Montreal in the Middle of January

Montreal in the middle of January. It appeared in greasy spoons around the province in the 1950s, and by the 1980s you could order poutine at McDonald’s and Burger King chains in Quebec, but not across the border in Ontario. Packing around 740 calories and 41 grams of fat per serving, poutine is a slurry of french fries, basic brown gravy and fresh cheese curds, or “squeakies,” as Canadians like to call them. And although poutine is considered a Canadian food, it’s really native to the province of Quebec. Hugh Acheson, a Canadian-born chef, James Beard Award-winning writer and restaurateur (he owns restaurants in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia).

But that hasn’t stopped people from outside Quebec – and outside Canada – from grabbing that poutine and heading for the hills. Funny you should ask, because although Quebecois can agree that poutine belongs to them, not everybody agrees on the genesis of the province’s most famous gut bomb. These days, you can order poutine in restaurants from Miami to Bangkok – bangkok.thaibounty.com – , but how did the famous fries get their start?

One town in Quebec called Drummondville is highly invested in the version of the poutine origin story that involves a man named Jean-Paul Roy who owned a restaurant called Le Roy Jucep. The rest, as they say, is history. Except, it’s not, according to the residents of the small dairy farming community called Warwick, Quebec. In Warwick the story goes that a hurried truck driver asked Fernand Lachance, the owner of the Lutin Qui Rit (The Laughing Elf) restaurant, to throw two menu items – cheese curds and gravy fries – into the same bag so he could eat them on the road. In Drummondville, legend has it that regular customers started bringing fresh cheese curds into Le Roy Jucep to sprinkle on top of the restaurant’s fries and gravy.

Todd Ginsberg, owner and chef at The General Muir in Atlanta, Georgia, where poutine is a year-round menu item. Acheson, who grew up in Ottawa, Canada (on the border of Ontario and Quebec), where a poutine truck parked down the street from his high school. But ask a native of Quebec how they feel about poutine being served on every continent on Earth, and you might sense a tinge of bitterness in their answer.