Quebec, the French Language, and Quebecois Identity

[Laceoflight]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

BTW, the most highly-rated “Québécois” cuisine in the world might be found in Vancouver.

A lot of what you get on the menu might be unrecognizable to your average Québécois family. So is it Québécois food or is it the chef’s IP?

[BIG PARENTHÈSE]
This discussion was interesting until the tone changed and became... more dismissive ? (sorry for my lack of nuances and vocabulary - ESL here)
I am so tired of coming here and seeing mostly people from outside of my culture talking about it as if they really knew it or cared about it. This is a good example of what happens daily here on SSP. It's exhausting.

The core of québécois culture is mostly rooted in french canadian traditions and influences (which are also largely the produce of a mix of old French and First nations traditions), which are since forever complemented by external inputs that were largely integrated into the mainstream culture (Irish notably, Jewish, British in general, and more recently global north american), and then more recent inputs that will probably have a long term influence (haïtian, maghrebin, sub-saharian african, an so on). There is a clear root - the old french and agrarian influences - and also traits from other groups that are appropriated to a certain degree.

For food, it's not about eating poutine everyday (which is a fairly recent fast food and in no ways a familial dish), it's about what you can expect to eat in family gatherings (traditions), or when you are simply invited at someone's house. The day to day cuisine is generally made of what you could find on the farm (meat, potatoes and vegetables), with seasonal variants (for example, in fall and winter, the bouillis, pot-au-feu, etc.) Pâté chinois is one of those variants. Some meals or charcuteries are eaten less often, but still somehow present, such as boudin, tête fromagée, plorines, etc. The meal will likely be accompanied by some kind of soup as a starter (ex.: soupe à la gourgane) For breakfast, you could expect some galettes de sarrasin with mélasse, some pain de ménage and cretons, or more conventional options found everywhere (we don't live under a rock). For dessert, if you are a good boy, maybe you will get some sucre à la crème, or some pouding chômeur. If it's apple season, why not have some croustade.

We also have pretty strong regional culinary sub-cultures ou variants, as there are different climates and ressources. Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (real tourtière, anything made with blueberries), Montérégie (tarte à la farlouche, gibelotte, perchaude, cidre, fromage), Bas-Saint-Laurent (crevettes de Matane, herbes salées du Bas-du-Fleuve, cipâte, ployes), Côte-Nord (crabe des neiges, pétoncles, anything with chicoutai...), Gaspésie (morue, crabe, homard, guédille, soupe quiaude or tchaude), Madeleine islands (croquignoles and seafood in general, maquereau, pot-en-pot...), Eastern townships (wine, cidre de glace, canard du lac-Brome), Lanaudière (potato doughnuts), Charlevoix (agneau), Montréal (bagel, smoked meat) notably.

But culinary traditions in Québec are also associated with gatherings and special times during the year. Everyone knows our spring tradition, the cabane à sucre : omelette, fèves au lard, oreilles de christ, grands-pères dans le sirop, crêpes, jambon à l'os, soupe aux pois [the nickname you gave us, remember?] tire sur la neige, sirop d'érable...). The end of summer tradition is the épluchette de blé-d'inde (litterally a large familial corn-peeling party) : the Neuville corn is cultivated around Québec city since 4 centuries (an ancestral variety). Our winter traditions are associated with the end of year holidays and catholic traditions : the Réveillon is a mid-night meal that most families had, where you can generally find some dinde (turkey), ragoût de pattes de cochon, pains fourrés (in Sageuenay and Lanaudière, they often have some pain-surprise or pain-sandwich also, which is disgusting IMO), tourtière (meat pie), atocas (cranberry gelly), and desserts such as bûche, pets de soeur, beignets, tarte au sucre, tarte au sirop d'érable, tarte à la pacane... Maybe some caribou too!

Anyway, it's not about one meal. It's about tradition and influences. And the future will be different for sure.
[/BIG PARENTHÈSE]

[MonctonRad]

Good post.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by someone123

But Vancouver does have a good food scene that has a lot of its own uniqueness that flows from a mix of local ingredients, local innovation, and the particular blend of cultures that came here. It's not just highly rated with no substance nor could it be transplanted to Indianapolis. It is much more sophisticated than anywhere in Quebec aside from Montreal. It exists independently of what language people here speak or if they talk like pirates or do folk dancing.

