While I was attending the annual Salon Audio Montreal - the Montreal Audio Fest - the organizers always put on a dinner banquet for some of the exhibiting members of the audio industry. The dinner is held in one of the large banquet rooms at the Hotel Bonaventure which also is the host for the audio show. The theme of the banquet changes each year and this year's theme was an old-fashioned Quebecois-style sugar shack.
When my colleague from Montreal was telling us that the dinner would be a huge sugar shack spread, I was completely in the dark as to what a sugar shack really is. Sugar shacks - known as cabane à sucré in French Quebec - are dining halls on farms that produce maple syrup. From late February until mid-to-late April, sugar shacks attract many people who get together to celebrate the end of winter and the running of maple sap.
The sugary maple sap runs when temperatures get above freezing in the daylight hours, then freezes again at night. As the first sap runs, the maple sap is lighter in color and isn't as flavorful or as rich in taste. As the weeks go on, the sap begins to get thicker and darker and more robust in taste. At the end of the season, the sap gets almost a dark amber in color and is very strong on the taste buds. From what I understand, the dark syrup is usually the hardest to find and the most expensive of the four grades of maple syrup in Canada.
The sap is gathered and taken into a building where it's boiled down into syrup. As much as 90% of the sap is boiled away to make the syrup. It's a sort of festive thing to boil the syrup, and maple syrup farms have been hosting meals for the workers who help gather the sap for the boiling process for a number of years. Those dinners expanded to family and friends of the workers, and then many of the farms built large halls with banquet-style seating for anyone to visit and enjoy the festive atmosphere sugar shacks became known for.
Most of the foods at a traditional sugar shack involve the sweet and savory. Usually, the meal starts off with a bowl of split-pea soup with chunks of ham, or a corn chowder. From there, you'll see pickled vegetables such as onions and beets, fresh bread with jams, and cretons - a Quebecois-style minced pork paté that is spread on toasted bread. After that, the main course of foods such as sausages, sliced ham and tourtière - a meat pie that is usually served for holidays and special occasions. Pancakes are also a staple at sugar shacks and most of the main foods are slathered in fresh warm maple syrup.
Sometimes, the food is a bit more upscale at certain sugar shacks with wild game such as duck and goose on the menu. And that was going to be the case at the sugar shack banquet this particular evening.
After a cocktail hour and some mingling, we were instructed to take our seats. We had assigned seating and I was at a table with my German colleague, as well as my Montreal colleague and his wife. Also seated at our table were the husband and wife team who put on the Montreal Audio Fest (he was also a former co-worker of mine at my old job with the company out of Montreal), and another couple co-workers of mine from years ago who no longer worked there. It was really like old home week for me seeing a number of people I have known for years for the first time in a long, long time.
Also sitting in front of us at each of our seats was a liter can of real Quebec maple syrup. My colleague from Germany was in a quandary - he had carried-on his bag on his flight from Brussels to Montreal and he was planning to do the same thing going back home. They definitely wouldn't let him put a can of syrup in a carry-on, so he thought about just checking his bag just to bring home the maple syrup. He said, "My bag was jam-packed on the way over. I don't know how I would even get this can in there even if I checked my bag." Our Montreal colleague promised that he would send over some Quebec maple syrup to him at some point. So, I got a second can of syrup as I checked my bag when I flew to Montreal. (It was the lighter amber maple syrup - not the best real maple syrup I've had, but not bad for a gift.)
The staff started to bring out the opening salvo of what appeared was going to be a lot of food. The pickled vegetable/relish tray featured baby beets (which were wonderful), zucchini slices that had been charred and pickled, sweet red peppers, carrots and other assorted offerings. They didn't have the creton spread, but they had pork rinds which were pretty good.
Also part of the appetizers was a hearty corn chowder with chopped ham. The chowder had a rich and tasty base to it and it was also very good. But the main choices hadn't shown up yet and I was starting to get a little full.
Then the fun started. A server brought out a large platter of meat. My Montreal colleague is a vegetarian, so I knew this would be a hard pass for him. But for the others at the table, this was intriguing. I asked one of my former co-workers what was in the dish and after a quick conversation with the waiter in French I was told it was duck breast, duck thighs and duck sausage. Oh, my god...
More food came out and since we were at a long banquet-style table, there was not a lot of room on the table. But we made room for the meat pie and the baked beans. The meat pie was enveloped in a golden brown crust and looked pretty good. The baked beans were your basic western-style campfire baked beans.
I took a duck thigh, a slice of duck breast and some the baked beans. The beans were just all right, but when I added some of the maple syrup they had at the table to them, they perked right up. The duck thigh was pretty good, but the roasted duck breast was out of this world. It was cooked to a medium-rare and was thick cut and juicy. It was so friggin' rich that I wanted to die on the spot because I got so full, so quickly. I didn't even bother to try a duck sausage or any of the meat pie because I was literally in pain from all the rich food that I had eaten up to that point.
Oh, but then there's dessert - more rich and decadent stuff that I couldn't pass up the chance to NOT try just a little bit. The first thing was basically a pancake in a cup with rich maple syrup covering it. It was more like a muffin made out of pancake batter with powdered sugar on top. It was one of those stupidly easy things to make, but I would have never thought about doing anything like this. I could only manage two or three bites before I had to pull in the towel. For some reason, I was starting to get the shakes from the onset of a sugar overload.
Then someone brought over what looked like a misshapen lollypop. In Quebec these are known as "tire d’erable", which basically translates into "snow toffee". At a real sugar shack, they set up a snow-filled trough. Then they drip the boiling maple syrup onto the snow. As it slowly hardens, you put a popsicle stick in to the middle of the dripped syrup and roll it around in the snow until it gets hard. Voila! Snow toffee on a stick.
And, oh my god, if I wasn't going into a diabetic coma at that point, I figured I never would. Rich and sweet, the snow toffee was an excellent treat. I had two of them, they were so good. At the end of the night, I said to my German colleague, "I don't know if I'm going to be able to have a night cap at the bar. It's almost like I need an artery flush to get all the sugar out of my system!"
And like traditional sugar shacks - and since it's a celebration of the change of the dead of winter into the rebirth of spring - they have to have music. And this was a local Montreal band - Les Agités (The Restless) - which featured four members dressed in flannel shirts and jeans. They started off playing traditional Quebecois music - sort of an Acadian/Cajun style of music with guitars, fiddles, and one of the guys playing the spoons as the rhythm section. After about five songs, they switched gears and went rock-and-roll with a number of classic rock selections from the 50's, 60's and 70's. The lead singer was the youngest member of the group. It turns out that his father was in the group and used to be in a band/orchestra that played for Cirque du Soleil shows in Las Vegas for a number of years. (Cirque du Soleil was founded in Montreal in 1984.) His son - the lead singer - was born in Las Vegas and he seemed to be proud to be from there. He did a killer Elvis Presley imitation in singing "Jailhouse Rock" and "Suspicious Minds". They were very good and we stayed right up to the end of their set at 10 p.m., full stomach and all.
So, this really wasn't an authentic sugar shack that they have in Quebec (and parts of northern Vermont and New Hamshire in the states), but it was a good representation of what a sugar shack is all about. It was a celebration of community and the coming of spring. The food was interesting, much of it was very good, and there was a lot of it. And the sugar overload was almost unbearable. But how can you turn down such yummy food? I doubt if I'll ever make it to an authentic sugar shack in the backwoods of Quebec, but at least I was able to experience something close to the real thing.