"Poutine Bison"

This is how a great regional cuisine comes into being. There are good things available, products of the place, that are brought together by the admixture of lucky chance and cultural invention. Pay attention now, because this is good.

It all started with a bison roast, a big one, from a beast killed in a pasture and hung in a barn. Since the roast was large for my household, I trimmed off a pile of stew-meat for separate use. The roast then went into a marinade—plum juice extracted from Prunus americana, the native plum of the northern plains, picked last summer along the Sheyenne.

Meanwhile the trim went into a kettle along with some onion, carrot, and herbs (a selection, mainly thyme and marjoram). Some garlic salt and vegetable bouillon deepened the broth. Then came the addition where the Native met the Nordic: a diced rutabaga.

I’d better add a word on behalf of the rutabaga, which English folk are inclined to call a Swede and feed to cattle. It’s great winter provender, healthy, keeps forever if waxed, and adds both texture and taste to all sorts of cold-weather dishes.

As we tucked into the bison rutabaga soup—eating it with a dollop of sour cream, like borscht—I was unaware that it was National Rutabaga Month, as declared by the Advanced Rutabaga Studies Institute (everybody thinks I make this stuff up), in Forest Grove, Oregon. Forest Grove has been the self-declared Rutabaga Capital of the World since 1951.

Getting back to the main event, the bison roast, next day it went into a roasting pan along with some onions and carrots. I slipped whole cloves of garlic into little cuts in the top of the roast, rubbed it with ground pepper and coriander, then set it to bake at 325 degrees. (Bison meat roasts at low temperature, because it’s dense, and conducts heat readily.)

By the time the roast was done, it had given back much of the marinade as juice in the pan, which was the basis for a lovely gravy. The gravy, gently sour from the plum juice, was reminiscent of a Sauerbraten, only more delicate. The marriage of bison and plum juice is one made in heaven, or else in North Dakota.

Speaking of culinary unions, along with the roast and gravy we served a potato-rutabaga mash, which I call potatobagas. Too bad we ate up all the mash, because potatobagas mixed with a little egg and flour and fried in butter make a great side dish for breakfast.

We’re not done yet. There was leftover gravy. It happened, too, that I had just come home from an extension gig in Towner, North Dakota, bearing curds. I mean to say, I stopped in at Winger Cheese and loaded up. Most of the curds we already had eaten up beer-battered and fried, but the remainder there in the kitchen, along with the gravy, and a bag of Norkotah potatoes that were showing their age since I dug them the previous September, led to an obvious conclusion: poutine.

Well, it’s obvious if you’ve spent time in Quebec, where poutine is the ultimate comfort food. Poutine is a plate of French fries covered with cheese curds and then slathered with brown gravy. Popular writers credit its invention to a restaurateur named Fernand Lachance in Warwick, Quebec, in 1957. He named it.

I figured that use of original ingredients gave me naming rights to the new regional concoction, which I dubbed Poutine Bison. It’s a wonderful name, if you let yourself imagine the ways it might be spoken. Mutter it with Gallic diffidence from the corner of your mouth, or exclaim it with foppish glee, or growl it sensually from the back of your throat, punctuated with a guttural chuckle—Poutine Bison, heh-heh.

All right, I’ll stop playing with my food now.

 

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