KD: Canada's soul food

Not that I gave it too much thought, but if you had asked me to name Canada's soul food, I probably would have said poutine, the Quebecois combination of fried potatoes, gravy, and cheese curds. I've seen the squishy curds in cellophane bags for sale in supermarkets, so I suppose you could prepare the dish at home, but I have only eaten it at restaurants or street stalls. Sometimes it is really good. My favourite version is at our local gastropub, The Harbord House, where they use a mix of sweet and regular potatoes, and make the gravy from a veal jus. Yum. In fact poutine goes some way toward helping me understand why anglo Canada is so keen to keep francophone Quebec in the federation. (Delightful though it is to visit Montreal, keeping a pet French-speaking province seems an awful lot of trouble: all that double-labelling and signage, having publicly to fund not just French programs in schools but a whole parallel Catholic school board... )

In any case, I found out recently that I'm entirely wrong about poutine being Canada's soul food. That accolade goes to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, or as it is known here, Kraft Dinner. It's so well-loved it has a nickname: KD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Dinner). Heart-and-soul food.

The inventor of Kraft's powdery mac-and-cheese in a box, James Lewis Kraft, was born in Fort Erie, Ontario. This fascinating or at least mildly interesting bit of history came to my notice recently due to the kerfuffle over giant food multi-nationals Kraft and Heinz merging, generating concern for Canada's KD factories. (Will they call the new corporation HeinzKraft or does that sound too much like a German architecture movement?) Feature writer Jim Coyle  in the Toronto Star abjures his readers: 'But, brothers and sisters, only from our frostbitten, orange-stained fingers will they pry the manufacturing plant that makes Canada's national soul food' (Insight, Sun Mar 29 2015, p IN3).

See?

I grew up with boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese stacked in the pantry; their contents often appeared as dinner during my childhood. I had no idea  mac and cheese existed without cardboard casing. I hated the stuff. Not until I moved to England the first time, as an undergraduate on a study-abroad program, did I discover the homemade version. A charming pamphlet of vegetarian recipes from a now-defunct Brighton health food store, 'Simple Supplies', provided one of my life's eureka moments: I adore mac and cheese.

And yet, today, I have a stash of (21st century) KD on my own pantry shelves. My daughter loves both to prepare and eat it.  Perhaps the preference skips a generation. Or, maybe, my children have become real Canadians.

Not sure how I feel about that. 

POSTSCRIPT: I recently came across this YouTube video, from a series called 'Box Mac', which compares and contrasts America's and Canada's versions of Kraft Mac'n'cheese. All you ever wanted to know about macaroni and cheese, and more. Much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZYESQVHxs&index=24&list=PLmqeFKoBmT0I_glrgD5zC8NEXgTQ_-Jx_