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Want entertainment? Head to Vishtèn’s website, and let the francophone band from Prince Edward Island beguile your eyes and ears with its mix of traditional fiddling, extroverted foot percussion, and 21st-century arrangements.

If you’re in need of education, the trio’s members will be happy to fill you in as well, with notes on Maritime history and the survival of the Acadians.

And if you’re hungry, you’re also in luck: the aforementioned website also includes a selection of recipes, some handed down from family members and others garnered on tour.

Perhaps you’ll learn to make chicken fricot with dumplings, a hearty stew with roots in French peasant cuisine. I’ve already bookmarked the page for pâtés à Dodo, a rustic variant on Quebec’s famous tourtière, as made by multi-instrumentalists Emmanuelle and Pastelle LeBlanc’s grandmother Claudette. But it’s telling that the Vishtèn menu also includes Knoblauchcremesuppe, an Austrian garlic soup, and homemade wontons. Proud of their culture the LeBlanc sisters might be, but they’re no chauvinists.

Are their recipes a metaphor for their sound?

“Oh, maybe!” Pastelle LeBlanc says with a laugh, reached at home in Charlottetown. “But we’re just so much foodies that we thought it would be interesting to maybe put a few Acadian traditional recipes on there, like the fricot and the meat pies—and we’ve been talking about adding more. But the others are just things we’ve picked up here and there on the road.”

Video of Vishtèn TERRE ROUGE Vishtèn, "Terre Rouge"

That the LeBlancs benefited from an atmosphere of home cooking and house parties is obvious.

“We grew up very much surrounded by music,” Pastelle confirms. “My dad was a music teacher, as well, at the school, and he would invite people over all the time, so there were many parties and many musical sessions. And when we were younger we step-danced for a long time, which is a really natural thing here too. Most people will know how to do a step or two. But then the music came in a little bit later, in our teen years.”

LeBlanc points out that even the most traditional forms of Acadian music are inherently cosmopolitan, incorporating elements of French, Irish, Scottish, and Indigenous culture. Vishtèn broadens the mix further by adding Pascal Miousse, whose roots are on the Magdalen Islands; he’s a fiercely rhythmic fiddler, and on the band’s latest album, Horizons, he also gets to show that he’s a skilled electric guitarist. With Emmanuelle and Pastelle each playing several instruments, the three are easily able to duplicate the record’s full and vibrant sound on-stage.

“As you’ve heard, there’s lots going on!” Pastelle enthuses. “There’s a lot of bass; let’s say that I’m doing that on the piano with the left hand. Pascal’s set up with his fiddle and effects; the electric guitar that you hear on the album transfers pretty well to the live show. And then Emma’s got all the percussive stuff and a mandolin with an octave sound, like a bass, added on there. It was a lot of work to transfer the album sound to the live show, but we’ve been touring with it since last June, and it’s going pretty well.”

Vishtèn plays the Festival du Bois, which takes place at Coquitlam’s Mackin Park from Friday to Sunday (March 22 to 24).