By CINDA CHAVICH

(Grosses Coques, NS) – In today’s global food market - where any dinner might include edamame, orechiette, sambal oelek or malpeques – it’s unusual to discover a traditional Canadian dish that’s completely new.

But along the shores of southwestern Nova Scotia, where the flags flying outside of every home are Acadian, the homey seaside cafes still serve rare dishes like rappie pie and fricot. That is, if you can get the well-meaning waitresses to take your order.

“Tourists don’t like that,” the motherly woman advises at the Café Chez Christophe, a local restaurant set a historic farmhouse next to the road in Grosses Coques, where the chowder and rappie pies are often filled with the fat bar clams that are the namesake of this small Acadian community.

But the aromas of old-fashioned home cooking emanating from chef Paul Comeau’s kitchen, and the happy diners tucking into the local specialties, are trumping her best advice. Soon the steaming square of “pie” is set before us, along with fricot (chicken soup with fat dumplings), and chowder loaded with local lobster and scallops.

Rappie Pie is a dish unique to this tiny corner of the world – finely grated potatoes baked with chunks of tender stewed chicken (or the local clams) layered in a starchy pie. The waitress is probably right. With its glutinous layers of slow-cooked potatoes, rappie pie may be a tad too weird for some diners, but it’s strangely comforting, too, like Chinese rice congee, polenta or creamy grits.

Here along the rocky Clare shore between Yarmouth and Digby, where French-speaking Acadians settled after they were unceremoniously “deported” from their homes in the lush Annapolis Valley by British troops some 250 years ago, the food traditions have held as fast as the Acadian language and culture. The province’s only French university, the Université Sainte-Anne is in Church Point, where the towering 56-metre spire of St. Mary’s Church (the largest wooden church in North America) dominates the landscape and students still recreate Longfellow’s Évangéline tale in a musical drama on summer nights.

Rappie pie, or rapure as it’s also known, is one of those old-fashioned dishes, likely born of necessity. While the origins of the dish are sketchy, looking at the starched bonnets and aprons of their traditional dress, it’s not hard to imagine why thrifty Acadian women might have devised this recipe to use the grated potato pulp, after it was pressed to remove its precious starch.

To make rappie pie, finely grated potatoes are squeezed dry in a cheesecloth, then the pulp is mixed with flavourful broth and layered with fried onions and tender stewed meats in a casserole dish. The pie is then slowly baked for several hours – until it is golden brown and crusty on the outside, and oddly gooey on the inside. To gild the lily, many Acadian cooks serve their rappie pie with a dollop of molasses, sweet relish, butter or ketchup.

Fricot is an old-fashioned Acadian dish, too – a thick soup with homemade broth and fat dumplings. Sometimes it’s made with the big clams found in the area, or with rabbit, but at Chez Christophe the homestyle dish is loaded with chicken, potatoes, carrots and summer savoury.

While both fall firmly into the category of peasant food, they are the kind of specialties enjoyed today by Acadians at Sunday family dinners and other special occasions, along with bread pudding, buttermilk pies and slabs of meaty tourtiere.

Stop in any of the clapboard communities clinging to the windswept rock and rugged beaches along Baie Sainte-Marie – Port Maitland, Mavillette, Comeauville, Saulnierville – each flying the tri-coloured Acadian flag with its bright yellow star, and you will find places to enjoy unique Acadian cuisine during the annual August Festival Acadien du Clare. You can even buy take-out versions of rappie pie, or the pre-pressed potatoes to make your own dish, in many Nova Scotia supermarkets.

The brutal expulsion of Acadians in the mid-1700s is truly a tragic chapter of Canadian history – but thankfully some of these stalwart settlers found their way home, cuisine intact.

(this Local Bounty column first appeared in the Globe and Mail)

©Cinda Chavich 2007

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