Salmon Guédille

I have something of a giddy and over-the-top crush on Québécois food. Sure, we all love poutine (oh, poutine...) but just how familiar are you with the awesome food of La Belle Province? Oh, and by "La Belle Province" I mean Quebec, and not the fast-food restaurant chain of the same name - though that bit of linguistic overlap is particularly apropos here. Quebec has a long, fascinating culinary history that's reflected by its diverse contemporary food culture, but there's a special connection to the wonderfully weird and adventurously indulgent foods that have emerged from Quebec's many greasy spoon snack bars, aka les Casse-Croûtes.

I'm admittedly rather fascinated by these dishes, though I think I come by this interest honestly enough. My parents grew up in Montreal but moved the prairies before I was born - the perfect recipe for a slightly romanticized and catching form of nostalgia, at least as far as food is concerned. Unsurprisingly, this meant that I grew up accustomed to a number of Eastern Canadian specialties, including a handful that always held that coveted 'treat' status in my mind. And while I (like every child) knew a treat when I was on the receiving end, it wasn't until I was much older that I began to realize that my friends had no idea what these foods were. Nobody I knew ate tourtière at Christmas, but I assumed in my youth that this was more of a holiday thing than an Eastern thing. While I eventually figured that one out for myself, it was two other foods that clued me in to the 'otherness' of my family's food in the land of wheat fields and pickup trucks: Jos. Louis, and hot dog buns.

Jos. Louis snack cakes (pronounced in the anglo-style as 'Joe Louie' and pluralized to sounds like 'Joe Louies') are puck-shaped, packaged red velvet cake with a cream filling and a chocolaty shell. Sounds pretty basic, right? Well when I was a kid, they were insanely hard to find, and so when we'd manage to acquire a box it was cause for celebration. You know, because they were amazing. I mean, they probably still are amazing, but I haven't had one in ages because I'm not 11, I need to exercise restraint, and I'm not prepared for the fallout that will inevitably come from my kids trying them. The thing is, when I was a kid, nobody else even knew what they were.  Worse still, everyone figured they were just something like a wagon wheel. A WAGON WHEEL. (You need to picture me sneering when you read that last bit).  For the uninitiated, wagon wheels are (inferior) snack cakes that look very much the same, but are typically filled with some kind of spray-foam-esque marshmallow substance sandwiched between two biscuits with all of the charm (and flavour) of particle board. Comparing them to my beloved Jos. Louis' was basically sacrilege. Fortunately, Québécois French has a whoooooole bunch of words dealing with that very subject, but I try to keep the language tame 'round these parts. Over time, Jos. Louis' became more common in the West and I was able to communicate the difference to my friends with a little more clarity and a lot less colourful language. But sadly, I'm still fighting the good fight when it comes to my second beloved Québécois food item: the center-cut hot dog bun.

Center-cut, bread-sided hot dog buns might not sound too exciting, but they fill my heart with joy (and possibly cholesterol).  We'll get the what and the why in a moment, but first, let's keep unraveling the thread of my culinary obsessions. By the time I was in my twenties I was happily aware of my own personal Québécois foods, and more than happy to get on a soapbox for them in the flat and frozen prairies. But it wasn't until I spent two years living in Montreal myself that I came to truly appreciate Quebec's snacks, diners, and simple meals. At the risk of falling into the trap of 'you had to be there' food writing, it's tough to get at what exactly makes a steamed wiener or a stacked smoked meat sandwich or a fresh Montreal-style bagel so damned good. You just sit down (or stand up if you're getting a hot dog), dive in, and you just... know. I guess the best way I can put it is to say that it's unabashedly all about the flavour.  Forget the pretenses of decor, marketing, or trendy haute-cuisine trappings - it's just about best recipe in its simplest and most addictive form.

