Food and agriculture and history were never far from our thoughts during a visit to Quebec City. Indeed, the Chateau Frontenac hotel where we stayed was built partly out of a need to feed people.
When the CPR was completed, Van Horne, the president of the company, was faced with two problems: he needed people to ride the trains and the dining cars wouldn’t make it up the steep grades of the Rockies. Hence a series of hotels built like castles. The Banff Springs was the first, to take care of the dining-car problem – passengers could eat before going through the Rockies to B.C. or, going east, after coming through the Rockies.
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The Chateau Frontenac was next, to take care of passengers disembarking in Qubec City from Europe. Then came the Empress in Victoria to catch ship traffic from the west.
Quebec City is still a port city, and being from the Prairies, I was intrigued to sit of an evening in the hotel lounge and watch the lights come on on the Bunge elevator in the port below.
Inextricably linked with memories of Quebec and history are memories of Quebec and food. Tourtiere. Pork and beans with maple syrup. Fresh asparagus. Simple bread pudding with the clearest maple syrup I have ever seen. Pheasant. Maple syrup pie.
The best food memory, though, is the simplest. On a wet, snowy day, when walking would have been too uncomfortable, we took a bus tour to the country outside of Quebec City, stopping at a little country place called Chez Marie.
The proprietoress bakes bread daily in an outside oven. For one loonie, she will serve a slice of that homemade bread slathered with maple butter.
Eaten on a cold, rainy day by an open fire, it was an event to be savored.
I brought back something else from Quebec City besides maple butter and memories of food – a determination that, particularly in our rural areas, we must become more tourist-conscious.
While we may not have the long history of a Quebec City, we do have a lot of history and a lot of interesting things to see.
We should be running more bus tours from our cities to the country.
And there’s no reason why we couldn’t have a lot of “Chez Maries” dotting our countryside, selling home-baked bread with saskatoon berry jam or jam made from the myriad of other berries that grow on the prairie. Just a thought, but it seems to me we have a lot to offer here and we’re selling ourselves short.
