Squash Stuffed Pasta with Sage and Parmesan, Au Pied de Cochon’s Harvest Season Sugar Shack
There were 12 courses at Au Pied de Cochon’s Harvest Season Sugar Shack in Mirabel, and I can tell you exactly which one I would drive two hours to eat again. It was the squash stuffed pasta with sage and Parmesan. Not the most elaborate dish of the meal. Not the biggest. Not even remotely the sort of thing you would expect to be thinking about weeks later. But here we are.
A friend managed to get us a reservation at the sugar shack of celebrated Quebec chef Martin Picard. Located in Mirabel, about an hour outside Montreal and less than two hours from home, it is a destination for people who take their eating seriously, or at least seriously enough to spend a good chunk of a day doing it.
Growing up, my parents’ house was dinner party central. Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays, anniversaries and the occasional “come on over for dinner” all seemed to end up in the same kitchen.
After my mother passed, I found her dinner party notes: menus, ingredients, little reminders and glimpses of the meals she had prepared for family and friends over the years.
In this series, I’m going back through those notes and recreating one dish from each dinner party. The recipes are part reconstruction, part memory, and a way of understanding where my own passion for cooking came from.
A Life Lived in Courses
October 9, 1995
Thanksgiving was running late.
Not disastrously late. Nobody had lost the turkey. We had simply decided that Thanksgiving, traditionally celebrated on Sunday in our family, would make a perfectly good Monday.
There were seven of us around the table, including my grandmother Rose, my mother’s mother.
My grandmother was a great cook. A lot of what we ate came through her, sometimes by recipe and sometimes by osmosis.
My mother had learned the way people often learn family cooking: by watching, helping and eventually acquiring the confidence to know what belonged in a dish without having to look everything up.
Thanksgiving had its requirements.
There was stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots and turnip. And then there were a couple of things that had wandered in from another era and apparently had no intention of leaving.
Tomato aspic was one of them.
By 1995, tomato aspic had already passed its cultural peak, but my mother was not especially interested in culinary fashion. I don’t remember any of us being particularly enthusiastic about it. Still, there it was, quietly occupying its place on the Thanksgiving table.
Some family dishes survive because everyone loves them.
I had never eaten a proper Sunday roast. Not once. For someone who has spent a considerable portion of his life eating things on purpose, this seemed like a fairly serious oversight.
So I decided to fix it.
A quick search led me to The Cheshire Cat in Carp, about a 30 minute drive from home. I enlisted a few friends because if I was going to finally eat a Sunday roast, I wanted witnesses. Or accomplices.
The pub is tucked away in Carp, just off the highway, in a setting that feels a world away from the city. It is not exactly where you expect to stumble upon a memorable meal, which made discovering one there all the more satisfying.
We started with drinks in the outdoor lounge before moving to the patio. September had begun making its presence known, so the overhead heaters and blankets were a nice touch. The place was bustling, but the staff never seemed rattled by it. The servers were funny, kind and attentive without hovering, a quality that should be easier to find than it is. They made us feel less like customers and more like people who had somehow been invited over for dinner and were now expected to eat everything.