Not sure what exactly we’re arguing here, but my point is that the following is a perfectly realistic scenario: a “world elite” Manhattan chef makes a special $1,000 bacon and cheese sushi roll that just got voted the planet’s tastiest and most desirable Japanese food, meanwhile Japan has lots of Japanese dishes easily identifiable as “Japanese cuisine” and the most authentic forms of it are found over there.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by lio45

Not sure what exactly we’re arguing here, but my point is that the following is a perfectly realistic scenario: a “world elite” Manhattan chef makes a special $1,000 bacon and cheese sushi roll that just got voted the planet’s tastiest and most desirable Japanese food, meanwhile Japan has lots of Japanese dishes easily identifiable as “Japanese cuisine” and the most authentic forms of it are found over there.

This does not seem to be that difficult a concept to understand.

Originally Posted by someone123

But Vancouver does have a good food scene that has a lot of its own uniqueness that flows from a mix of local ingredients, local innovation, and the particular blend of cultures that came here. It's not just highly rated with no substance nor could it be transplanted to Indianapolis. It is much more sophisticated than anywhere in Quebec aside from Montreal. It exists independently of what language people here speak or if they talk like pirates or do folk dancing.

Yeah... but... nowhere in Quebec outside of Montreal is anywhere close to being as big and diverse a city as Vancouver.

Originally Posted by hipster duck

BTW, the most highly-rated “Québécois” cuisine in the world might be found in Vancouver.

A lot of what you get on the menu might be unrecognizable to your average Québécois family. So is it Québécois food or is it the chef’s IP?

It sounds amazing.

There is actually quite a bit of stuff on there that an average Québécois family would recognize.

Though it does say that it's a "fusion" cuisine: primarily inspired by his Québécois roots with stuff from other cuisines mixed in - especially French, as usual.

Originally Posted by Laceoflight

[BIG PARENTHÈSE]
This discussion was interesting until the tone changed and became... more dismissive ? (sorry for my lack of nuances and vocabulary - ESL here)
I am so tired of coming here and seeing mostly people from outside of my culture talking about it as if they really knew it or cared about it. This is a good example of what happens daily here on SSP. It's exhausting.
]

In fairness, the discussion was veering into a little bit of the "Anglo-Canada simply has no culture" thing which one often hears in Quebec and upsets ROCers. So it's not surprising that some of the posts have been more edgy as a result.

I myself try really hard to always be respectful, even as I also strive to keep my comments as frank as possible.

(Excellent post BTW.)

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Laceoflight

[BIG PARENTHÈSE]
This discussion was interesting until the tone changed and became... more dismissing ? (sorry for my lack of nuances and vocabulary - ESL here)
I am so tired of coming here and seeing mostly people from outside of my culture talking about it as if they really knew it or cared about it. This is a good example of what happens daily here on SSP. It's exhausting.
[/BIG PARENTHÈSE]

Good post!

I should say that I wasn’t being dismissive about Quebec culture. On the contrary I was responding to a guy who made the usual clichéd comment about how Ontario doesn’t have a culture.

I think that it’s great that Québécois celebrate regional nuances, although you have to admit that not all of that came about totally spontaneously. Most traditional cultures (by that I mean supposedly age-old traditions that are invoked in modern-day nationalism) are somewhat artificially created by culture ministries and live due to a healthy dose of protectionism, subsidies and historical retconning. Many traditions that seem to be centuries old and the product of peasant circumstances are, at most, a few generations old and the product of a marketing team.

[MonctonRad]

The Maritimes have a well established regional cuisine dominated by chowders and seafood. The trouble is that this is similar to regional coastal cuisines in New England.

I would say there are multiple regional cuisines in North America. It's just that they don't really respect international borders. The regional cuisines are more dependent on geography, climate and landforms.

Quebec is a bit of an exception because it throws in the variable of ethnic cuisine (which you also get in the US southwest). Southwestern Mexican cuisine is also transnational.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Laceoflight

This discussion was interesting until the tone changed and became... more dismissive ? (sorry for my lack of nuances and vocabulary - ESL here)
I am so tired of coming here and seeing mostly people from outside of my culture talking about it as if they really knew it or cared about it.

The discussions would be better if they were more positive. My view is that Quebec culture is great, unique, and deserves to be preserved, but that there is also a lot of unique culture elsewhere in Canada that rarely gets a fair shake.

My family's 50/50 from Quebec (Francophone) and the Maritimes (Anglophone) so I know some Quebec cultural stuff and can get somewhat of an inside view of it (content and not just language itself). There is a lot of NS stuff that could be posted like in your post. My NS ancestors by and large moved there in the mid-1700's (from Europe, not the US). I find that on SSP I am always reading about how English-speaking parts of Canada that are not Newfoundland are America lite. Usually I don't bother responding. I understand that the old parts of NS are small and people nationally will not learn about say Lunenburg County, but people shouldn't make sweeping generalizations if they don't know the details.

