Quebec, the French Language, and Quebecois Identity

[dreambrother808]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

I’ve seen videos about French tacos. Confusion in a nutshell. Some things should never have been invented.

They can be delicious though. I had one in Marseille but maybe I just loved the Reblochon cheese inside.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

There are literally restaurants called "fusion" or advertising "fusion" everywhere in North America. I have never seen that in Europe or Asia. The fact that some Turkish immigrants adapt a Turkish dish in Germany to whatever ingredients they can find there is no different from certain Chinese dishes found in Chinese restaurants in the US which were developed in the US with local ingredients and are not found in Asia (such as that Chinese dish of chicken with some little wheat wraps whose name I can't remember now, which you won't find in Asia, and you won't find in Europe either). That's not fusion. Fusion is something else altogether.

Sounds like chicken balls. Served with bright red sweet and sour sauce.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Sounds like chicken balls. Served with bright red sweet and sour sauce.

In the Maritimes we call them bobo balls.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

In the Maritimes we call them bobo balls.

Anglo Montrealers used to call them bobo balls. I think the company that made them back in the 70s labelled them as such.


Modern French Cuisine Is a Potpourri of Influences. The quintessential French cuisine we know and love today did not suddenly arrive but evolved over centuries from many influences. From the traditional use of local, abundant ingredients to the changing tides of politics and royal intermarriages, the story of how modern French cuisine evolved spans continents and includes trade routes, colonial escapades, and the interests of the aristocracy. For example, Italian noblewoman Catherine de Medici married French King Henry II in 1547. When Catherine came to France, she brought not only her kitchen staff but new Renaissance culinary traditions with her from her Italian homeland. At Catherine’s behest, chefs began to focus more on aesthetics, flavor, and presentation.

Fusion is just the word used to describe novel mixings. Over time, they come to be accepted as part of the local food culture. The Indigenization and Creolization of food goes back millennia.

tomatoes are from Central America (don't tell the Italians!)
potatoes are from the Andes (don't tell the Irish/Americans/Belgians!)
chocolate comes from the ancient tribes inhabiting what is now Ecuador.
noodles were pioneered in China, and brought to Europe by way of trade with the Arabs in the 10th century.

For all those cultural chauvinists, please read this: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~franker/Anth140/AssignedReadings/onehundredpercentamerican.pdf

[theman23]

Originally Posted by Architype

Fusion doesn't have to be related to local cuisine. Vancouver has some Italian Japanese restaurants for example. OTOH, adaptation is a normal occurrence that comes from a blending of existing local cultures at a grassroots level; I've sometimes eaten with chopsticks in one hand and a fork in the other. Fusion is considered more haute cuisine. In today's woke elitist society however, you could get accused of appropriation rather than adaptation.

Italian Japanese restaurants are a Japanese export.

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

There are literally restaurants called "fusion" or advertising "fusion" everywhere in North America. I have never seen that in Europe or Asia. The fact that some Turkish immigrants adapt a Turkish dish in Germany to whatever ingredients they can find there is no different from certain Chinese dishes found in Chinese restaurants in the US which were developed in the US with local ingredients and are not found in Asia (such as that Chinese dish of chicken with some little wheat wraps whose name I can't remember now, which you won't find in Asia, and you won't find in Europe either). That's not fusion. Fusion is something else altogether.

Perhaps you should provide some examples of what's been riling you up?

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Anglo Montrealers used to call them bobo balls. I think the company that made them back in the 70s labelled them as such.


Modern French Cuisine Is a Potpourri of Influences. The quintessential French cuisine we know and love today did not suddenly arrive but evolved over centuries from many influences. From the traditional use of local, abundant ingredients to the changing tides of politics and royal intermarriages, the story of how modern French cuisine evolved spans continents and includes trade routes, colonial escapades, and the interests of the aristocracy. For example, Italian noblewoman Catherine de Medici married French King Henry II in 1547. When Catherine came to France, she brought not only her kitchen staff but new Renaissance culinary traditions with her from her Italian homeland. At Catherine’s behest, chefs began to focus more on aesthetics, flavor, and presentation.

