When newcomers to Canada, the Italian couple had discovered along Quebec’s country roads the joys of the casse-croûtes, the food shacks that lie dormant in the frozen landscape during winter and then burst to life during the all-too-short warm months.
And so on a recent afternoon, the couple, 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,” Ms. Grasso said. “We are from Sicily, so we are used to good, fresh seafood.”
The most famous menu item of Quebec’s casse-croûtes — the dish of French fries layered with cheese curds and gravy known as poutine — has become known far beyond this French-speaking province’s borders, with restaurants as far afield as Seoul 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?
Ms. 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,” Ms. Grasso said.
Casse-croûtes can be found everywhere across Quebec, many open year round.
But in far-flung areas of the vast province — as 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 American-style 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. “Winters here are really long.”
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-fledge casse-croûte. They kept the establishment’s name, which referred to its old-fashioned ice cream.
“It’s not written the same way, but it’s also a reference to Molière,’’ Mr. Noël said of the 17th-century French playwright, adding, perhaps with an overabundance of caution of what customers can expect: “We have nothing to do with Molière.”
The couple are hardly miserly in their use of local products. The strawberries and raspberries on their sundaes came from their gardens. Mr. Noël made sure to secure a steady supply of local shrimp, the small but tasty Nordic kind, whose population has dwindled with the St. Lawrence’s warming waters.
One winter, the couple came to install a new dishwasher in the shack. But a wall of snow in front blocked the entrance.
“We came back in the spring,” Ms. Grandmont said.
La Mollière stirs back to life in May. The owners spend the next five 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.
“I prepare it in secret every morning,” Ms. Grandmont said. “I bring over the ingredients to the restaurant and then hide them back in the trailer. The recipe’s in my head.”
Every casse-croûte purports to offer something unique, which is part of the restaurants’ charm, Mr. Noël said.
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,” Ms. Reyt said.
Although casse-croûtes became a Quebec institution, the influence on them of American 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 guédille au homard 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Noël, who is not related to his namesake at La Mollière.
When Mr. 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.
Chez Cathy’s poutine had a rocky start a couple of decades ago.
“In the beginning, they used Kraft cheese instead of cheese curds,’’ said Danielle Samuel, who has worked at Chez Cathy for 41 years. She shook her head.
By noon on most days, the parking lot at Chez Cathy is filled, but not all the customers were exiting their vehicles; it’s one of the few places that still serve customers by the side of their cars.
For the past nine seasons, Nathalie Dufresne has flitted from car to car, taking orders and returning with food on trays that are hung on the windows.
“The locals stay in their cars, but the tourists get out and come order at the window,’’ Ms. Dufresne said.
“A car!” Ms. Samuel alerted Ms. Dufresne, spotting the day’s first customer, though it was still morning, as the waitress sprinted outside.
It was Dave Mainville’s day off from his job as an electromechanical technician, and he wanted to spoil himself by starting the day with his favorite, a poutine from Chez Cathy. He had been coming for years and so had his mother, with whom he was planning to share the dish.
“Casse-croûtes are open only a short season, so you want to come as often as you can,” Mr. Mainville said. “You know you won’t be able to get a poutine at Cathy’s in the month of December.”
Read More: In Quebec’s Casse-Croûtes, Fast Food for a Short but Sweet Summer