I think as I travelled around I believed less in the idea that the US is one cultural blob, Canada is generically part of that, and Europe is very exotic and different. It's all shades of grey of course but more significantly the magnitude of cultural travel is quite different from the stereotypes, IMO. There's a lot of cultural affinity along others lines, like ex-Commonwealth or Protestant and Catholic areas, or even more fundamentally just the "Latin" or more widely "Western" world, of which we are a part.

[esquire]

I bet tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Ontarians will have a dinner that looks something like this. Possibly even made with Ontario-produced ingredients. So does that make it Ontario cuisine, or does it only count if it's something that other regions/countries don't make?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

The Maritimes have a well established regional cuisine dominated by chowders and seafood. The trouble is that this is similar to regional coastal cuisines in New England.

I would say there are multiple regional cuisines in North America. It's just that they don't really respect international borders. The regional cuisines are more dependent on geography, climate and landforms.

Quebec is a bit of an exception because it throws in the variable of ethnic cuisine (which you also get in the US southwest). Southwestern Mexican cuisine is also transnational.

It's not even a "trouble" or a "problem" necessarily. It just is what it is.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by esquire

I bet tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Ontarians will have a dinner that looks something like this. Possibly even made with Ontario-produced ingredients. So does that make it Ontario cuisine, or does it only count if it's something that other regions/countries don't make?

So that would mean that pad thai, fajitas or lasagna are Québécois cuisine?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

The discussions would be better if they were more positive. My view is that Quebec culture is great, unique, and deserves to be preserved, but that there is also a lot of unique culture elsewhere in Canada that rarely gets a fair shake.

My family's 50/50 from Quebec (Francophone) and the Maritimes (Anglophone) so I know some Quebec cultural stuff and can get somewhat of an inside view of it (content and not just language itself). There is a lot of NS stuff that could be posted like in your post. My NS ancestors by and large moved there in the mid-1700's (from Europe, not the US). I find that on SSP I am always reading about how English-speaking parts of Canada that are not Newfoundland are America lite. Usually I don't bother responding. I understand that the old parts of NS are small and people nationally will not learn about say Lunenburg County, but people shouldn't make sweeping generalizations if they don't know the details.

I think as I travelled around I believed less in the idea that the US is one cultural blob, Canada is generically part of that, and Europe is very exotic and different. It's all shades of grey of course but more significantly the magnitude of cultural travel is quite different from the stereotypes, IMO. There's a lot of cultural affinity along others lines, like ex-Commonwealth or Protestant and Catholic areas, or even more fundamentally just the "Latin" or more widely "Western" world, of which we are a part.

International travel is actually mostly what formed my views on this. Prior to that, my views were a lot closer to yours.

[Laceoflight]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Good post!

I should say that I wasn’t being dismissive about Quebec culture. On the contrary I was responding to a guy who made the usual clichéd comment about how Ontario doesn’t have a culture.

I think that it’s great that Québécois celebrate regional nuances, although you have to admit that not all of that came about totally spontaneously. Most traditional cultures (by that I mean supposedly age-old traditions that are invoked in modern-day nationalism) are somewhat artificially created by culture ministries and live due to a healthy dose of protectionism, subsidies and historical retconning. Many traditions that seem to be centuries old and the product of peasant circumstances are, at most, a few generations old and the product of a marketing team.

No problem, I get your point. We agree that a culture is a process, not an immutable thing. However, no marketing program made us eat pouding chômeur, or pâté chinois, or galettes de sarrasin, or even cod. Poverty, geography and availability of the produces did.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Laceoflight

No problem, I get your point. We agree that a culture is a process, not an immutable thing. However, no marketing program made us eat pouding chômeur, or pâté chinois, or galettes de sarrasin, or even cod. Poverty, geography and availability of the produces did.

I was going to post something similar. I don't think that most of the distinctive cultures in the world are the result of efforts to artificially "create" a distinctive culture, either by marketing types or government ministries of culture.

Though it's true that the above actors sometimes appropriate stuff that emerged naturally in the population, and make it a bigger deal.

[Laceoflight]

Originally Posted by esquire

I bet tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Ontarians will have a dinner that looks something like this. Possibly even made with Ontario-produced ingredients. So does that make it Ontario cuisine, or does it only count if it's something that other regions/countries don't make?

