Talk:Cuisine of Canada

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Contents 1 Unique to or originate in Canada 2 Past deletion 2.1 Canadian Food 2.2 Reintegrated Now 2.3 See also 2.4 West Coast Fusion 3 Caribbean influences??? 4 Kraft Dinner?!? 5 More Photos Please 6 Fish & Chips 7 Mr. Tube Steak

[edit] Unique to or originate in Canada

Is a Donair really distinctive from a, um, donair? I grew up in Winnipeg and have never heard a Pogo™; isn't it just a regional name (which region?) for a corn dog? These may be interesting footnotes, but they don't sound like they belong on a list of unique or original Canadian foods. Anyone object if I remove them? —Michael Z. 2005-08-11 21:32 Z

[edit] Past deletion

The following was deleted by an anonymous vandal (User:69.169.40.156) on March 13, 2006. See [1]. I put it back here so as not to disrupt the work by User Delire, but it probably should be reintegrated into the article. Luigizanasi 06:16, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Canadian Food

A variety of dishes are uniquely Canadian, or have a distinctive Canadian style.

• Poutine, a French-Canadian fast-food dish consisting of French fries, cheese curds, and gravy.
• Caesar cocktail, sometimes the bloody caesar, and usually just ordered as a "caesar", is made from vodka, clamato juice (clam-tomato juice), Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, in a salt-rimmed glass, and garnished with a stalk of celery, or more adventurously with a spoonful of horseradish, or a shot of beef bouillon. The caesar was invented in 1969 in Calgary, Alberta, by bartender Walter Chell to mark the opening of a new restaurant "Marco's"
• Chinese smorgasbord - although found in the U.S. and other parts of Canada, this term and concept had its origins in early Gastown, c.1870 and resulted from the many Scandinavians working in the woods and mills around the shantytown getting the Chinese cook to put out a steam table on a sideboard, so they could "load up" and leave room on the dining table (presumably for "drink").
• Lumberjack's Breakfast aka Logger's Breakfast, a gargantuan breakfast of three-plus eggs, ham, bacon and sausages plus several large pancakes. Invented by hotelier J. Houston c 1870, at his Granville Hotel on Water Street in old pre-railway Gastown in response to requests for his clientele for a better "feed" before starting a long, hard day of work.
• Butter tart, a tart invented about 1915 in northern Ontario. The main ingredients for the filling includes, butter, sugar and eggs, but raisins and pecans are often added for additional flavour.
• Tourtière, a meat pie originating from Québec traditionally made from ground or shredded pork, onions, celery, and may utilize rolled oats as a thickener.
• Ginger beef, a candied strip of beef, deep fried and served with a sweet and spicy ginger sauce. Created in Calgary, Alberta in the 1970s and now available in most Canadian Chinese restaurants.
• The Nanaimo bar, a chocolate dessert taking its name from Nanaimo, British Columbia.
• Pea-meal bacon, a pickled back bacon rolled in cornmeal. Generally called Canadian bacon outside of Canada. This so-called "Canadian bacon" is usually simply un-pickled back bacon.
• Oka cheese, a popular semi-firm cheese made by Trappist monks in Oka, Quebec
• Egg Custard typically is made with maple syrup as opposed to corn syrup in the United States.
• Donairs, a variation on the Middle-Eastern Döner kebab, are a street food originated in Halifax: they consist of slices of roast processed meat (made from spiced ground beef rather than lamb), and a sauce consisting of condensed milk, vinegar, sugar, and garlic powder. They are served on a pita loaf with diced onions and tomatoes.
• Pogo, a hot dog sausage fried in batter, and served on a stick. Americans call them "Corn-Dogs"
• Beaver Tail A large flat round of fried dough, sprinkled with powdered or cinnamon sugar. Also known as an Elephant Ear or a Moose Antler.

[edit] Reintegrated Now

I merged in as much of this information as was missing and seemed useful. I added a Meals subheading to accomplish this, and threw another meal type in, Cabane au Sucre breakfasts, to supplement the new category. Any Quebecois eds appreciated on this!

