the pasty. This lightly seasoned meat pie was portable, and could be eaten cold or heated on a shovel over a miner’s headlamp. No tools required, it’s eaten by hand or with a fork, gravy or catsup optional.

It’s dark as a dungeon…and dirty and dangerous.

When the mining slowed in mid-century, the Cornish went home. Finns, Swedes and others remained, and continued to make pasties. The mines boomed again late in the 1800s, the timeframe my grandparents settled in the U.P. He was a miner, and I imagine my grandmother fixed pasties for him and made little ones for the children, including my mom.

                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                  

It’s Finn country – and we missed a Finnish festival by one week!

Finnish flag in the Iron Mountain museum.

 

 

 

Poutine. Frankly, when this Canadian dish was described and recommended to us, I thought it sounded awful!

What you see here is french fries topped with fresh cheese curd and covered with brown gravy, with an optional item, diced chicken. There are many favorite additions to the basic recipe. Hamburger’s favored. Another variation is to use pizza sauce. It seems that the sky’s the limit! 

 

Poutine appeared in the late 1950s, and quickly became popular. We first saw it at a fast food chain located inside a Canada Visitor Welcome Center! It’s a staple nationwide, even served in school cafeterias. I was told we’d like it.

It’s sold at most fast food joints, in greasy spoons and in family restaurants, where we found it in Gaspé and I finally dared to try it …and I DO like it! The gravy does make the fries stay warm longer. This one’s easy to make, so here’s the basic recipe:

The French fries should be of medium thickness and fried so that the inside stays soft, while the outside is crunchy. Use a light gravy - chicken, veal or turkey, mildly spiced with a hint of pepper. Sprinkle cheese curd over all. I don’t know where you get this, but it must not be more than a day old. To substitute, use little chucks of an extremely mild cheese. To maintain the texture of the fries, the cheese curd, then gravy must be added immediately prior to serving.

Variations are apparently endless. Poutine made Mexican-style is called “carne asada fries.” Consult Wikipedia for  high and low class variations, and a couple of political jokes. Or this fine site:  http://www.montrealpoutine.com/

Cipaille, or Sea Pie (which is how it is pronounced). We walked the wharf at Rivièr-au-Renard, a small fishing town  near the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula. Couldn’t find any restaurants near the harbor, so we went to a supermarket for readymade salads. We also picked up two cipailles in small square bread tins to have for dinner.

 

When we reached the fishing docks, we found the town restaurant! And watched fishermen offload their turbot catch. It’s a slow process, using a shovel to empty fish from the icy hold into the bucket, which is lifted ashore, weighed and emptied into a shipping box! Three boats can be simultaneously unloaded at separate weighing sheds along the pier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back home in the RV, we stuck the cipaille in the oven for dinner. It’s a slightly juicy meat pie with delightfully crispy pastry and funny name. The ingredients label: porc, boeuf, pataters, oignon, poiure, epices, mélangees, pate, farine, griasse, poude a pate, sel.

Freetranslation.com can’t provide a translation for cipaille, but an online source notes a similar dish in Hannah Glass’s 1747 The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, a valuable info source for culinary practice in England and the American colonies. The recipe is for ‘Cheshire Pork Pie for Sea’ with layers of salt pork, meat and potatoes.

Though every Canadian province claims the dish, it probably originated in the Gaspesie region. It also  resembles the English dish “six pies” made with four kinds of game, such as duck, moose, elk, hare and partridge. Cipaille is definitely old, and is still popular in households where there’s a hunter.

The Cipaille was the best! I call it yummy.

Michigan, Mackinac and Michiganders

We’re on the road! We left New Orleans June 15, and since have set some sort of record for consecutive days visiting. A result is occasional disorientation: Where were we last Thursday? What was it somebody told us to see here? When are we going to eat the food we bought? Who wanted us to send them a picture?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The best part is connecting with friends and lots of Chuck’s family, getting to know them better, catching up on growing kids, and re-uniting with friends from cruising days after more than 20 years!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve explored the northern Michigan-Canada interface along the Great Lakes. This is a good thing as we’re soon heading for Canada, to blast through Ontario and spend the rest of the already dwindling summer in the Maritime provinces.

Welcome to Mackinac Island – A community that in 1898 rejected the automobile in order to retain it’s historic character. To this day, horsepower and bikes are the only method of transport and travel on the island!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mackinac Island occupies a strategic location between Michigan’s UP, lower Michigan, and Canada.

BTW, the UP is always referred to as “the UP”, never as the Upper Peninsula. In any discussion of Michigan geography, such as the location of a town, a true Michigander will always illustrate with a graceful series of gestures. It’s very difficult to emulate by an outsider, especially trying to to get the correct side of the hand turned toward the listener, so the state does not seem “inside-out”!  

“See, here’s the thumb (they always start with Michigan’s thumb, check the map to make sense of it) …

and up here … (now they add the other hand) is the UP.  Mackinac (or Frankenfort, or Traverse City, etc.) is right here!”  It’s entrancing to watch this ballet  executed at the speed of speech, because they seem to use three hands to both illustrate the geography and also pinpoint to the location by pointing! 

Mackinac’s historic significance stretches back hundreds of years, involving Native Americans since 1000 B.C., and French, British and Americans in times of war and peace. The island was strategic during the Seven Years War (I must look that up), the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

Residents, guides, explorers and fur trappers, soldiers and their families all played a role in evolution of the island into an attraction with historic sites, elegant homes, fancy and period hotels, and diverse outdoor activities. It’s a May to October destination for tourists and these summer workers, who told us they return year after year.

 

 

 

The cook leaves the kitchen for lunch.

 

 

 

 

                                          

Fort Mackinac Ranger led drill squad today.

                               Horses everywhere! If you want a ride, flag one down! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our fast trip back to shore!