Canada boasts plenty of world-class restaurants, but you don’t need to splash out to try unique cuisine. As Vic Naughton, the general manager of Air Canada for New Zealand/Australia suggests, there are plenty of fun, tasty and quirky treats available everywhere.
If there is one item people associate with Canada it’s maple syrup. While we generally pour it over a stack of pancakes, Canadians have found many more creative ways to enjoy it – from maple flavoured popcorn to maple roasted sweet potatoes.
Quebec produces the majority of the world’s maple syrup and if you are there in winter make sure you try some maple taffy, created by pouring boiling hot syrup straight into clean snow.
Another famous Canadian ‘delicacy’ – I use the term advisedly – is poutine, which is simply chips drenched in brown gravy and cheese curds (moist pieces of curdled milk). I’m originally from the north of England so for me anything with chips and gravy has instant appeal, and sure enough after trying it an ice hockey match in Vancouver I fell in love with it.
Canada is enormous and as you’d imagine the different provinces have created their own local specialities such as Montreal’s wood-fired bagels, Nova Scotia’s chive-lime lobster roll, Saskatchewan’s beloved Saskatoon berry pie, and British Columbia’s Nanaimo bar.
One sweet treat you’ll find everywhere are beaver tails – a fried dough pastry stretched to resemble a beaver’s tail and topped with something sweet (such as cinnamon sugar) or savoury (such as, yes, poutine!).
Canada also has some wonderful drinks to experience, from sophisticated ice wines to the slightly less cultured Newfoundland Screech, a dark and delicious rum.
One drink I’d recommend trying is the Caesar, a legendary Canadian cocktail created by mixing vodka with a savoury concoction called Mott’s Clamato Juice. The latter is – as the name suggests – consists of tomato juice mixed with clam broth, which sounds repulsive, but is quite addictive once you’ve tried it.
Source : Stuff