Eating in Toronto

Peameal

Toronto’s dish comes as a peameal bacon sandwich, and you need to understand what it is because the name misleads twice over. It isn’t bacon: it’s pork loin, the lean cut, cured in brine and then rolled on the outside in yellow cornmeal, which gives it that characteristic rim. And there are no peas in it: it’s called peameal because in the nineteenth century it was rolled in dried pea flour, which preserved better. When they switched to cornmeal, the name stayed.

You eat it in a soft roll, with mustard and nothing else, at St Lawrence Market, standing up, mid-morning. The queue is long and it moves fast.

And a warning about expectations: it’s lean meat, so don’t expect the crisp fat of English or American bacon. It’s a different thing, and it’s the thing from here.

Scarborough

East of downtown, a long half-hour out, is Scarborough, where much of Toronto’s recent immigration lives and where, without serious argument, the best food in the city is. Chinese food from several regions, Sri Lankan, Tamil, Filipino, Caribbean, Afghan. And all of it is in single-storey strip malls, ugly, with a car park in front and plastic signage.

That ugliness is the guarantee: these places don’t live off you finding them, they live off the neighbourhood, so nothing has been toned down and there’s no English menu with photographs. Toronto has the largest Tamil community outside Sri Lanka and India, and here you eat a kothu roti (roti bread chopped to pieces with blades on a hot plate with vegetables, egg and curry, making a noise you can hear from the street) that doesn’t exist in Europe. If you have a day and want to eat genuinely well, take the subway east.

Poutine, which is from Quebec

Chips, hot gravy and fresh cheddar curds. It’s from Quebec, from the countryside, from the fifties, and it reached Toronto the way anything reaches Toronto: with the people who moved. It’s eaten a lot and it’s good, but it isn’t this city’s dish and saying otherwise annoys two provinces at once.

The test of whether it’s properly made is acoustic: the curds have to squeak when you bite them. That squeak only comes from same-day fresh cheddar, unrefrigerated, and it disappears within hours.

If the cheese doesn’t squeak, it’s old or it’s grated, and then it’s a plate of chips with gravy. In Quebec that’s grounds for a serious argument. Here, slightly less.

The double-double

Tim Hortons started in 1964 under a hockey player and it is, for better and worse, a national institution: it has more outlets than any other chain in the country and it’s part of the landscape of every Canadian road. The coffee isn’t good and everyone knows it, Canadians included, who drink it anyway.

What to learn is the vocabulary: a “double-double” is a coffee with two sugars and two creams, and the expression is so established it entered the Canadian Oxford Dictionary in 2004. Ordering it that way saves you a conversation.

And a Timbit is the ball of dough that comes out of the doughnut hole: they’re sold in boxes and taken to meetings. None of this is gastronomy and all of it is Canada.