Poutine

After a friend from Brazil who was our house guest this past week and I had made a business visit in Chattanooga, we asked someone in the office for a suggestion for lunch. He told us that we must go to Kenny’s on Market Street because it was a popular local deli. 

After we were seated in Kenny’s, the server gave us three pages of menus each on an 8 x 10 piece of paper. I thought that was an inexpensive way to have a menu, but I imagine the real reason was that these menus made it easy to make changes to the prices. There was a regular menu, a specials menu, and a beverage menu. My eyes went first to the regular menu and the first thing that caught my attention was “Poutine.” 

Poutine is a dish of French fries topped with cheese curds and a brown gravy. This fine dining selection originated in Quebec in the late 1950s.

I first enjoyed Poutine in Montreal in 2011 with my Quebecois friend and a team of Chick-fil-A Owner/Operators. Any old French fries will do, but the keys to the best Poutine are the cheese curds and the brown gravy. 

I have tried Poutine in several restaurants over the years, but none of them outside of Quebec have been successful in serving “real” cheese curds. Cheese curds are small moist pieces of curdled milk that are a by-product of cheese making. When you bite into them they are kinda squeaky and taste a lot like cheddar cheese. Curds are actually cheese that has not gone through the aging process. 

I even had poor Poutine at a restaurant in old town Montreal just last fall. We were vacationing with our traveling friends in northern Vermont, and we decided to take a day trip to Montreal. I was not excited about seeing Montreal again, but I do like me some Poutine, so I was all for this road trip. 

The Poutine was disappointing. Old Town caters to tourists who don’t know the difference in good or bad Poutine. I should have been wary of finding the good stuff in the tourist area, but that is where our friends wanted to eat. 

Back to Kinney’s. The description at their deli said that their Poutine included cheese curds , but the cheese was just globs of mozzarella cheese. Their gravy, however, was the real thing.

We have a restaurant in our town that had Poutine when it opened. It was OK, but their gravy was not Quebecois. Before the restaurant was one year old, they removed Poutine from their menu. I think it was because the people who really knew Poutine were disappointed in it, and those who had never tried it didn’t like the sound of eating curds on their fries or they looked at the calorie count! 

Some of us are guilty of treating people like some people treat Poutine (or other menu entrees). It sounds strange and foreign. Poutine sounds like Putin, so some people don’t like it because of the way it sounds. Ever have a negative feeling whenever you hear people speaking a language you do not understand? 

One of the ingredients of Poutine does not rouse the taste buds. When we encounter a food item that turns us off, we ignore it.  We are afraid to try it. When you see a woman dressed in a hijab or a Jewish man wearing a skullcap—called a kippah—does it turn you off or do you have negative thoughts? Would you be willing to engage them in a conversation?

I confess that even after living in other countries and traveling in over half of the countries in the world, I still struggle with engaging some people who may be different from me. Recently I started a conversation with a Sikh who was wearing a turban. He was at the checkout of the convenience store, and there was no one behind me, so I began to ask about his family and what part of India they came from. Would you believe that before I left the store we were talking about our grandchildren? 

One day while I sat by my mother’s bed as she was dying, I was thinking what a provincial childhood and youth I had experienced in Mississippi. I prayed and thanked God for giving me a lifetime of cross cultural experiences. 

While I was meditating, God led me to think about the different cross-cultural encounters I had experienced just during that particular day in Mississippi. Early that morning I bought gas from a Gujarati Indian at a Circle K. I bought donuts for the nursing home staff from a shop owned and operated by a Cambodian family. I had a long visit with the nursing home physician who was a first generation immigrant from Somalia. Before meeting me, she had never met anyone in Mississippi who had ever been to her country or who could talk about some good things about her country. 

You can turn your nose up at Poutine, but don’t do that to your fellow pilgrims on this earth who were created to relate to people around them and live in harmony with each other. God loves each of us equally. 

“So Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality.’” Acts 10:34 ESV