Bagels are another wonderful and illustrative example.  New York and Montreal are constantly arguing about who makes the best bagels, but honestly, both cities need to put aside their differences and take a stance against the convenience-before-quality plastic-bagged scourge that passes for a bagel elsewhere on the continent. Round bread does not a bagel make. Things changed for me the first time I say down in a Montreal bagel shop.  I watched a worker deftly maneuver a massive wooden board resembling some kind of Brobdingnagian tongue depressor into the fiery maw of the wood burning oven.  I saw him expertly scooping dozens of sesame seed bagels, pulling them from the oven and tossing them off of the paddle and into a long wooden bin.  It's the kind of work that's mesmerizing in its perfect simplicity.  Before the bagel even makes it to your plate, you've become truly appreciative of the process.  When you take that first bite - well, then you're in love. And for the record, lest I sound overly romantic about the process, it's definitely still about the flavour. Those pre-packaged, over-priced bagel-shaped-objects you find in the grocery stores? They straight-up can't compare.

Now let's be honest - the world is full of food experiences like these. Anywhere you go, you're likely to find some amazing bit of cuisine that just blows you out of the water and ruins you for anything else. The weird thing about Quebec though, is that a bunch of the foods that fit this bill are really common, every-day sorts of foods. Scalding maple syrup poured onto the snow may not be an everyday thing (yes, my non-Canadian, non-Vermont-based readers, that is a real thing), but hot dogs, sandwiches, fries, and rotisserie chicken are, and in Quebec they're AMAZING. I think it has something to do with the simple yet effective creative push to mash good things together. Fries are good. So is gravy. How about cheese curds? Mash that all together and you've got poutine. Oh, poutine! And you can export these ideas just fine, but if you don't pay attention to what makes it good (for poutine, it's thick fries, great gravy, and fresh cheese curds), then it will falter, a grim spectre of its true potential. Oh, poutine. Casse-croûtes, like greasy spoons, food carts, and street vendors around the world, are inherently democratic places. A good recipe - and a slavish attention to making sure that it's followed properly - is the only real key to success. After all, there's someone just down the street looking to beat you at this game, and customers will line up out their door if s/he can do it better than you.

None of this is to say that there's no room for innovation; in fact, the opposite is true. If you can put a unique twist on a recipe it might just take off and become a whole new thing all on its own. In fact, it's this very process that led us to the wild and wonderful guédille. The guédille is, essentially, a hot dog bun filled with a bunch of stuff that is not a hot dog. In general, this takes the form of a mayonnaise-dressed salad (chicken, egg, coleslaw, etc.), either alone or with something else. In Baie-du-Febvre they grill the bun and fill it with club-sandwich-style fillings. In Gaspésie they fill it with coleslaw and French fries, because Gaspésie is not messing around. But one thing unites all the recipes, and that's the right kind of hot dog bun.

So what's so special about this mythical hot dog bun, you ask? It's simple really - they're sliced from the top, not the sides, and they're baked like tray buns, so that when they're pulled apart they leave soft, white bread 'faces' on the side. If we left it there, the difference would be negligible, but here's the thing: those bread faces can be buttered and fried like a grilled cheese. If you can't understand why a hot dog (or guédille) with grilled-cheese-style bread would be a great thing then you'd better find a pack of top-loading buns and come on over. I'm going to sit you down, put on some Harmonium, and we're going to do it up right. A guédille can come in a grilled (well, fried, but grilled sounds nicer) or plain bun, and I know that tradition is tradition, but I can't fathom why you WOULDN'T want to go with the grilled version. The fillings taste that much better enveloped in buttery, crispy, perfectly browned (and just a little greasy) bread.

Sadly, top-loading hot dog buns remain elusive West of Ontario. This means that those of us in the bread-sided top-loading bun camp are forced to proselytize to anyone willing to listen in hopes that one day bakeries will catch on. We're also forced to smuggle buns out of Quebec, thank you very much. I once had to explain to a somewhat confused airport security agent in Montreal why my carry-on was literally filled with bags of hot dog buns. No, I'm not making that up. But fret not, my adventurous food-loving friends! I'm here to help.

If you're in the eastern part of Canada and you just didn't know about this stuff, well, you're welcome. And thanks to the wonderful and popular lobster roll (which is basically another kind of guédille) you can probably find top-loading buns with ease in New England, and possibly elsewhere along the Atlantic coast. I don't know yet, but if you do, leave a comment. As for everyone else, I'm going to share my hot dog bun life hack with you in the Recipe Notes below.

Note: Butter is only used to toast fry the sides of the buns. Omitting this step or using a butter substitute makes this meal dairy-free as well. But don't omit the step, because it's the best. Use a dairy-free substitute if you need to, but fry those buns.