Quebec products, and where to buy them
Highlighted Products:
–La Vache Canadienne: Pied-de-Vent & Laiterie Charlevoix
–Moulin de la Rémy
–La Milanaise
–Érablière Escuminac
–Gaspésie Sauvage
–Les Jardins Sauvages
–Les Herbes Salées du Bas-du-Fleuve
–Emporium Safran
–Cassis Monna et Filles
–La Maison de la Prune
–Les Trois Acres
–Fermes Gaspor Farms
–Canards du Lac Brome
To find out where to purchase these products, click here.
Talk on Quebec products on Zoom given by Julian Armstrong on May 10, 2021 for the Art Libraries Society of North America.
Get into a conversation with a French-Canadian and you realize food is important. The cuisine, adapted ever since the 17th century from the cooking of north-western France, is a vital part of life and Quebecers spend time and money to eat well.
Quebec food is regularly rated as Canada’s first and most distinctive cuisine. As I hope to show you, Quebec’s obsession with food means that it gets better and better. Fresher, healthier, more interesting products are being developed, year after year.
However, despite the popularity of the foods of the world, as a chef once said to me, “The mother cuisine is French—the favourite ingredients, the sauces, the techniques.”
Quebec’s earliest dishes continue in fashion, improved from pioneer times. In homes and some restaurants, especially around the holidays, you’ll find the old favourites – the meat pie tourtière and ragoût, pea soup and pâté, maple pie and cider.
Speculation is that, because we are so aware we are a region of French on an English continent, we are concerned about preserving our traditions – our language, political systems, and heritage cuisine. So we keep it alive, talk about it, improve it, and cook it.
I will now take you on a quick tour of Quebec, presented by some of today’s energetic, dedicated producers. Their foods show their sense of history. Some of these producers have harked back centuries for inspiration. Others are on the cutting edge of today.
One of our top chefs explained what these new special products are doing to the traditional cuisine. Anne Desjardins, longtime chef at L’Eau a la Bouche in Ste. Adèle north of Montreal, called it northern gastronomy. “We are discovering boreal cuisine. This is right, because we live in the north. We are Nordic,” she said.
Most of these products I will show you are available online.
I will begin with my favourite cow. It’s a story about her milk and the cheeses made from it.
La Vache Canadienne
She came from France to Quebec in 1608 with the French explorer Samuel de Champlain when he established his first colony. She is smaller than other breeds we know. Either black or brown, she is hardy and friendly. She also eats less than other breeds. And she tolerates hot or cold weather.
Her milk is perfect for making cheese because it is extra-rich, and contains more butterfat and protein than other milks. That means a cheese-maker needs less milk to make the same amount of cheese, and it coagulates faster, so it gives cheese-makers less work.
Unfortunately, she produces only about half the amount of milk as the better-known breeds. The first settlers expanded the herd and, in the mid 17th century there were 300,000 of these cows in Canada. But the big milk-producing cows gradually took over and now, we have only about 1,000 of these cows in Canada, three herds, all in Quebec. One is on the Îles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, another is in the Charlevoix region of north-eastern Quebec, and a third is in the Saguenay region of northern Quebec.
Happily, two Quebec cheese-makers have herds of these cows and make semi-soft cheeses from the milk of the Canadian cow.
Pied-de-Vent
This cheese-maker can be found on the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence called Ȋles de la Madeleine, using the milk of their herd of 130 “Canadian” cows.
Laiterie Charlevoix
Located in the Baie St. Paul in the Charlevoix region, this cheese-maker makes two cheeses from the “Canadian” cow’s milk. The best-seller is Le 1608, honouring the date the French settlers and the cows arrived in Quebec. The second cheese is L’origine de Charlevoix.
Moulin de la Rémy
A small number of dedicated Quebecers is back of a movement to increase organic grain farming, mill the grain with stones, and sell it to bakers and the public. One of the mills is a beautiful stone building on a hillside high above the St. Lawrence River. It was built in 1825 by the religious order Séminaire de Québec, and restored in 1992.
Rudy Laixhay
The man in front of the mill is a dynamo in this new grain and milling industry, called Rudy Laixhay. He has worked with Jean Labbé of Laiterie Charlevoix, a big cheese-maker, to persuade about 10 young farmers to take over abandoned land, drain it, level it, and grow about six varieties of organic grains.
Rudy has their grains milled, using millstones he imported from France. He then sells the flour to organic bakers all over Quebec.