Fusion is just the word used to describe novel mixings. Over time, they come to be accepted as part of the local food culture. The Indigenization and Creolization of food goes back millennia.

tomatoes are from Central America (don't tell the Italians!)
potatoes are from the Andes (don't tell the Irish/Americans/Belgians!)
chocolate comes from the ancient tribes inhabiting what is now Ecuador.
noodles were pioneered in China, and brought to Europe by way of trade with the Arabs in the 10th century.

For all those cultural chauvinists, please read this: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~franker/Anth140/AssignedReadings/onehundredpercentamerican.pdf

Good post. A lot of the of the seemingly odd contemporary combinations we see now are a result of natural cultural mixing - i.e. a Korean marries into a Ukranian family and prepares a Korean meal with some ingredients and accompaniments more familiar to their Ukranian in-laws.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Sounds like chicken balls. Served with bright red sweet and sour sauce.

Chicken balls? Never had that so far (thankfully). I've had fish balls in Taiwan though. (it was ok)

PS: Have you ever tried eating fish balls with chopsticks? (there are only chopsticks available in Taiwan)

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by theman23

Good post. A lot of the of the seemingly odd contemporary combinations we see now are a result of natural cultural mixing - i.e. a Korean marries into a Ukranian family and prepares a Korean meal with some ingredients and accompaniments more familiar to their Ukranian in-laws.

Yes, that example resonates with me (as a Caucuasian mutt married to an East Asian gal...both of us like to cook, so we have created many interesting things in the kitchen)

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Modern French Cuisine Is a Potpourri of Influences. The quintessential French cuisine we know and love today did not suddenly arrive but evolved over centuries from many influences. From the traditional use of local, abundant ingredients to the changing tides of politics and royal intermarriages, the story of how modern French cuisine evolved spans continents and includes trade routes, colonial escapades, and the interests of the aristocracy. For example, Italian noblewoman Catherine de Medici married French King Henry II in 1547. When Catherine came to France, she brought not only her kitchen staff but new Renaissance culinary traditions with her from her Italian homeland. At Catherine’s behest, chefs began to focus more on aesthetics, flavor, and presentation.

Influence is not the same thing as fusion.

PS: My ancestors were right there at the court when Catherine de Médicis married Henri II (that was in 1533 by the way, not 1547). They were at the service of the beautiful Marguerite d'Angoulême, duchess of Alençon and queen of Navarre, who was the aunt of Henri II (and sister of François Ier). Marguerite d'Angoulême was one of the most renowned French women of the 16th century, who held a brilliant court in Alençon and in southern France, was herself a renowned poetess, protected humanists, scholars and literati, as well as religious reformers (although she never converted, she was quite protective of the early Reformers).



As it were, my ancestors were purveyors of the queen's table (my ancestor, and later his son and his son-in-law, was in charge of the logistics of buying and transporting wheat and then preparing the 300 or so breads needed for the court (of Navarre) every day), so I have studied in detail the expenses of the queen because they mention my ancestors every day (the chief baker always came first in the list, before the purveyors of meat, vegetables, etc), and I can tell you that you are overestimating the influence of Catherine de Médicis. In the accounts of her aunt-in-law the queen of Navarre you cannot see any change before and after Catherine de Médicis, it's still very French food, up to the 1570s when I last checked. Perhaps Catherine introduced some changes at the royal court of France proper, but the royal court of France was just one court among many in France, a country far more decentralized back then than today, and other princely courts, to say nothing of local aristocrats and provincial bourgeois families, still remained very very French in their tastes.

[MolsonExport]

If Catherine de Medici's chefs incorporated Italian cooking styles using local ingredients or to suit local tastes, it was definitely fusion, just a long time ago. So said my 'ancestors' in academia, at least. The notion that France is somehow immune from fusion cuisine is just bizarre.

Paella Marseille
Beninese Ragout
Matcha Eclair
Duck Confit Tacos
Japanese Duck à l’Orange
Swordfish Brochettes with Basil and Harissa
Green chili eggs Benedict
Lamb Tagine
Vietnamese Crepe
Raclette Quesadilla
French Tacos

Cajun and creole foods (French in North America) are epitomes of fusion cuisine that has since been 'indigenized' as special to the cultures from which they issued forth (which were a frothy mixture of peoples). Vietnam gave the world the wonderful Bánh mì sandwich, which was a product of the French influence (Baguette).

