Canada

A dense, minimally-leavened Indigenous quick bread of wheat flour, fat, and water, cooked by pan-frying, baking, or over an open fire, and adopted as a staple across Indigenous communities of Canada and the northern United States.

A Canadian fried-dough pastry, stretched into a flat tail shape and topped with cinnamon-sugar or sweet spreads and fruit.

Tandoor-charred marinated chicken simmered in a smooth, mildly spiced tomato-butter-cream sauce, a Punjabi dish that became a diaspora staple eaten as Canadian comfort food.

A distinctly Canadian individual pastry consisting of a flaky short-crust shell filled with a deliberately runny, gooey custard of butter, brown sugar, and egg, traditionally studded with raisins.

A Québécois cold pork spread of finely minced pork slow-cooked in its own fat with onion and warm spices until set into a sliceable, spoonable terrine.

A spring side dish of foraged ostrich-fern fiddleheads — the tightly coiled young fronds — blanched to remove bitterness and toxins, then sautéed in butter with lemon or garlic.

A Canadian Prairie dessert of vanilla custard set in a graham-cracker crumb crust, topped with browned stiff meringue and a dusting of crumbs.

A Newfoundland Sunday boiled dinner of salt beef simmered with cabbage, turnip, carrot and potatoes, served with pease pudding made in the same pot.

A New England sandwich of cooked lobster meat — dressed cold with mayonnaise or served warm in butter — piled into a toasted split-top bun.

A sweetener and condiment made by concentrating the sap of the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) through sustained evaporation, yielding an amber to dark viscous liquid with a distinctively complex caramel-woody sweetness.

A small, dense, slightly sweet ring of dough boiled in honey-sweetened water then baked in a wood-fired oven, almost always coated in sesame or poppy seeds.

Beef brisket dry-cured with salt and a coriander-and-pepper spice blend, smoked, steamed, and hand-sliced thick onto rye bread with mustard.

A Canadian no-bake confection built from three pressed, chilled layers — a cocoa-graham-coconut crumb base bound with egg, a custard-powder buttercream middle, and a thin chocolate glaze top — served cold and sliced into bars.

A Canadian sandwich of pan-fried peameal (cornmeal-crusted, brine-cured lean back bacon) piled on a soft kaiser bun, emblematic of Toronto's St. Lawrence Market.

A Quebec dish of thick-cut fresh fries piled with fresh white cheddar cheese curds and drenched in hot brown gravy, served immediately so the curds warm but retain their squeak.

An Acadian casserole of grated raw potato whose starchy liquid is wrung out and replaced with hot meat broth, layered with chicken or clams and baked until a translucent gelatinous body forms beneath a browned crust.

A double-crust prairie pie filled with native saskatoon serviceberries, sweetened and brightened with sugar and lemon.

A Montreal sandwich of brined, heavily-spiced, smoked and steamed beef brisket, hand-sliced thick and piled on rye bread with yellow mustard.

A thick French-Canadian soup of dried yellow split peas slow-simmered with salt pork or a ham bone until creamy.

A double-crust lard-pastry pie filled with spiced ground pork (or a pork-led mixed-meat blend), seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, baked until golden and served as the centerpiece of the French-Canadian Réveillon feast.

A Canadian Maritime dessert of wild blueberries stewed on the stovetop with soft dumpling-like drop biscuits steamed on top, served warm with cream.