But we decided to continue with our taste test anyway – there are a lot of interesting looking recipes in this book, including ones from restaurants we’ve only heard of but have never dined at before.

The Taste Test involves making a recipe from the book, as well as eating that same recipe from the actual restaurant itself. We’re in Canada, so unfortunately our choices were somewhat limited. Ward made three recipes from the book, two of which we were able to compare to the “real thing”, and one for which we had to rely on our memories of sampling.

Our choices?

KFC’s original fried chicken, as well as the biscuits to go with them, and The Outback’s Walkabout Soup.

There’s a KFC nearby, but unfortunately The Outback Restaurant near us closed down a while back so we had to rely on our memories of the soup (or rather, Ward had to rely on his memories of the soup – it’s one of his favorite things on The Outback menu).

The Ingredients

As always, Ward prepped all the ingredients first:

Yes, that is a very big container of Crisco you see in the top picture: the KFC recipe requires deep frying in either lard or Crisco. We opted for the slightly healthier choice.

And the bag of white stuff next to it? That’s MSG (monosodium glutamate). The recipe also calls for “Accent”, which Ward couldn’t find at our grocery store, so he Googled it and it turns out Accent is MSG!

The Results

First up, the chicken and biscuits. We both thought the biscuits were very similar to KFC’s biscuits. KFC doesn’t have the best biscuits in the world; they’re good but not great, as were the ones we made.

The fried chicken was delicious, but we thought it didn’t have quite the same flavour as KFC’s original fried chicken. Our pieces were juicy and tender, too, which impressed us, as we both find KFC’s breast pieces to be on the dry side. We actually liked the chicken Ward made better than KFC’s, even though the taste wasn’t exactly the same.

America’s Most Wanted Recipes’ version of The Outback’s Walkabout Soup, on the other hand, was both a big hit with everyone and a twin to the one served at the restaurant, in Ward’s opinion. Since this is what he always used to order when we’d go out to The Outback, I’ll take his word for it.

I don’t normally care for cream-based soups, but I found this soup to be lighter tasting than most cream soups, and the flavour was wonderful. Ward’s even happier, since we no longer have a branch of The Outback close enough for him to get his fill of the Walkabout Soup; now he can make it whenever he feels like it!

So our experience with America’s Most Wanted Recipes has been good so far. Another thing we really like is the opportunity to prepare and sample some signature dishes from restaurants we’ve heard about but don’t have here in our part of Canada!

A Taste of Acadie, by Marielle Cormier-Boudrea and Melvin Gallant

About this Cookbook:

For A Taste of Acadie, Melvin Gallant and Marielle Cormier-Boudreau travelled all over Acadia, from the Gaspé Peninsula to Cape Breton, from the tip of Prince Edward Island to the Magdalen Islands, and around northern New Brunswick and southern Nova Scotia. They gathered the culinary secrets of traditional Acadian cooks while there was still time, and then they adapted more than 150 recipes for today’s kitchens. A Taste of Acadie, the popular English translation of the best-selling Cuisine traditionelle en Acadie, is available once again this spring.

The indigenous cuisine of Acadia is a distant relative of French home cooking, born of necessity and created from what was naturally available. Roast porcupine or seal-fat cookies may not be to every modern diner’s taste, but the few recipes of this nature in A Taste of Acadie hint at the ingenuity of women who fed their families with what the land provided. Most of the recipes, however, use ingredients beloved of today’s cooks. Here you’ll find fricot, a wonder of the Acadian imagination, pot en pot, a traditional Sunday dinner sometimes called grosse soupe, and dozens of meat pies, variations on pâté à la viande. There’s also pâté à la rapure, with a crust made of grated potatoes, and the popular poutine rapée, one of the few French dishes to survive the transition to the New World, although certainly not in its original form. For those with a sweet tooth, Gallant and Cormier-Boudreau include recipes that use maple syrup and fresh wild berries, from poutine à trou, a delectable mixture of apples, cranberries and nuts in a rich pastry purse, to the cheekily named pets de soeurs (nun’s farts), a biscuit with a puckered middle and a saucy Acadian name.

A Taste of Acadie is traditional cooking at its best, suffusing contemporary kitchens with country aromas and down-home flavours. Decorated with evocative woodcuts by Michiel Oudemans, it is a pleasure to look at and a charming addition in its own right to contemporary country-style kitchens.

Table of Contents:

Preface | Introduction | Soups | Fricots | Fish | Shellfish | Meat | Vegetables | Desserts & Pastries | Breads, Biscuits & Crépes | Miscellaneous | Substitutions | Index

Our initial thoughts:

We can never resist searching out local cookbooks when we travel, and during our recent trip to Nova Scotia we made some lovely finds. A Taste of Acadie was one of these finds, and we’re very eager to put some of the recipes in this book to the test. The first recipe we’ll be trying? Rappie pie (on page 121)!

Related Links and other Fun Stuff

Poutine Râpée recipe

Rappie pie recipe

Acadian culture

Where to buy A Taste of Acadie:: U.S. (Amazon.com) | Canada (Chapters) | UK (Amazon.co.uk)