By the time our waitress cut us down to size, we’d already eaten the following: fried sturgeon “sushi,” maple-marinated herring with potatoes, organ-meat terrine with maple buckwheat blini, foie gras in puff pastry with bechamel and cheese, lobster souffle with potatoes and smoked beef, and a meat pie containing four kinds of pork — and “garnished” with three kinds of offal.
I was with two friends at the bar of Cabane a Sucre Au Pied de Cochon, 45 minutes outside Montreal, and each of those last three dishes could have filled up six people, easy. But we’re professionals, and we know the power of pacing. We knew better than to come close to finishing any of them. So when our waitress said, “I hope you’ve saved room for the main course,” our hearts — and our stomachs — sank. That wasn’t the main course?
One roasted duck, two more forms of pork and a pot of beans (with more duck) later, it was clear: This place can make even the pros feel like rookies. And that was before dessert hit, and hit big, with maple syrup in so many forms we lost count. By the end of the meal, when locals were ordering takeout containers by the bagful for all their uneaten food, we decided that rather than waste our bounty, we’d donate it to the couple sitting next to us. They planned to do the sensible thing and ring up a bunch of friends to come over the following day for a party.
The wild chef behind these festive mountains of food is Martin Picard, whose Au Pied de Cochon in the city has been a sensation for its unsubtle dishes, such as pig’s trotters stuffed with foie gras. As a defender of Quebecois cuisine, Picard bought a place in suburban St-Benoit de Mirabel a few years ago and turned it into his own version of a cabane a sucre, or sugar shack, where syrup producers mark the season with maple-drenched meals. And his is no fake: On-site production of maple syrup is supervised by his uncle, Marc, and the liquid gold works its way into just about every dish, as does Picard’s sense of playfulness — and unbridled excess. (If you think that this man knows, or cares, about the meaning of “over the top,” consider the fact that he piles his fried-sturgeon sushi with pork rinds, and he sprinkles those with flecks of gold leaf.)
Picard’s sugar shack sells out its entire season within hours of opening reservations the previous Dec. 1, but there’s always next year. And it’s far from the only way to experience the region’s favorite obsession of late winter and early spring. Quebec, which produces 75 percent of the world’s maple syrup, is dripping with the stuff, and not just in the countryside, where carloads of families pack into hundreds of cabanes a sucre for maple everything.
Mad about maple syrup
In Montreal, the season was quickly coming to an end because of the early arrival of warm weather; when the nights stop freezing and the trees start blooming, the sap stops running. Nonetheless, even a short season sparks pop-up shacks on busy plazas and outside subway stations such as Mont-Royal, where signs reading “Le nouveau sirop d’erable est arrive!” announce the arrival of the season’s syrup and the vendors sell such Quebecois specialties as barbe a papa a l’erable (maple cotton candy, or “papa’s beard”) and tire d’erable (maple taffy).
I had both at Picard’s restaurant but hankered for the traditional presentation of the taffy, laid out on fresh snow. So I took the Metro up to the Montreal Botanical Garden and trudged past its insectarium and through the sprawling arboretum, where snow was quickly melting, to the Tree House building. There, another Mirabel-based maple house, Les Sucreries Jette, had set up an outpost for the season. I stepped up to one of the big metal trays, and a gray-haired man wearing stylish eyeglasses ladled a swipe of thickened maple syrup onto the ice in front of me. I handed him a $2 coin in exchange for a little wooden stick. I waited a few minutes for the syrup to start to harden, then poked the stick into one end and twirled until I had a pure blast of sticky sweetness, the sun shining through it as through amber.
“There’s your lollipop!” a man told his son, who was twirling in unison with me. “Get it!”
Perhaps it was the sugar rush, but as the boy begged for another round, I found myself itching to know a little more about the history of maple sugaring in Quebec, so I headed back downtown to Canadian Maple Delights in the Old Port neighborhood. Downstairs from all the pastries and other maple products (maple caviar, anyone?), the free museum has a décor with a tree motif. Amid historical examples of taps, pails and other equipment, the display tells how Native Americans were the first to discover “sinzibuckwud,” the Algonquin word meaning “drawn from wood,” using their tomahawks to cut into the tree, reeds to run the sap into birch buckets and hot stones to concentrate it. A far cry from modern production, in which tubing takes sap from thousands of trees right to storage tanks and reverse osmosis systems shorten the time it takes for the sap to evaporate into syrup.
Interesting, all. But I was most captivated by a short mention that family “sugaring-off” events, the end-of-the-season neighborhood parties that gave birth to the commercial sugar shack experience, would typically top off the large meal — including maple taffy on snow — with “outdoor activities or a dance to burn off the calories.” I was still feeling bloated from the previous day’s maple-soaked brunch in Mirabel, and it struck me that if Picard wanted to be particularly true to Quebecois tradition, perhaps he should require everybody at his cabane a sucre to get up after that last course of maple-glazed sticky buns, maple taffy on maple praline ice cream, and maple-cream-filled eclairs topped with maple cotton candy, and do a little dance. Or a big one.
Better yet, maybe he should take down all those tubes behind the shack, streaming from tree to tree like so many telephone lines, and instead make his guests haul all those buckets of sap back to the evaporator by hand. Something tells me that those Algonquin Indians and early settlers, a little more active than your average American tourist in Montreal, felt just fine after even the largest maple-soaked meal.
I, however, needed to find a gym.
The Details
Stay: Hotel Anne Ma Soeur Anne, 4119 Rue Saint-Denis, 877-281-3187, Right in the heart of the lively Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood. Request a room facing the rear terrace rather than the street, or prepare for the noise. Rates from $91.
Hotel Nelligan, 106 Rue Saint-Paul Ouest, 877-788-2040, . Beautifully stylish hotel in the Old Port neighborhood, featuring a weekend sugar-shack buffet on the heated terrace through April 22. Rates from $199.
Dine/Drink: Cabane a Sucre Au Pied de Cochon, 11382 Rang de la Fresniere, Mirabel, 450-258-1732, Chef Martin Picard’s over-the-top shack, about 45 minutes west of the city, is sold out for the season, but mark your calendar for midnight Dec. 1, when the place starts taking reservations for 2013. Then act quickly. Set menu, $57.
La Cabane, Scena, Pavilion Jacques-Cartier, Old Montreal, 514-288-0914, Creative sugar-shack cuisine in a pop-up restaurant on the pier at the end of Place Jacques-Cartier, through April 15. One seating (7 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, noon Sundays), $59.
Le Comptoir Charcuteries et Vins, 4807 Boulevard St-Laurent, 514-844-8467, Refined dishes that offer a welcome break from the sugar-shack excess. Plates to share from $9.
L’Assommoir, 211 Notre-Dame Ouest, 514-272-0777, More than 300 cocktails, including a surprisingly balanced maple’tini, $10.
DO: Canadian Maple Delights, 84 Rue Saint-Paul Est, 514-765-3456, Hundreds of maple products, plus a cafe with baked goods and sorbets made with maple, from $1.50. Downstairs, a free museum explains the history and process of sugaring.
Montreal Botanical Garden, 4101 Rue Sherbrooke Est, 514-872-1400, . In the Tree House section, weekend sugaring activities include maple taffy (tire d’erable) on snow for $2.
More info:
Joe Yonan