If it stays around for centuries (let's be less drastic - say a few generations) and becomes mainstream, then yes.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by Acajack

So that would mean that pad thai, fajitas or lasagna are Québécois cuisine?

The way they are prepared in Quebec, quite probably. I'm going to assume that those items as prepared in Longeuil don't resemble their counterparts from their originating nations terribly closely. In much the same way that I've been surprised by North American dishes served overseas... you'd be surprised what a garden salad can look like in third tier Chinese cities.

[Nashe]

Do I get a "Quebecer card" if I've grown up eating all of those things despite none of my ancestors ever living in Quebec? (Partially Acadian, FWIW) It's weird... everything you describe I'd call part of MY family culture (even the ones with different names are the same thing) but my family hasn't left SE NB since Pierre Arsenault came from France. Throw in corn boils and kitchen music too!

As much I love the flavour of life that culture is, I think we get a bit too territorial about it, generally. It's like trying to hold your sand castle together in a rising tide while ignoring that it's made out of the same stuff that surrounds it for miles, really. Where does the castle end and the beach begin? The castle is just a "current" state of some beach held together for a few centuries by our collective will. In reality, it's all made from the same stuff and bits of it crumble off and then we reconstitute... but is it even the same sand we held before? Illusionary.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Laceoflight

Poverty, geography and availability of the produces did.

There's a lot of geographical variety around Canada and a lot of that variety exists outside of Quebec's borders. The reality is that the stuff we have here is not the same as say Regina, whether we're talking local food, any kind of economic base tied to the land, or outdoor recreation. The culture and lifestyle is determined somewhat by all that stuff. Whether your town is based on the fisheries or farming can matter more to your culture than a lot of factors.

If you want to see how language itself fits in you can also look at Europe where there are a lot of small countries that each have their own language (often farther apart than English and French). I am not sure they are all so distinctive that they'd hit whatever bar Canada fails to hit. A lot of them occupy small-ish valleys or plains. There are a lot of countries out there that have their own language or culture but don't have a great civilization behind them (on par with France, Japan, Russia, China, etc.).

[kool maudit]

This comes up from time to time, and there are good, solid arguments on the side of both "culture is just the shape of our lives" and "everyone has distinct stuff where's yours".

In the specific case of Ontario, I think it is important to remember how much of the province's historical identity was tied to the British Empire, and for how long. Even in the cultural giant that is the USA, some places would struggle on this level if the federation were to somehow disband and ideas like "the American heartland" kind of went along with it, became anachronisms. What, at the end of the day, is Indiana? What is Illinois?

And yet these places surely have a feel and a tenor that is totally their own.

[kool maudit]

There really is no bar or objective measure. There is just people applying categories to their experiences and communicating them outwards. If the category is not as crucial a part of the experience in some periods or places, the experience doesn't fail to be inhabited. But there will be that question mark in the minds of others.

Some places can be very distinct to the outsider, but do not particularly emphasize or communicate that distinctness. Denmark is like this. South Park even offered the Danes as "Europe's Canadians", which was funny, because before moving there, I guess I had them pegged that way too. But they are in fact very much themselves and very different from, say, Germans or Swedes.

Swedes openly downplay any idea of distinctiveness, they love the open society idea and are good at it, but then you go to a Midsommar and it is so strange and pagan and specific to them.

Then there are Albanians, for whom the whole thing of "being Albanian" seems as central to them as do the far more famous such identities of the US or France, but unless you have experience with them, you wouldn't probably know.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Vorkuta

Do I get a "Quebecer card" if I've grown up eating all of those things despite none of my ancestors ever living in Quebec? (Partially Acadian, FWIW) It's weird... everything you describe I'd call part of MY family culture (even the ones with different names are the same thing) but my family hasn't left SE NB since Pierre Arsenault came from France. Throw in corn boils and kitchen music too!

As much I love the flavour of life that culture is, I think we get a bit too territorial about it, generally. It's like trying to hold your sand castle together in a rising tide while ignoring that it's made out of the same stuff that surrounds it for miles, really. Where does the castle end and the beach begin? The castle is just a "current" state of some beach held together for a few centuries by our collective will. In reality, it's all made from the same stuff and bits of it crumble off and then we reconstitute... but is it even the same sand we held before? Illusionary.

Quebec culture conflates with "francophone Canadian" culture to a large degree, so none of that is surprising.

And even for ROCers with no francophone roots, a little bit of that rubs off simply by virtue of being in the same polity and economic space as Quebec. I think you can probably buy frozen St-Hubert tourtières in grocery stores in Vancouver, for example.