La Milanaise
This is another organic grain milling company, located at St. Jean sur Richelieu and led by Robert Beauchemin, an organic producer.
M. Beauchemin began stone-milling in 1982 and has supplied bakers and stores with his flour called Milanaise all over Québec for nearly 40 years. He runs a large, commercial business handling all sorts of grains, lentils, pulses, seeds, etc., including Red Fife wheat, a Scottish variety imported into Canada over 170 years ago and believed to be originally from Ukraine.
Érablière Escuminac
The Malenfant family maple farm on the Gaspé coast has added yellow birch syrup to its products. It is a semi-sweet syrup compared to a cross between balsamic vinegar and molasses. Like maple syrup, it comes in amber or dark grades.
Use it to glaze meat or fish, in barbecue sauce, marinades, salad dressings and even in wild rice pudding. Think of it as a more exotic vanilla extract. Wild mushrooms may be fried in it.
Gaspésie Sauvage
Wild mushrooms are the specialty from this company, run by a Belgian-born forager named Gérard Mathar, who is based at Douglastown on the Gaspé coast. He and his partner Catherine Jacob supply restaurants with fresh wild foods, and dry these products to sell to the public.
Exotic products such as dried lobster mushroom powder can be used as a coating on scallops. Gérard’s wild mix of porcini mushroom powder adds flavour to meats. Algae, wild aquatic plants that include seaweed, is another dried product.
Les Jardins Sauvages
A wild food foraging company north-east of Montreal at St. Roch de l’Achigan runs a wild food restaurant. Chef Nancy Hinton, a top chef who ran away to the wilds, cooks an exotic, wild cuisine. Her partner François Brouillard harvests her ingredients in the forest, providing the restaurant a variety of wild foods from fiddleheads to herbs.
The couple sell their products at a tiny store in Jean Talon Market in Montreal. Fresh fiddleheads in season, dried and preserved products year-round, especially mushrooms are offered.
Les Herbes Salées du Bas-du-Fleuve
Salted herbs are a traditional Quebec condiment, made each summer by home cooks getting ready for winter. They would store the mixture in the root cellar and use it to liven up meat pies, ragout, pea soup, mashed root vegetables, and rice.
Jean-Yves Roy has a farm and production centre at Ste. Flavie in the Gaspé. A plant scientist by training, he uses his grandmother’s recipe for this herb and vegetable mixture. Instead of the knife his grandmother would have used, he has machines to chop the ingredients, then adds coarse salt and stores the mixture in barrels kept at about 60 degrees F (15 C). He bottles his product to sell in food stores all over Quebec and beyond. His latest invention is a dehydrated version he sells in packages.
Every family had a recipe, but the basics are parsley, chervil, savory and chives, plus such vegetables as spinach, celery, onions, carrots, parsnips, and leeks, leaves included. The Roy farm at Ste. Flavie produces all the ingredients.
Modern uses include hamburgers, seafood casserole, pasta sauce, salad dressings and even a tomato sandwich. Add the herbs to any hot dish just before serving, says Roy. If you want to cut the salt, rinse the mixture before adding it to a dish.
Emporium Safran
Micheline Sylvestre was a location manager for filmmakers before she made agricultural history in Quebec by growing and selling saffron. She is producing this seasoning of the Mediterranean, Middle and Far East in the rigorous climate of Québec on her small farm (2-1/2 acres/one hectare) at St. Damien, north-east of Montreal. What’s more, she has inspired a small group of other Quebec saffron producers.
The tiny saffron bulbs – she says she currently has more than 100,000 – are members of the crocus family and have a reverse production life. They flower in autumn with pretty lilac coloured blossoms. Each flower produces three red stigmas which, when dried, make saffron threads. Micheline must harvest those stigmas immediately, drying the flowers in a 120-degree F (50 C) oven.
Red saffron is the best, she says. Fakes on the market are made from safflowers and are yellow, dyed red. To tell if your saffron is real, touch it. Your finger should turn yellow. If it turns red, it is a fake dye job. The real thing is expensive; it takes over 150 flowers to make one gram of saffron.
She makes saffron into a variety of products, selling the pure product in small red velvet bags because the product has been known as red gold. She also makes saffron syrup and jelly, saffron salt and vinegar. Her latest project is to make saffron ice cream.
