There are 95 ways to taste poutine, and I’m only just getting started. There’s the dish as its inventor intended – a bowl of hot chips smothered in cheese curds and gravy. You’ll find it on the menu at practically every cafe, diner and canteen in Quebec, the Canadian province in which it originated in the late 1950s. It comes with no ancestry, no precise explanation of who first thought these disparate ingredients might be combined into an explosion of flavour. But so popular is this messy, tasty, improbable dish – hangover food incarnate – it’s often described (much to the annoyance of Québécois) as “Canada’s national dish”.

La Poutine Week – a country-wide celebration held in the depths of winter each year – is almost over by the time I arrive in Quebec City, but there are still plenty of hot chips going begging. And they’re being served in the most imaginative of guises: there’s poutine onion soup from Bistro St-Malo, an elegant serve of chips bathed in onion confit and Boréale Rousse beer and swathed in bubbling cheese.

Just one of the ways to serve up Quebec City’s poutine dishes. Credit:Getty Images

There’s the Don Corleone poutine from Boston Pizza Quebec, an Italian medley of sausage, meatballs, pepperoni and vegetables cooked in garlic butter and slapped on a bed of fries. There are Les Botanistes’ on-trend polenta fries are delicately scattered with cheese, smoked pumpkin seeds and spruce-infused vinegar. There are poutines that are vegan and gluten-free and keto (the latter’s chips are replaced with crispy slivers of turnip, parsnip and celeriac). There’s even “ice poutine” for dessert – rolled waffles dressed in ice-cream and chocolate coulis.

But the snow is deep and the cold is ruthless, so I shuffle into the first eatery I find on my walk towards the Boulevard Champlain. This is Le Chic Shack, where poutine is more at home on the menu than sparkling water and Coca-Cola. I select La Forestière – hand-smashed chips dressed in wild mushroom ragout, parmesan, cheese curds, shallots and fresh herbs – and sit at the window watching the wintry city pass by as I devour its most beloved of dishes.