As a punch line, poutine has a lot going for it. Many Canadians believe that it is also good to eat. Their fondness for it is, in fact, often the basis of the punch line, since an outlander who hears a description of poutine in its basic form—French fries with cheese curds and brown gravy—is likely to think that it sounds, well, disgusting. Jokes about poutine on that level are the equivalent of jokes about the Scots eating haggis or Scandinavians in the upper Midwest crowding into church basements to feast on lutefisk—an ethnic ritual that my first taste of lutefisk moved me to compare to teen-age circumcision. On a recent trip to Montreal, a city that is to poutine what Baltimore is to crab cakes, I asked a young woman I’d met there named Emily Birnbaum why poutine often struck people as funny. “Because it’s so gross,” she said. “After you finish a poutine, you say, ‘I can’t believe I ate that.’ ” It almost goes without saying that she was eating poutine as we spoke. So was I.

Poutine was invented in rural Quebec—the time was roughly half a century ago; the identity of the inventor is the subject of some dispute, although a restaurant proprietor named Fernand Lachance is what detectives would call “a person of interest”—and for many years the humor about it within Canada could have been seen as a way of making a mildly deprecating jape about its home province. I live in Nova Scotia in the summer, and I’ve heard similar remarks about the fondness Newfoundlanders exhibit for pork scraps. In recent years, poutine has rapidly widened its range—although someone from Quebec who’s tasting a poutine in Alberta is likely to appear disdainful, like a travelling salesman from Buffalo sniffing suspiciously at what a Southern California sports bar lists on its menu as Buffalo Chicken Wings. In addition to pointing out that the proper pronunciation is poo-TIN rather than the more commonly heard poo-TEEN, a Québécois would respond to, say, the use of shredded cheese rather than Cheddar-cheese curds the way a strictly raised Buffalonian would respond to wings served with cucumbers and Thousand Island rather than celery and blue-cheese dressing. At the cash registers of convenience stores in Quebec, a province that produces nearly half the Cheddar cheese in Canada, it is customary to find packages of cheese curds. If they’re relatively fresh, cheese curds, which might be described as Cheddar before the taste is added, squeak when you bite into them—a phenomenon that, in the view of some upmarket cheese connoisseurs, remains their most appealing characteristic.

National franchise restaurants in Canada like Harvey’s and New York Fries and Burger King now have poutine on the menu even in provinces that are overwhelmingly Anglophone. Toronto has at least one restaurant that serves virtually nothing but poutine—Smoke’s Poutinerie, a start-up franchise that, following the trend of using the standard dish as a base to build on, offers twenty varieties, including double-pork-peppercorn poutine and curry-chicken poutine. Montrealers who feel a poutine yearning coming on while travelling in the United States have a chance these days of finding relief in upstate New York and northern New England and even on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Canadian chefs with national reputations often do gourmet takes on poutine, the way Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters began some years ago to do gourmet takes on pizza. In Toronto, Wine Bar, which was originally owned by a prominent chef named Jamie Kennedy, has a poutine of the day on the menu—Local Organic Fries as Braised Lamb Poutine, for instance, paired with a glass of Bodega Estepa 2007 Pinot Noir. Commenting on the results of a nationwide survey last summer, Roy MacGregor, who often writes about Canadian identity in the Globe and Mail, wrote that one of the more surprising discoveries was the possibility that “the national food of Canada is now poutine”: more of the survey’s respondents, it turned out, had tasted poutine than had been in a canoe or seen a moose. If poutine is a joke, then, it may be a joke not just on Quebec but on the entire country.

A Canadian satirist named Rick Mercer used to do a series of television remotes known as “Talking to Americans,” in which he asked Americans questions that revealed them to be pretty much oblivious of the huge, contiguous country that is their most important trading partner. He asked questions like whether Canada, which he described as a country without a seacoast, needs a navy or whether Canada should switch from its twenty-hour day (more minutes in each hour, of course) to be in line with the American twenty-four-hour day or what should be done about the Russian invasion of Chechnya and Saskatchewan. He persuaded Americans to sign petitions to stop the Toronto polar-bear hunt and put an end to the Canadian custom of leaving the elderly to die on ice floes. His best-known coup came during the 2000 Presidential campaign, when, having insinuated himself into a pack of reporters, he shouted out a question to George W. Bush: What was the candidate’s response to the statement by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Poutine that Bush looked like the man who should lead the free world into the twenty-first century? Bush looked immensely pleased. “I appreciate his strong statement,” he said. “He understands I believe in free trade. He understands I want to make sure our relations with our most important neighbor to the north of us is strong. And we’ll work closely together.”