Cassis Monna et Filles
A father and his two daughters grow black currants on the Île d’Orléans and make prize-winning liqueurs and other products from the fruit. Called Cassis Monna & Filles, the company is run by Bernard Monna and his daughters Catherine and Anne.
The crème de cassis liqueur, perfect for making Kir, is the big seller. More than 50,000 bottles a year are sold of all their products.
Three wines, a syrup, vinaigrette and a series of bottled terrines, mustard, jam, jelly, ketchup, honey and an onion confit all attract visitors to the boutique, wine cellar, and restaurant.
The liqueur and wines are only a few of Québec’s local wines. One, called Chicoutai is made from the Nordic cloudberry the chicoutai. Another from blueberries is called Minaki. Amour en Cage comes from ground cherries. These drinks compete with imported liqueurs in Québec liquor stores.
La Maison de la Prune
Plums have a historical background at a beautiful orchard in the lower St. Lawrence River valley at St. André de Kamouraska. Proprietor Paul-Louis Martin, a cultural historian, discovered its history, when, in 1972, he acquired the 1840 manor house he was restoring, and researched its seigneurial property. The red and yellow Damson plums growing behind the elegant old building were from trees originally imported from France in the 1620s by Récollet priests.
He and his partner Marie de Blois added to the 100 old trees to make a profitable plum orchard of 400 trees and began selling Marie’s jam and jelly, coulis, preserved plums, spiced sauce and vinegar, and the fresh fruit in season.
Aware that plum trees used to flourish all along the St. Lawrence, Martin has worked to restore this heritage fruit. He wrote a book, Les Fruits du Québec. It also explores Québec architecture and her gardens.
If you visit the shop in the old manor house when it is open each August and September, you may get lucky and meet the historian and even have a tour of the beautiful old orchard.
Les Trois Acres
Read the honey labels carefully when you shop at this small honey farm near Dunham in the Eastern Townships of Québec. The pure, unpasteurized honey comes in eight different flavours, depending on where the beekeeper has deposited his hives.
Beekeeper is biologist Stephen Crawford who, with wife Lilian, runs the farm. He credits a TV show called The Nature of Things, hosted by environmentalist David Suzuki, with giving him the idea of beekeeping. In 1990 he bought two hives. Now, 30 years later, he has 150 hives and runs both a honey business and, thanks to Liliane, a cosmetics sideline using the leftover beeswax available when the honey has been extracted.
Varieties of honey are geared to the seasons. In spring, the bees go for dandelions, wild raspberry blossoms and apple blossoms, resulting in very sweet and floral-tasting honey. In summer, they use sweet clover, centaurea and basswood blossoms and make mild-tasting honey. In fall, the honey comes from goldenrod and asters, giving a spicier taste.
Customers who find their honey crystallizes in the jar need only need stand the jar in hot water, either from the tap or a saucepan of water just beginning to simmer. The honey will liquify in about 15 minutes. Honey lasts forever and never goes bad, says Liliane.
Fermes Gaspor Farms
Roast suckling pig is a celebration dish but uneconomic for a chef to offer regularly. It’s too small to be profitable, restaurateurs maintain. That was before a family pork farm north of Montreal decided to experiment with growing their piglets bigger, to about 30 kilograms (65 pounds).
In 2004, the Aubin brothers started feeding piglets on a specially enhanced milk formula, giving them eight times the amount of food as with grain-fed baby pigs. The piglets receive mother’s milk for four weeks, and then seven to 10 weeks on milk enriched with coconut fat. The brothers have the animals slaughtered at three months of age, producing a meat that is marbled and flavourful. The public in top restaurants has accept to pay as much for it as for filet mignon.
Gaspor (the name from gastronomic pork) meat comes from animals large enough to allow a chef to cook a variety of dishes. Labour-intensive to produce, the supply of what’s called Porcelet de Lait is limited to about 5,000 animals a year. Chefs across Canada, and restaurants in New York and California, as well as a few in Japan, buy the meat.
Canards du Lac Brome
American businessmen started Canada’s best-known duck farm in 1914 to cater to the Chinese immigrant market. Peking ducks were installed and enjoyed swimming in Brome Lake in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
Then Canadian Senator George Foster and friends who summered in Knowlton heard that a commercial development might be created on the shores of their beautiful lake. They decided to buy the business in 1939 and it remained in family hands until the mid 1990s when a Quebec businessman and an American veterinarian bought it. The ducks no longer appear. Ever since the threat of bird flu, they are raised in barns. But the farm flourishes and has an elegant new shop in Knowlton.
