It’s amazing how certain Canadian foods can immediately transport you back to childhood nostalgia, from lunches at school to family road trips and Sunday night snacks.
Jos Louis Snack Cakes
Vachon’s snack cake staple has been a Canadian school lunchbox favourite for generations. It consists of two soft layers of red velvet cake with a fluffy layer of white cream filling sandwiched in between. It is fully coated with a creamy, chocolatey shell.
Tearing open the package during recess to discover a perfectly round blob of chocolate cake was a kid’s daily dose of finger-friendly chocolate deliciousness.
McCain Deep ‘n Delicious Cake
There wasn’t a childhood birthday bash, thrown-together family celebration or easy weeknight dessert that didn’t involve one of these iconic square aluminum pans out of the freezer.
The original chocolate cake is pure genius, a super moist, bouncy cake layered with and covered in familiar rows of soft, sweet chocolate frosting that would always stay soft.
Glosette Raisins
Whether heading to the local cinema or out trick-or-treating on Halloween, there are always these little cardboard boxes.
Packed full of fat raisins covered from stem to end tip in a smooth, glossy coating of milk chocolate; part of the fun as a child was rattling the box like a maraca, then sliding back the small cardboard tab to dump a handful into your mouth.
Pizza Pops
Originating out of Manitoba, these handheld crescent roll pockets are the ultimate microwavable after-school treat.
It consists of pizza sauce, melted cheese, and pepperoni packed inside a soft dough wrapper that ballooned during cooking. Kids everywhere learn very quickly that taking that first bite into a hot Pizza Pop straight from the microwave is dangerous because the steam and liquefied pizza sauce can burn the tongue.
BeaverTails
Whether you ate them at an outdoor winter carnival, ice skating on a frozen canal, or at a summer festival, these fried dough treats are kid heaven.
They are stretched thin to resemble a flat beaver’s tail, fried until crispy, and served hot off the fryer. They could be topped with trendy chocolate hazelnut spread, but the traditional version mostly includes classic cinnamon and sugar.
Tourtière
As brutal Canadian winters and Christmastime approached, kitchens nationwide would smell intensely of this French-Canadian meat pie.
Stuffed into a buttery pastry crust was a mixture of ground pork, beef or veal seasoned with warming spices such as cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. Removing a slice of tourtière from the oven on Christmas Eve is one of the fondest kitchen memories of Canadian youth.
Swiss Chalet Sauce
Visiting a restaurant or picking up a box full of rotisserie chicken practically guaranteed an encounter with this unmistakable, intensely nostalgic dipping sauce. An herbaceous, tangy, mildly spicy mixture, this completely divides people. You either love it or hate it.
As a child, part of the joy of eating this meal was tearing up a soft white bun and dipping it into the sauce packet until it was fully saturated.
Timbits
No road trip, Saturday morning hockey practice or classroom birthday party is complete without a multicoloured cardboard box of Tim Hortons’ bite-sized donut holes.
Kids enjoy choosing their own mix from the display and debating endlessly about which flavour is best. Parents usually choose honey dip or apple fritter, while kids tend to heavily favour the neon sprinkle-coated birthday cake or the chocolate-glazed.
Cheese Strings
Opening a Black Diamond Cheese String at lunchtime recess is a true performance art in Canadian elementary schools. Black Diamond Cheese Strings come individually wrapped in plastic with sticks of mozzarella cheese inside.
They are meant to be pulled apart into thin string-like pieces. Children spend ages tearing the thinnest strings they could manage. To eat a Cheese String whole without creating any strings was a schoolyard crime back then.
Shreddies
This woven, checkerboard-patterned whole wheat cereal has been a breakfast staple throughout Canada for generations.
Whether enjoyed drowning in milk on a weekday morning or baked into a savoury “Nuts & Bolts” trail mix concoction by a grandparent during the holidays, the distinctive snap of these tiny tiles is familiar to Canadians of all ages.
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