The flavor of Quebec is sweet, savory and worth the trip

It is a culinary adventure that started with a bang: Some 400 million years ago, a meteor more than 2 miles wide slammed into what is now the Charlevoix region of Quebec, Canada, creating an impact crater 34 miles wide.

L’Observatoire de l’Astroblème de Charlevoix, a science center devoted to studying the meteor’s impact (an astroblème is a scar left by the impact of a meteorite or asteroid), near the town of Baie-St.-Paul, has a plaque that explains the event. The explosion caused what is known as an impact winter to fall over the Earth as the ash, dust and debris blotted out the sun and devastated natural systems.

The impact modified the surrounding landscape and, over the eons, erosion, glaciers and other forces deposited nutrient rich soil in the crater, creating a distinctive terroir and nourishing productive farms. The farms became part of Canada’s first agro-tourism program in 2004, the Route des Saveurs, or Flavor Trail, with 33 official stops. It lives up to its name.

The savory trail is built around hyperlocal food, everything from duck to foie gras to beef, and foraged sea buckthorn berries, whelks and wild mushrooms. “We use pretty much everything we can find around here,” said David Forbes, a chef at Camp Boule, a buvette, or small restaurant, atop the ski area Le Massif in Petite-Rivière-St.-François.

Charlevoix’s two largest towns are Baie-St.-Paul and La Malbaie, each with about 8,000 people. From Quebec City, my wife, Chere, and I were headed first to La Malbaie – the ‘bad bay,’ said as a curse, no doubt, by Jacques Cartier, the French explorer who in 1534, came to this part of what became Canada.

After a 90-minute drive that sliced through rolling rural countryside alongside the St. Lawrence River, we found dinner at Chez Truchon, a highly recommended restaurant in a cozy, well-kept house in the charming Pointe-au-Pic neighborhood of La Malbaie. I had duck breast from a local farm, with a glaze of miso and maple, and a layered potato cake called a mille-feuille with a blueberry and ginger sauce.

After dinner we walked along the broad, muddy bay that earned this town its name. A wharf extends out over stone jetties, and from August through October, a project called Pointe-au-Pop, features a string of pop-up restaurants and shops along the wharf.

We spent the night at Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu, a grand hotel that was rebuilt in 1929 in the French Château style after the original, built in 1899, burned down. Perched on bluffs overlooking the St. Lawrence River, the imposing structure resembles a castle, with stone walls covered with ivy. It appealed especially to wealthy Americans seeking fresh air and nature. President William Howard Taft, a frequent visitor, said the natural surroundings were “as intoxicating as Champagne but without the morning-after headache.”

It is those early wealthy visitors that helped birth the culture of fine cooking. “You had chefs asking for and finding beautiful products from here,” Forbes said.

An island for eating

In the morning we drove west to St.-Joseph-de-la-Rive to catch the free car ferry to Isle-aux-Coudres, a charming rural island in the middle of the river. (Ferries run every half-hour to the island, seven days a week.)

The road around the island is only 14 miles and bikes can be rented here for leisurely touring. We drove to a small bakery, Boulangerie Bouchard, which offers everything from brioche to croissants and pizza bread, as well as a dessert made with butter and brown sugar on pie dough called pets de soeur (or nun’s farts) and a local specialty called pâté croche, or crooked pie, a pastry crust stuffed with crumbled meat. We passed a couple of miniature stone chapels as we left, open to visitors. These simple and elegant chapels were built in the early 19th century for Catholic Corpus Christi processions, part of a move, according to the church, to bring “God down into the street.”

We drove on to Les Moulins de L’Isle-aux-Coudres, a stone flour mill built in 1825 that still uses a water-powered grindstone to produce wheat, rye and buckwheat flour. “All are grown on the island,” said Jean Francois Bouchard, one of the three millers, whose clothes were covered with splotches of flour. “We go through 8 tons of grain a year.”

As we watched, the millers opened the spill way and water gushed onto the giant wooden wheel with 88 buckets, which began to slowly spin, turning the stone grinding wheel that pulverized buckwheat and filled the air with dust.

This is one of eight small museums in the region known as économusées, dedicated to preserving traditional crafts and food production.

On the way back to the ferry we stopped at Cidrerie et Vergers Pedneault, where workers pick fruit from 6,000 apple trees and 3,000 other fruit trees to make cider and liqueurs. We sipped several types of cider, from cherry to apple, and pear and plum aperitif ciders, in an elegant tasting room, and took several bottles with us. The cidery also makes a highly regarded mistelle, an ice cider.

We got back on the ferry and drove 10 miles or so to Baie-St.-Paul, a charming little town in the bend of the St. Lawrence that dates back to the early 1600s. Rue St. Jean Baptiste is famed for its shops and is highly walkable, featuring more than two dozen art galleries, and a variety of restaurants and boutiques – including a chocolate shop with maple and gorria pepper-flavored chocolates (gorria is a somewhat spicy French Basque pepper grown and used widely here) and boutiques selling goodies made by local producers – including birch syrup and yes, gorria jelly.

For those who prefer not to drive, the Charlevoix train makes a round trip between Quebec City and Baie-St.-Paul once per day.

We checked into our hotel, Le Germain Charlevoix Hotel and Spa, which is within walking distance of Rue St. Jean Baptiste. It is modern, with two excellent restaurants, and in keeping with the agro-tourism theme, behind the hotel is a herd of softly mooing Highlander cows in a corral, their long tawny bangs hanging over their eyes. Vegetables are grown in a large garden nearby.

That night we made our way a few miles out of town to a dinner on the Famille Migneron de Charlevoix farm, which produces cheese and also recycles whey to make gin, vodka and eau de vie.

We joined about 30 other people at Faux Bergers in one of the farm buildings for a spectacular four-hour, seven-course meal with wine pairings, made with almost entirely local ingredients, from arctic char sashimi with a bright and tangy fermented carrot juice and koji syrup sauce, to radishes served with a whipped mix of browned butter, whelks, kimchi and radish greens. Duck served with beets roasted for 12 hours and then smoked were both earthy and savory. “We call it instinctive cuisine,” said Émile Tremblay, a co-owner and chef. “The way we roll is we look at what is available either in the fridge, the pantry or the farmer’s offers as a starting point, that dictates what the dishes will become.”

With all the eating we decided it was time to visit one of the two national parks in the area for a little exercise to work up an appetite for the next round. The Haute-Gorges-de-la-Rivière-Malbaie park was less than an hour away, so we tooled up there, stopping at Laiterie Charlevoix, a dairy farm where we glimpsed cheese being made, and picked up a brie-like, soft triple cream cheese and pate to go with a fresh baguette for a picnic. We walked a few miles in a forested canyon in the park while rain pelted us, and stopped for a soggy lunch on a platform overlooking the steep, thickly forested gorge.

The meteor-induced terroir is only part of the story here. “People here are proud of what they do and do the most with what they have,” Forbes said. “It’s the mix of the two together that make this possible.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.