People would take you more seriously if you didn't constantly have your nose in the air about "Anglo-Saxon" North America. You come across like that snotty maitre d' in "Ferris Buehler's Day Off"

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

If Catherine de Medici's chefs incorporated Italian cooking styles using local ingredients or to suit local tastes, it was definitely fusion, just a long time ago. So said my 'ancestors' in academia, at least. The notion that France is somehow immune from fusion cuisine is just bizarre.

Paella Marseille
Beninese Ragout
Matcha Eclair
Duck Confit Tacos
Japanese Duck à l’Orange
Swordfish Brochettes with Basil and Harissa
Green chili eggs Benedict
Lamb Tagine
Vietnamese Crepe
Raclette Quesadilla
French Tacos

Again, as opposed to you, my knowledge of this is not just theoretical or read in history books, but I have actually studied the expenses of one princely court of France in the 16th century (plus also the expenses of Marguerite de Valois, the daughter of Catherine de Médicis), which list in great detail all the food their courts consumed day by day, and I'm sorry but there's nothing Italian in it that can be seen. You see a few exotic stuff sometimes (most noticeably "poules d'Inde", aka turkeys, which is the one exotic stuff that I recall), but by and large it remains very very French food.

Of course new ingredients entered European cuisine, but that's not the same thing as fusion. Just because you start using tomatoes or drink chocolate doesn't mean it's "fusion". French cuisine didn't become a fusion of French and Aztec cuisines, it remained French cuisine, with just a few new ingredients (the Aztec did not even consume chocolate the way the Europeans did).

Last year at the National Library of France I found this original handwritten letter in a stack of documents I was exploring, written in the 1580s by a low-ranking aristocratic lady to a low-ranking aristocratic man living in a rural château near the city of Vendôme in Northern France. Pray tell me where is the fusion there? It's just so quintessentially French. I wrote it down because it shocked me how similar to us those French from 440 years ago were in their relish for (French) food.

"Monsieur, ayant reçu un remerciement qui vous est dû des pâtés que vous m'avez fait la faveur de me donner, je ne veux point manquer à vous en rendre action de grâces. L'on me mande qu'il en a été fait part à beaucoup de la grand ville qui ont bu à ma santé, mais ce devait être à la vôtre, et dit le discours que jamais l'on n'a mangé rien de si tendre et de si bien assaisonné. Ces grands remerciements m'en font vous en rendre un semblable, non de cela seulement, mais de tous vos autres bienfaits. Ne pouvant rien présentement de revanche, vous n'aurez de moi que ce que de longue main vous est acquis, et ma très dévotieuse volonté à vous faire tout le service qui me sera possible, en la qualité que je suis qui est etc."

This was right in the middle of the French Religious Wars, and yet people were obsessing about a good pâté just as we still do today. Which shows that we should take history books with a certain grain of salt, because if you believe the history books France in the 1580s was a place of massacres, carnages and awful intolerance, and yet this letter sounds as homely and interested in mundane stuff as it would in the Enlightened 18th century. It's also interesting how people frankly didn't write so differently from today (whereas Shakespeare's English, which is contemporary of this letter, is pretty different from today's English, to the point of being hard to understand for many people).

[Kilgore Trout]

I think I see what you mean, but in that case "fusion" is a bit of a bogeyman because it's just a quasi-meaningless idea. A marketing concept more than anything. You can do Italian-Japanese fusion, for example, but it rests on the foundational techniques and knowledge of one cuisine or the other.

I had a very good French-style kaiseki meal in Kyoto that was distinctly Japanese in presentation and in many of its ingredients, but remained essentially French in how the food was made. Was it fusion? Who knows. It wasn't advertised as such. It was just a French kaiseki meal in Kyoto.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

I think I see what you mean, but in that case "fusion" is a bit of a bogeyman because it's just a quasi-meaningless idea. A marketing concept more than anything.

It can be a marketing tool, but in California at least it's really a special genre of cuisine. They really blend different cuisines, like Mediterranean and something, or often Asian and European (which is typically the sort of fusion I don't like).

If fusion was pushed to its ultimate stage, all food would become a sort of look-alike world food, with nothing distinguishing the various national foods, no more originality, just everybody using the same ingredients and cooking the same stuff. It would be utterly boring.

