GASPÉ, QUEBEC—When they were newcomers to Canada, the Italian couple had discovered, on Quebec’s country roads, the joys of the casse-croûtes, the food shacks that lie dormant in the frozen landscape during winter, then burst to life during the all-too-short warm months. And so on a recent afternoon, Marta Grasso and Andrea La Monaca, sat side by side at a picnic table at one of these shacks, La Mollière, a lobster roll before him and a shrimp roll for her. A large blue sky spread out behind the casse-croûte, built on a promontory over the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. “You can taste the sea,” Grasso said. “We are from Sicily, so we are used to good, fresh seafood.
” The most famous menu item of Quebec’s casse-croûtes, poutine, has become known far beyond Quebec, with restaurants as far afield as Seoul, South Korea, specializing in the dish. But what about the funny-sounding pogo? Or a pinceau, sometimes spelled pinso? And the guédille, whose etymology remains obscure, even though it’s a staple of casse-croûtes? Grasso, who now calls Montreal home, was mystified when she first encountered a guédille, a sandwich consisting of a split-top hot-dog bun stuffed with seafood salad, meat or whatever is handy, on a trip three years ago. She was immediately hooked.
Her mother also became a fan during a visit from Italy last year. “She wanted to go eat a guédille every day,” Grasso said. can be found everywhere across Quebec, many open year round.
But in far-flung areas of the vast province — in the small towns along the St. Lawrence River or on the Gaspé Peninsula some 600 miles northeast of Montreal — they are typically mom-and-pop operations that open and close with the seasons. The menus, displayed on the exterior walls, offer typical fast food but with a French Canadian reinterpretation.
“Casse-croûtes are summer,” said Nicole Boulay, a local resident who was eating poutine at La Mollière, in Cap-des-Rosiers, a village that is part of the city of Gaspé. Mélanie Grandmont and Pascal Noël bought La Mollière shortly after getting married in 2011, turning what had been an ice cream shop into a full-fledged casse-croûte. They kept the establishment’s name, which referred to its old-fashioned ice cream.
The couple are hardly miserly in their use of local products. The strawberries and raspberries on their sundaes came from their gardens. Noël made sure to secure a steady supply of local shrimp, the small but tasty Nordic kind, whose population has dwindled in the St.
Lawrence’s warming waters. La Mollière stirs to life in May. The owners spend the next handful of months in a trailer behind the casse-croûte, no days off.
Each casse-croûte boasts of, it seems, its own secret sauce, and the trailer is also where they safeguard the ingredients of their highly classified poutine sauce: a mix of barbecue sauce with ketchup, the recipe for which was handed down by his octogenarian grandfather. Casse-croûtes are “time travel machines’’ in the history of Quebec and the lives of its people, according to “Moutarde Chou,” a book on the establishments. Quebec’s casse-croûtes first flourished amid the growing prosperity after World War II, said Gwenaëlle Reyt, an expert on the history of food in Quebec at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
“Casse-croûtes emerged with the boom in cars and tourism in Quebec,” Reyt said. Although casse-croûtes became a Quebec institution, the influence on them of American-style fast food and car culture was strong. Burgers and hot dogs became indispensable items.
“The casse-croûtes offered dishes that we never made at home,” said Michel Lambert, an author of several books on the history of family cooking in Quebec who worked at a casse-croûte as a teenager in the 1950s. “That’s why they were considered exotic.” Over the decades, dishes were reinvented and reimagined inside the modest shacks.
Sometimes the transformations seemed more linguistic than culinary. Isn’t a pogo really a corn dog after all? And a is pretty similar to a Maine lobster roll, though it could be argued that the various mutations of the guédille have made it as Québécois as poutine. At one point, Lambert researched the sandwich’s etymology.
“I never found the origins of the word guédille,” he said. “I don’t know whether it’s French or Indigenous. Maybe one day we’ll find a historical link to one man.
” At Chez Cathy, a casse-croûte in Rivière-au-Renard, another village in Gaspé city, you can get a pinso, a reinterpretation of the club sandwich. Instead of chicken, it contains ground beef patties. “It’s one of our popular items,” said Mario Noël, who along with his two sons owns Chez Cathy.
The casse-croûte began offering the sandwich under its longtime previous owner, whose daughter was named Cathy. “Now many other places offer it,” though elsewhere it was usually spelled “pinceau,” said Noël, who is not related to his namesake at La Mollière. When Noël bought Chez Cathy in 2019, the deal included a secret sauce dating back to the 1960s, as well as the restaurant’s pinso and its top-selling guédilles.
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