During a visit to New York last spring, Calvin Comfort—a young man I’ve known since he was a child in Nova Scotia—told me that he ate poutine in Vancouver, where he now lives, but when I asked him if he ate it often he looked startled. “If you ate it often,” Calvin said, “it would kill you.” Some people find the almost brazen unhealthiness of poutine another opportunity for humor. The T-shirts offered for sale by a Web site called Montreal Poutine bear the legend “Body by Poutine.” A poutine at Kentucky Fried Chicken has been measured by a weight-loss program called Keep Canada Slim at nine hundred and seventy calories, fifty-four grams of fat, and more than twenty-six hundred milligrams of sodium. Roy MacGregor called poutine a “concoction that should only be consumed by the heartless.”

It is widely assumed that someone seen digging into a poutine has not come to the table directly from the gym: poutine has a strong association with late-night eating by young people who have had a lot to drink—either because it acts as what I’ve heard referred to as a “beer sponge” or because they’re too drunk to know any better. Poutine’s association with unhealthy eating and excessive drinking may be part of the reason that it is considered by some Montreal residents of relatively sophisticated tastes and mature years to be at least embarrassing and maybe beyond the pale.

On my recent trip, I saw three such Montrealers of my acquaintance—one of whom illustrated his lack of food snobbery by waxing eloquent about a place called Wilensky’s, a lunch counter where you decide whether you want the top or the bottom of an onion roll wrapped around your hot dog. (“Give me a top,” you say to the counterman, or “Give me a bottom”; I don’t know what would happen if you said, “Give me the whole roll.”) Two of these people, including the Wilensky’s fan, made it quite clear that they had never eaten poutine, and the third said that she had tasted it once long ago. Her tone of voice was an indication that she considered poutine-eating to be, like text-messaging or attending heavy-metal concerts, an activity best left to the young. In the summer of 2008, when the invitation to the Canadian Embassy’s Canada Day party in Washington depicted Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec City, holding a bowl of poutine, Jean-Paul Perreault, the president of a Francophone advocacy group called Impératif Français, said that linking Champlain to such a crude dish was “contemptuous and unacceptable”—prompting the Embassy to issue an apology and causing some people who posted comments on the Toronto Star’s Web site to suggest that Jean-Paul Perreault lighten up un peu.

I had a top at Wilensky’s myself. The tops have the onions on them; I can’t imagine why anyone would have a bottom. This was at lunch on the day I arrived in Montreal. It was a bifurcated lunch, since I also fortified myself with a smoked-meat sandwich at a legendary Montreal deli called Schwartz’s. Before the advent of poutine, smoked meat was probably Montreal’s best-known food, although the city has always had a collateral reputation for bagels. Smoked meat, which is similar to pastrami, has certainly not been chased from the field; Schwartz’s still sells ten thousand pounds of it a week. Across the street, a restaurant called Main offers, on a menu otherwise dominated by delicatessen specialties, smoked-meat poutine. Eating a smoked-meat sandwich at Schwartz’s was what I thought of as a tip of the hat to the old champ—the equivalent of having one beef-on-weck sandwich in Buffalo before turning to some serious chicken-wing consumption. I had come to Montreal to eat poutine.

I think I first saw the word “poutine”—in French-Canadian slang, it can mean “mess,” among other things—ten or twelve years ago, on the menu board of the snack bar on the ferry that goes from Digby, Nova Scotia, to Saint John, New Brunswick. I was not tempted. With all due respect to the operators of that vessel, I have to say that I never went aboard without carrying my own food—a collection of Nova Scotia specialties that invariably included the peppered hot-smoked salmon sold in supermarkets in the Canadian Maritimes. In the summer, I snack on that salmon throughout the day, the way some people pop Tic Tacs. Poutine then more or less faded from my mind until about three years ago, when I found that Bud the Spud, a chip wagon that for many years parked in front of the main building of the Halifax library, was offering a version of poutine. Bud the Spud’s French fries were always a favorite of mine. Some summers, I would catch myself concocting an unlikely errand in Halifax, an hour and three-quarters from where I live, just to get within striking distance of Bud the Spud. I was not willing to try a poutine rather than a bag of Bud the Spud’s fries—I believe the word “adulteration” might have been uttered at the time—but Bud’s decision to offer it in what had been a straight French-fries operation was an indication of the inroads it had made. By last summer, when I noticed that the takeout connected with the only store in our village had added poutine to its menu, it began to dawn on me that poutine might be on its way to becoming another icon in a country that often seems uneasy with the ones it already has.