Fusion for food is a bit like globish for languages. It would lead to a dreadfully uniform world bereft of what makes it interesting.

[Kilgore Trout]

Yes, that is a very California thing, like California Pizza Kitchen and its many weird pizzas. It was definitely popular on a larger scale in the 1990s and early 2000s. But as a concept I think it has receded and there are more organic kinds of culinary fusion going on at the moment.

[1overcosc]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Anglo Montrealers used to call them bobo balls. I think the company that made them back in the 70s labelled them as such.


Modern French Cuisine Is a Potpourri of Influences. The quintessential French cuisine we know and love today did not suddenly arrive but evolved over centuries from many influences. From the traditional use of local, abundant ingredients to the changing tides of politics and royal intermarriages, the story of how modern French cuisine evolved spans continents and includes trade routes, colonial escapades, and the interests of the aristocracy. For example, Italian noblewoman Catherine de Medici married French King Henry II in 1547. When Catherine came to France, she brought not only her kitchen staff but new Renaissance culinary traditions with her from her Italian homeland. At Catherine’s behest, chefs began to focus more on aesthetics, flavor, and presentation.

Fusion is just the word used to describe novel mixings. Over time, they come to be accepted as part of the local food culture. The Indigenization and Creolization of food goes back millennia.

tomatoes are from Central America (don't tell the Italians!)
potatoes are from the Andes (don't tell the Irish/Americans/Belgians!)
chocolate comes from the ancient tribes inhabiting what is now Ecuador.
noodles were pioneered in China, and brought to Europe by way of trade with the Arabs in the 10th century.

For all those cultural chauvinists, please read this: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~franker/Anth140/AssignedReadings/onehundredpercentamerican.pdf

This last one is actually not true. Noodles were invented independently in both the Mediterranean and East Asia, and West Africans have noodle-like stuff as well (the basic concept is so simple - a stretchy dough that is boiled - that independent creation is expected). The Romans made noodles.

This is just me being a pedantic food nerd. I agree with the basic point of your post, which is that cuisine has constantly evolved over millennia as peoples share ingredients & techniques with each other. It's a common meme that on any video where somebody is making a dish from their country of origin, half the comments will be something along the lines of "actually this food is from country Y", where Y is the name of a nearby country. The Eastern Mediterranean is particularly bad for this sort of thing - if a Lebanese person posts a video of a "Lebanese shawarma" you'll have angry Turks commenting "actually this is Turkish and it's a kebab", angry Greeks commenting "actually this is Greek and it's a gyro", etc.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

It can be a marketing tool, but in California at least it's really a special genre of cuisine. They really blend different cuisines, like Mediterranean and something, or often Asian and European (which is typically the sort of fusion I don't like).

If fusion was pushed to its ultimate stage, all food would become a sort of look-alike world food, with nothing distinguishing the various national foods, no more originality, just everybody using the same ingredients and cooking the same stuff. It would be utterly boring.

Fusion for food is a bit like globish for languages. It would lead to a dreadfully uniform world bereft of what makes it interesting.

I would have seen fusion as something that's as likely to supplement traditional cuisines as it is to replace them.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by 1overcosc

The Eastern Mediterranean is particularly bad for this sort of thing - if a Lebanese person posts a video of a "Lebanese shawarma" you'll have angry Turks commenting "actually this is Turkish and it's a kebab", angry Greeks commenting "actually this is Greek and it's a gyro", etc.

Let's not even talk about baklava.

[New Brisavoine]

Greasy food that will shorten your life expectancy.

Better eat Western Mediterranean food.

[New Brisavoine]

The last Francophone prime minister of Canada?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...ikely-resign-monday-leader-liberal-party

[New Brisavoine]

Other (shocking) news of the day (for some), in Le Devoir: the GDP per capita of Québec is now higher than Ontario's! Québec passed Ontario 4 years ago. In 2023, Québec's GDP per capita was 2.4% higher than Ontario's.

https://www.ledevoir.com/economie/829570/finir-retard-economique-ontario?

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

The last Francophone prime minister of Canada?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...ikely-resign-monday-leader-liberal-party

Why do you consider him Francophone?