Canadians love these foods, but visitors from other countries are often surprised/shocked when they first see or taste them.
Caesar cocktail
A Caesar cocktail actually looks like a plain Bloody Mary. The substitution of tomato juice for Clamato (artificial commercial tomato juice spiked with brined clam broth) makes all the difference. Loaded with Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce, this savoury, aggressively briny cocktail is beloved by Canadian brunch-goers and terrifying to foreigners.
Pouding chômeur
Meaning “poor man’s pudding,” this Québécois dessert was invented by factory workers during the Great Depression. It’s basically cake batter soaked in boiling brown sugar or maple syrup and baked.
The syrup pools at the bottom, resulting in a sweet, gooey layer of caramel underneath a mound of fluffy cake that outsiders find cloyingly sweet and heavy.
Garlic fingers
It’s pizza-shaped, covered with garlic butter and cheese instead of tomato sauce, and sliced into long, thin parallel strands. It is served with a compulsory side of donair sauce for dipping.
This sauce, made of sweetened condensed milk, vinegar, and garlic, will confuse your sweet tooth with its sweet-and-savoury flavour profile. Most foreigners simply cannot understand it.
Flipper pie
Flipper pie is a traditional Newfoundland meat pie made from the dark and oily meat cut from harp seal flippers. The meat is stewed slowly with root vegetables and pork fat; then it’s topped with pastry before baking.
Seal meat tastes extremely strong, metallic, and fishy, so this local delicacy is highly acquired and frightening to unsuspecting tourists.
All-dressed chips
Can’t decide which flavour you want? Canada simply throws barbecue sauce, sour cream and onion flavouring, ketchup, and salt and vinegar brine all over one chip. The result is simultaneously salty, smoky, sweet, and acidic, and utterly bewildering to foreigners attempting to identify just one flavor.
Shreddies
It’s a square-shaped woven whole wheat cereal that Canadians can’t seem to live without for breakfast. These sweet, malty squares are traditionally drowned with cold milk, despite how quickly they go from being aggressively crunchy to soft and soggy.
Many foreign travelers think it tastes too bitter since wheat isn’t sweet like your typical sugar-loaded cereal and it’s high in fiber.
BeaverTails
Contrary to what its gruesome name suggests, this dessert does not actually involve the flattening of any rodents. Rather, it is a long, flattened piece of fried dough stretched out and formed to look like the tail of a beaver.
Dunked generously in cinnamon sugar, hazelnut spread, or crushed candies, this carnival treat is a winter tradition many tourists think is overly greasy.
Scrapbooking
In Canada’s Maritimes, “scrapbooking” actually does not mean a photo album. Instead, this name refers to the crispy little bits of leftover pork fat and skin left over from rendering lard.
Deep-fried, heavily salted, and crunchy, they are eaten by the handful like potato chips. Snacking on pure, deep-fried pork fat is quite a culture shock for some visitors.
Tiger tail ice cream
This Canadian ice cream is visually interesting and tastes oddly delicious. It consists of neon orange ice cream swirled with thick stripes of black licorice. Creamy fruity citrus mixed with herbal-tasting black licorice makes for a very love-it-or-hate-it flavor most non-natives consider bizarre and discordant.
Peameal bacon
Authentic Canadian peameal bacon is made from wet-cured pork loin coated with fine yellow cornmeal. The meat was originally coated in ground yellow peas in colonial times.
Lean and juicy, this breakfast favourite’s texture and crust are entirely unlike that of regular bacon strips, often leaving tourists puzzled when presented with a non-crispy slab of meat.
Thrills chewing gum
Thrills is a popular brand of Canadian chewing gum known for being flavoured with something that most commercial confectioners around the world will go to great lengths to avoid: soap.
It tastes like heavily medicinal rosewater, and its slogan even advertises its history (“It still tastes like soap!”). Visitors to Canada are often baffled that Canadians would pay to ingest it.
The Sourtoe cocktail
Available only in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada, this most extreme shot contains a locally distilled whiskey consumed with an actual mummified human toe cupped in the bottom of the glass.
Established in 1973, the Dawson City by-law requires you to drink with your lips touching the dried frostbite toe. This sensational challenge continues to astound the world.
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