[edit] See also

• Cuisine of Québec
• Canadian Chinese cuisine
• Cuisine of Toronto
• North American cuisine

[[Category:Canadian cuisine| ]]

[edit] West Coast Fusion

Surprised there's nothing here so far on "West Coast Fusion"; can't quite call it Cuisine of BC because it's shared with Seattle and points south; although California Fusion tends to be quite different. I'm not a haute-cuisine guy but it does strike me as a major feature of the dining-out, and even home-cooking, experience, in BC (at least on the Coast if not so much in the Interior).

Also what's overleaf is turning into an annoying list in some ways; do we really need to know Canadians eat this or that; what's cuisine, and what's food, is the point. Foodstuffs are not cuisine; and uniquely Canadian dishes, or cuisines that have developed in Canada, seem more to be the point. Similar problems with loose definitions have plaged Canadian Chinese cuisine, where simply because something is served in Canada by people who have Canadian passports it's supposed to make it "Canadian Chinese"; but the term and its variants ("Chinese and Western" as it used to read on cafe signs) was a distinct set of dishes not found in China, and not expected to be found in "authentic Chinese food" places, egg foo yung, chop suey etc. But now every fancy dish imported from Sichuan and Beijing is listed, just because you can get them on the menu in Ottawa's or Agincourt's Chinatowns; the roots of the Canadian-Chinese food experience are in the gold rush and the frontier towns and Chinese camp-cooks of the resource industry; not in what is served in the plethora of new Chinese restaurants in the "new Chinatowns" and their spinoffs. But again, in Vancouver, the influence of Chinese cooking, along with Japanese, Indonesian, East Indian/South Asian, Middle Eastern, French, Thai, Mexican, Hawaiian and other "Pacific Rim" cuisines is remarkable and unique; throw in local native foodstuffs (salmon of course, but other native stuff too....looks like eulachon grease is going to get fashionable too, if they can catch enough eulachons ("grease" is horribly expensive because it's so rare and the prep is complicated/time-consuming). I'll see who I can enlist to contribute on this; and I may just have to resort to transmuting restaurant/menu reviews from the dining-out pages of the Georgia Straight and mainstream papers to give this page a bit more meat...er, veggies, er.....Skookum1 18:42, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Caribbean influences???

Have they taken hold yet in Canadian cuisine or not?? Just curious.

I can't speak of the rest of Canada, but there are a bunch of Jamaican/caribean restaurants in Vancouver these days, and there is a lot more Caribbean immigration to Ontario/Quebec, so if anything, it's probably more obvious there. And damn to I love Jerk chicken. -- TheMightyQuill 01:14, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kraft Dinner?!?

Since when did Kraft Dinner become canadian in origin? I fear this may be an act of vandalism. Rigbyl7 20:33, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, James L. Kraft was born in Canada, and partly because of this, the prepared meal is called "Kraft Dinner" in Canada, and "Kraft Macaroni & Cheese" in the United States. Perhaps the name is more Canadian than the meal, but it's certainly a canadianism & food, and thus canadian cuisine. According to Kraft Dinner, "Canada has always been the world's largest per capita consumer of Kraft Dinner, and despite its American origins, the product has become a part of Canadian culture." - TheMightyQuill 04:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More Photos Please

This article makes me hungry for more pictures. Wiki can serve (lol) a unique function here. If I go elsewhere on the Internet, I can't be sure that the pictures are representative. Instead, I would expect most Internet food pictures to: 1) Illustrate a particular author or restaurant's interpretation of a dish, or 2) Illustrate a recipe which has been modified to be low-fat, low carbs, use lots of Brand X, etc.

The point of this article, and what pictures would illustrate well, is how typical Canadian dishes appear. If you take the photographs yourself, make 'em high resolution, please. That would also be an improvement over typical Internet cuisine shots. Even just a few more would be nice. (These guys are getting there...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_fin_soup and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi (look at the first pic Sushi blowup)) Alpha Ralpha Boulevard 06:56, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fish & Chips

Yeah, that's really Canadian. Originated in Canada and found nowhere else.209.29.94.72 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 05:55, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Mr. Tube Steak

Another classic. What you get at Mr. Tube Steak, Canadians eat with Mrs. Beaver Tail.209.29.94.72 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 06:01, 19 May 2008 (UTC)