by H. Snowborne

Created on: January 28, 2010   Last Updated: February 27, 2010

Canadian Food:  this topic is as broad and open as the country itself, and Canada is a huge country.  There's no doubt that so much of the common cuisine Canadians all love is really a mish-mash of dishes that have traveled from everywhere in the world, along with all the people who've made Canada their home, and dishes that have come precisely from the land itself. 

Every region of Canada has its own cuisine, and the cuisine can vary from within those regions, with urban areas favouring specific foods while rural areas make use of foods more readily available and accessible close by.

Some of the most predictably well known "Canadian" foods include things like Butter Tarts, Tourtiere, and back bacon, the kinds of foods people think of as Canadian because they don't seem to be made anywhere else in the world as well, or to such an extent. 

Butter tarts are incredibly rich and buttery, filled with maple syrup and raisins that develop a sheer crust of the crystallized maple in the filling.  They're truly delicious and they're actually a variation of the Quebeçois Tarte au Sucre, literally a "sugar pie" made from maple syrup and maple sugar, a food settlers learned about from the native Indians who cultivated and depended on maple trees for millennia. 

But so much of the food that comes from Quebec is also so varied. I've heard very good arguments for making Hebrew Deli cuisine well known as "typically Canadian", since so many of the foods which have become inseparably connected with Montreal tradition involve delicatessen fare,  like Montreal Bagels (the smaller, chewier full grain bagels most Canadians prefer over the New York variety); or Montreal Smoked Meat and chopped liver-Montreal is filled with well established Deli's like Schwartz's or Ben's or Snowdon's-and plenty of other places who make a specialty of the traditional meats and deli foods in the way no one else in the world does.

If you look to either the east or the west coast, food becomes extremely regional there.

Newfoundland cuisine, for example, blends some old traditions from the United Kingdom along with the cuisine that develops from locally grown foods and a history of hardship and tough climes. 

Codfish is the region's most recognizable food, and traditional dishes include delicacies made from all parts of the fish-Fish and Brewis, "Britches" (which is the cod roe), pan-fried cod that's dipped in milk and lightly breaded before being cooked in

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