The empty stocks of cream fudge

The picture on the right is one of cream fudge being made in my parent's house. This is a trivial post, but it is to me an important issue. So last Saturday I went to the local sweet shop. It may have been my last trip, as it will be closing soon. I bought some cream fudge, as I usually do and other stuff. The fudge is all gone. it took me two days, if that. I should have stocked more. One day, I may have to actually make cream fudge myself. I tried once in my life, I ended up with caramel. I am a bad cook.

I thought I would finish this trivial post with a funny anecdote, a great unknown line that is sort of about sugar. It was said by a pupil in one of the schools I used to work with and I have wanted to immortalise it on Vraie Fiction for quite a while. It was a difficult time, but some of the children were adorable. When some were winging about doing a tedious task, I used to say: "Come on, you are not made of sugar! You are not gonna melt with the effort." I was in a history class in year 6 (I think) once and said this to one of the girls. Another girl then said laughing: "Yeah, you are not very sweet!" I tried to tell her off, but I was laughing too much. I managed to ask her to be nice to her fellow pupils, but I was still laughing. I remember that line every time I have somethign high in sugar.

A visit to the local sweet shop

As my readership knows, the local sweet shop, which I adore, is going to close in September, so imminently. I love sweet shops in general and this sweet shop in particular, because of the quality of their products (they make one of the best fudge I ever ate) and because the staff is so warm and friendly, as a sweet shops staff should be. Its closing is very bad news for the town, I genuinely think it lose some of its warmt and friendliness. So I went to the local sweet shop this afternoon. I bought the usual cream fudge, also liquorice, some lucky dips and chocolate. It will not be enough to keep them in business, but I will have enjoy their sweets before they close down.

May Fayre

There was a fayre today in the local park. We usually go there for a bit. I enjoy fayres quite a lot (although they can get boring). My favourite is Nuit Blanche sur Tableau Noir on the Plateau Mont-Royal, which I haven't been to in years. At the local May Fayre I am fairly predictable: I have lunch there, usually burgers, I have a pint of real ale (or more), I buy keyrings and other stuff from the Cats Protection Society (I did again this year, two keyrings as they don't last long and one bookmark), I try to encourage local businesses and I avoid like the plague Christian stands (I prefer to save cats than souls).

So that is pretty much what I did this year. I also bought some cream fudge, not from the stand of our local sweet shop but from another one, owned by a sweet old man who travels around towns to sell his products. He does not even have a shop. He also had the weirdest fudge mix, with rhubarb in it. It was still delicious and so unique I had to buy some. I love rhubarb, but that is for another post. It was a strange May fayre as it did not look like May at all: the weather was cloudy and quite cool for a month of May. In a way it was fitting that I had burgers, dark beer (an IPA that was not very pale) and fudge. Still, I miss Nuit Blanche sur un Tableau Noir a lot. There was something Bohemian about it that I could never find in other fayres.

Reflexion on food and identity

I was thinking about this entry I made not so long ago, and I think why many associate food with national and regional identity is because it is so dependent of its environment. Sure, there are things we can find everywhere (Cadbury's chocolate, Pringles, etc), but as the movie Pulp Fiction illustrated, even the food in MacDonalds differs slightly from place to place, if only in name. But it is more fundamental than this. For example, an English apple and one taken from one of our apple trees in Chicoutimi are not only of different variety, but have also grown from a different soil, in a different environment, hence it will taste different.There is also the question of freshness: if one wants Boivin cheese, especially their cheese curds the best place to get it is where they make it so fresh it's still squishy when you chew it, an experience I lived numerous times, but will most likely be foreign to many Montrealers and almost every non Quebeckers. (And regarding the you are all missing something, by the way, ask my wife, she was lucky enough to eat it like this once, I am sure she does not understand how priviledged she was). Talking about cheese curds, it is something that is rare outside Québec, so it makes it a rarity for the expat I am. In the Lac-Saint-Jean region (and to a lesser extend in Saguenay), blueberries grow in large quantities, so much that we are nicknamed after the fruit. Of course, no blueberry here tastes quite the same as in my region. And we have a special chocolate and blueberry dessert (okay, blueberries covered with dark chocolate) made by the Pères trappistes (monks from the Mistassini lake, some good things came out of the Catholic church of which I will always be grateful) that is absolutely delicious and cannot be find anywhere else than in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (or almost). Fudge, made with or without maple syrup, which we call sucre à la crème (chocolate fudge we simply call it fudge), is a common delicacy in Québec, like poor people's candy, here it is rarer and more expensive, and does not have the same cultural reasonance, obviously. And I haven't talked about the many desserts (or even savoury meals) made with maple syrup, or the products of the hunt essential to make a real good tourtière. Food is about mental needs as much as physical ones.