Will the real Canadian cuisine please stand up, eh?

Canada Day is just around the corner and, if you surveyed 20 people to come up with a food associated with our national day, lots would say a big white slab cake with white icing trimmed with a maple leaf or flag made of red piping gel – the kind served to the public compliments of one community-minded agency or another.

Others might suggest picnic fare – hot dogs, grilled burgers, potato salad and the like, more to do with the time of year than any notion of Canadian cuisine. A few might mention cheddar cheese or back bacon, unless you ask a Québécois, and then you’ll get maple syrup, poutine, pea soup or tourtière for starters.

We have such a vast, diverse nation with an equally diverse history and collection of resident souls that it’s tough to pin down any one archetypal Canadian dish, never mind a national cuisine.

Making a quick tour West to East using the Canadian Encyclopedia as our guide, we come up with a regional smorgasbord that goes something like this: Fine salmon, halibut, black cod seethed in milk and shellfish bounty from the B.C. coast punctuated with roast lamb (from Saltspring), fine Armstrong cheeses, a fiddlehead or two and the fruitful bounty of the Okanagan topped with a cherry.

Mooooving into Alberta: beef, beef and more beef. And pork, lamb, chicken and turkey, with a dash of elk, bison, partridge or pheasant, and chokecherries and wild blueberries that I’ll personally attest to for making the best pies on Earth. And let us not overlook all the fine wheat, oats and barley.

Then we’re into Saskatchewan with more eternally unfolding hectares of grain, and the whitefish, trout, pickerel from the cold still lakes in the north. Saskatoon berries (more pies) and pin cherries. But wait a sec, those grow aplenty in Alberta, too.

The fact that Saskatchewan lies on so many migratory flight paths makes hunting wild fowl a no brainer – Canada geese, partridge, prairie chickens plus mallard ducks. Of course, these constitute local fare in Manitoba, too – and in Alberta, B.C. and rural Ontario. Heck, in most of Canada you can sit down to dinner of one wild game bird or another if you know the right people.

But if you want to get really Manitoban, then you’re after the smoked Winnipeg goldeneye and the wild rice, which really isn’t rice but a grass found in marshlands clear across to Atlantic Canada, despite the fact we continue to insist on wild rice as something archetypically Manitoban, I suppose because it is a big cash crop there, but so is it, too, in Ontario, and, besides, it was the aboriginal people there, particularly in the Great Lakes region, who showed settlers how to harvest it by shaking the grains into your boat or canoe.

And what else of this bounty can’t we find in Ontario? Barely none. With three-quarters of a million lakes, you can surely hook whitefish, pike and trout for a fry-up; then there’s the beef, pork and turkey and all the game birds, orchards and vineyards mirroring B.C.’s, and some great cheese makers to boot.

If you’re talking great Canadian cheese, you’re talking Québec, with its smooth Oka, Port-Salut and Pont L’Évêque, not to mention the artistry of the skilled local cheese makers using raw milk, whose wares you’ll have to sniff out like a pig hunting truffles for no store can legally sell them. Then there are the pea and onion soups, the tourtières and poutine, the famous apples and melons. And could we still be Canadian without Québec’s maple syrup?

On to the eastern seaboard, with the fabulous seafood of New Brunswick – broiled Restigouche salmon anyone? Your fiddleheads steamed or boiled? Clam chowder, oysters. More roast lamb. Snack on some dulse (dried seaweed) and level off your thyroid before eating those fine local potatoes, potatoes and more potatoes, which are big in NB, as they are in PEI.

In fact Prince Edward Island is home to the finest seed potatoes in the world (something Pemberton farmers might dispute) as well as top-notch cheeses and lobsters, and big fat oysters inspiring the traditional Malpeque oyster bisque.

In Nova Scotia, stand by for Digby scallops, one of my all-time favourites, and oyster stew, Lunenburg sausage, Cape Breton oatcakes, blueberry grunt, crisp apples from Annapolis Valley, and unique Acadian dishes such as pâté a la Râpure (Rappie pie).

The cod fishery is but a skeleton of its former self in Newfoundland, but you can still dig into cod cheeks and cod tongues and good old Newfie-style fish and chips. "The Rock" also delights in wild berries of all sorts, the likes of which we don’t get here in the West: partridgeberries, marshberries, squashberries and bakeappple berries deliver unique flavours to jams and pies, though nothing can hold a match to seal flipper pie.

Up in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, more wild berries, moose steaks and roast and sausage, caribou, ptarmigan and Arctic grayling, which you can hook out of lakes and clear-flowing rivers in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan as well.

And so you see, a few patterns starts to emerge of what stands, for the most part, in the pantry and on the dinner table as quintessentially Canadian – food from the wild, whether it was winging its way across the sky, roaming across the plains or through the forests, slipping through cool, clear waters, or poking its head up from the earth.

These are the foods that sustained aboriginal populations for centuries and early settlers after that. Of course, early immigrants also stuck close by mainstays from their respective homelands – the French with their rich soups and casseroles, the Irish with their soda bread and corned beef, the English with their roast beef or pork, white soups and jellies, the Scots with their oatcakes and scones.

Not surprisingly, the first Canadian cookbook, The Cook Not Mad; or Rational Cookery published in Kingston in 1831 by James MacFarlane, reads like a page right out of jolly olde England, with recipes for biscuits, pound cake, ice cream and the like.

So that slab cake with the gooey icing we were talking about earlier? Enjoy. It’s pretty archetypically Canadian after all.