The ducks, numbering 23,000 annually at the outset, now number two million. Their fatty meat, easy to grill on the barbecue, has been slimmed down.
The variety of ways the ducks are marketed is endless, from whole and cut up versions to confit, shredded, smoked, rillettes, pates and cooked frozen meals. Eighty per cent of sales are in Quebec.
Where to purchase:
Quebec specialty food producers contact list
Some producers have distribution systems in both Canada and the U.S.A. Some ship only to Canada. A few small producers sell only from their shops. Check web sites for information.
For assistance, feel free to contact Julian Armstrong.
Fromagerie du Pied-De-Vent cheese
149 chemin de la Pointe-Basse, Havre-aux-Maisons, Îles de la Madeleine, Québec, G4T 5H7;
Tel: 418-969-9292;
info@fromageriedupieddevent.com
www.fromageriedupieddevent.com
Laiterie Charlevoix
1167 Boulevard Mgr de Laval, Baie-Saint-Paul, QC G3Z 2W7
Tel: 1 418 435.2184
info@laiteriecharlevoix.com
http://laiteriecharlevoix.com/fr
Moulin de la Rémy
652 Chemin Saint Laurent, Baie St. Paul, Québec, G3Z 2L7, and Pierre du Moulin.
Tel: 418-633-7691
Rudy Laixhay, president : rudy@pierredumoulin.com
Celine Derue, 418-760-8665; admin@pierredumoulin.com
La Milanaise
820 rue Lucien-Beaudin, St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec, J2X 5V5.
Tel: 450-349-1747; 1-877-657-4646.
Robert Beauchemin, president.
www.lamilanaise.com
Erablière Escuminac Inc
240 Chemin d’Escuminac Ne, Escuminac, Québec G0C 1N0.
Tel: 418-788-3636 or 418-963-2490; cell Jason Malenfant 418-714-4199;
jason@escuminac.com or contact@escuminac.com or info@escuminac.com
www.escuminac.com;
Gaspésie Sauvage Produits Forestiers Inc.,
34 Rooney Ave., Gaspé, Québec, G4X 2Z2.
Tel: 418-368-2296
Gérard Mathar and Catherine Jacob.
www.gaspesiesauvage.com or www.gaspesiesauvage-shop.com;
À la table des Jardins Sauvages
17 Martin Rd., St. Roch de l’Achigan, Québec,
tel.: 450-588-5125.
www.jardinssauvages.com; info@jardinssauvages.com;
Boutique at Marché Jean Talon.
Nancy Hinton and François Brouillard
Les Herbes salées du Bas-du-Fleuve
182 Chemin Perreault, Ste. Flavie, Québec, G0T 2L0.
Tel: Jean-Yves Roy: 418-775-4922
herbes@herbessalees.com.
Dehydrated herbs: info@atelierspleinsoleil.com
Emporium Safran Québec
2584 Chemin des Cascades, St. Damien, Québec, J0K 2E0.
Tel: 514-804-5549;
Micheline Sylvestre, president.
www.emporium-safran.com; micheline.sylvestre@emporium-safran.com; info@emporium-safran.com
Monna et Filles
St. Pierre, Île d’Orléans, Québec, G0A 4E0.
www.cassismonna.com; info@cassismonna.com
Catherine and Anne Monna.
La Maison de la Prune
129, route 132 Est Saint-André-de-Kamouraska, QC, Canada G0L 3G0
Tel: (418) 493-2616
marie.deblois@bell.net
Les Trois Acres
1107 Dymond Rd., Dunham, Québec, J0E 1M0.
Tel.: 450-295-2540
Liliane and Stephen Morel
3acres.ca@gmail.com;
web site: www.3acres.ca
Gaspor pork:
15 Boul. Maisonneuve, St. Jérôme, Québec, J5L 0A1.
Tel.: 438-334-2125, 450-504-8448;
www.gaspor.com
info@gaspor.com
Alexandre Aubin, co-owner, 450-712-0475; alex@gaspor.com ;
Joey Benoit, sales director, joey@gaspor.com
Products are sold frozen.
Canards du Lac Brome
40 Chemin du Centre, C.P. 3430, Knowlton, Québec J0E 1V0.
Tel: 450-242-3825
canardsdulacbrome.com; info@canardsdulacbrome.com
Brigitte St. Julien, marketing manager, bstjulien@cdlb.ca