Poutine et Paris-Brest

Sunday afternoon, as we were heading toward a birthday party in east Montreal. The city cleans the streets with twin graders, huge snowblowing machines the size of combines, and giant dump trucks that cart the snow away.

Blizzards have nothing on us: we've been consuming enough calories to survive on an ice floe. Saturday night, romanced by a beautiful but very cold evening, we decided to have supper at La Banquise - a lively 24-hour Montreal favorite always filled with young people, which is fairly close to our house. The specialty is...poutine, (scroll down to the third entry) and for the first time in three years, we deliberately ordered some and actually ate it, washed down with a bottle of Cheval Blanc. For those who don't know this delicacy of Quebec, it is a generous pile of expertly-cooked French fries, covered with gravy and cheese curds, plus other toppings, ranging from onions and bacon to foie gras. I ordered lasagna and some very good asparagus soup; we shared the two entrees (the poutine and the lasagna) and the dessert, which was a small, deliciously intense brownie. Then we went for a long walk, and returned home about the time our faces had become stiff, our fingers had been curled into little balls inside our gloves, and we had lost feeling in our noses.

Thus fortified, and feeling guilty, on Sunday morning we had a very light breakfast of coffee and fruit, and went off to the cathedral. It was already snowing lightly. When we walked out after the coffee hour, four inches had already fallen and the pace of the storm indicated it was going to increase and keep on like that for a long while. We had been invited to a surprise 50th birthday party in the afternoon, so we called to make sure it was still on, since the birthday girl and her partner were traveling from far out in the country - "Oui," her father said, "pas de problem."

So we stopped first at our favorite florist, on St. Urbain, where I picked out a bouquet of salmon-colored roses and blue agapanthus, and then we drove slowly through streets in various stages of being kept open or becoming snowed-in, to a neighborhood of small detached homes in the eastern part of the island, the heartland of Quebeçois Montreal.

 

We found a parking place of sorts on the already snow-filled street, and went up the drifted steps. It was a wonderful party. There were only five anglophone guests among the twenty-five or so who had gathered- two women originally from western Canada, and the two of us, and a next-door neighbor whose parents had been French and English, but both Catholic. We were immediately warmly embraced by our friend's family, who we'd never met before, and the champagne flowed as generously as the buzzing French conversation, which to our surprise we could follow and contribute to fairly well. Then came a fantastic lunch, with more wine, followed by a huge Paris-Brest, our friend's traditional birthday "cake" - essentially a giant, flat cream puff filled with hazelnut cream and dusted with powdered sugar.

Night had fallen, and the guests bundled up and made their way out the door -- into the scene in the video at the end of this post. That's my husband at the end, walking toward our car. The plastic tunnels along the street are typical winter car-ports, erected temporarily all around the city neighborhoods where people have the luxury of a driveway. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, but the warmth inside the house was just as intense as the cold outside. It was a happy afternoon for us, and we were awfully pleased to be invited and included in the occasion - and to find our comfort level with the language had really improved quite a bit. I can tell not only from our better ability to communicate and understand, but from the fact that we weren't totally exhausted at the end of the afternoon!

It was still snowing when we went to bed.

Comments

[kaycie]

That sounds like a delightful afternoon. If it snowed like that here in Oklahoma, we'd shut the whole state down!

Oh, and I think I'd like to try poutine. It actually sounds like something that could have been dreamed up in the South.

[marja-leena]

How wonderful a day! And the video reminded me of Winnipeg!

[Fred Garber]

While I was reading this post, I was eating a nasty little 300 calorie It Ain't My 1st Choice microwave "dinner". I need to go out on the street and find some some real food like you talked about.

[Zuleme]

This post reminds me of living in Montreal in hmmmm....1968. We had bought Canadian army coats for five dollars each and the two of us would have looked like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. There was a blizzard and a cold snap on Christmas Day, it was around 25 below and we went out to walk around the snowy, peaceful city.
We had friends who were Russian immigrants and they treated us with such kindness that I still remember them, their summer cottage and the mother always trying to get me to Eat! Eat!, you too thin! I had my first taste of borsch with them.
We were young and poor but still, there were beautiful times.

[Jean-Olivier]

Est-ce que ta résolution du nouvel an sera de partir un blog français? ;o) Just teasing you... :)