Review
"Not just a how-to-do-it cookbook but an Acadian history encoded in foodways." -- The Island Magazine
Product Description
The indigenous cuisine of Acadia is a distant relative of French home cooking, born of necessity and created from what was naturally available. Roast porcupine or seal-fat cookies may not be to every modern diner's taste, but the few recipes of this nature in A Taste of Acadie hint at the ingenuity of women who fed their families with what the land provided. Most of the recipes, however, use ingredients beloved of today's cooks. Here you'll find fricot, a wonder of the Acadian imagination, pot en pot, a traditional Sunday dinner sometimes called grosse soupe, and dozens of meat pies, variations on pâté à la viande. There's also pâté à la rapure, with a crust made of grated potatoes, and the popular poutine rapée, one of the few French dishes to survive the transition to the New World, although certainly not in its original form. For those with a sweet tooth, Gallant and Cormier-Boudreau include recipes that use maple syrup and fresh wild berries, from poutine à trou, a delectable mixture of apples, cranberries and nuts in a rich pastry purse, to the cheekily named pets de soeurs (nun's farts), a biscuit with a puckered middle and a saucy Acadian name.
A Taste of Acadie is traditional cooking at its best, suffusing contemporary kitchens with country aromas and down-home flavours. Decorated with evocative woodcuts by Michiel Oudemans, it is a pleasure to look at and a charming addition in its own right to contemporary country-style kitchens.
