The mystery of white sauce poutine

This story originally appeared on July 25, 2025 in URBANIA, an online magazine based in Quebec focused on pop culture and society.

“Go on, try it before you call it disgusting,” orders a customer with a flawless hairdo, upon learning I’m from Montreal.

Golden fries cooked just right, fresh squeaky cheese curds… and that creamy white sauce, sometimes with a yellowish tint, poured generously over the top. A heresy for purists. A local pride, insist the people of the Outaouais, where it’s been simmering for decades without fuss, served on poutines as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

But cross the river, leave the region, and it’s a void. Nowhere to be found. Unknown. Even scorned. People raise their eyebrows, call it blasphemy.

And yet, let’s be honest: our national dish has been twisted, reimagined, dressed up in every sauce imaginable for years.

So why is it this one—the white one—that sparks such indignation? And above all, how do we explain that almost nothing is known about it?

Trying to trace the origins of this regional emulsion quickly proves futile. No articles, no official recipe. Which leaves only one option: head into the Outaouais and meet this odd cousin no one really knows.

Driving along Highway 50, a few questions keep circling in my mind. Is white sauce really as popular as people claim, or just a kind of urban legend kept alive by local nostalgia? Is it actually any good? And above all, where does it come from? Why, after all these years, has it remained confined to the Outaouais region, never crossing its borders?

First stop: Gatineau’s golden triangle, where three institutions wage a battle of the big brown fries just a few blocks apart.

Chez Lou Patates

"I’ve been working here for 19 years, and white sauce has always been on the menu,” says Martine behind the counter. “About 60% of our poutines are served with it."

Most customers I speak with seem unaware that this sauce is nowhere to be found outside the region. “What do you mean you don’t have this in Montreal?” exclaims one woman, a tired-looking dragon coiled around her neck as a tattoo.

And as for its origin? She has no idea either, though she’s been eating it since the 1980s.

"Some customers, every time they come back to Gatineau, leave with jars full of white sauce," Martine says, a touch of pride in her voice.

Two teenage girls walk past, trays loaded with pale-topped poutines. Behind me, a woman orders hers, the way it’s always been done here. The recipe carries on through generations.

The rumour, it turns out, is true.

But first, what exactly is this so-called white sauce?

It’s neither béchamel nor hollandaise. Not Alfredo, certainly not a packet of béarnaise, and nothing like a seafood sauce gone astray from Route 132 in Gaspésie.

Here, it’s something far more modest: a simple roux of flour and vegetable oil, stretched with powdered chicken broth, thinned with water, then simmered gently until it reaches the right consistency.

Gaga Patates

Open since 1959, the place has been run by the Charette family for three generations. If they don’t know where the sauce comes from, who would?

Taking a brief pause behind the griddle, Tina recalls her earliest memories. “Even back then, my mother made her hot chicken gravy from powdered chicken broth,” she says.

Later, she was part of that Gatineau youth who gathered at La Crêperie on Boulevard Gréber, a 24-hour spot where she and her friends would order fries with white sauce. “That was long before poutine went big,” she notes.

At Gaga, they estimate that white-sauce poutine makes up about 35 percent of sales. “We’ve been serving it for about 30 years, but we don’t claim to have invented it,” she adds.

In the Outaouais region, there are no fewer than a hundred snack bars, each adding its own little twist. But one constant remains: a pale, creamy, salty sauce served in generous ladles.

Is it good? Of course. Mostly, it’s more surprising to the eyes than to the taste buds. Better than the classic? That’s simply a matter of taste.

But why in the Outaouais? Could proximity to Ontario have let a bit of white sauce slip across the river?

Unlikely. After combing through the menus of the most popular poutineries in francophone Ontario and the capital, the verdict is clear: not a trace of white sauce. Nothing. The truth is hard to avoid, on the other side, poutine loses some of its shine. And if Ottawa deserves credit for a culinary specialty, it isn’t poutine, but the beaver tail.

Chez Bob Pataterie

Behind its timeless snack-bar look, I take the chance to order another local star: the pogo with sweet mustard. Born in the 1990s, this specialty has, for many, become an unofficial emblem of Gatineau cuisine.

“It’s yellow mustard, brown sugar, celery seeds, and a bit of mystery,” the cashier tells me. Another recipe with hazy origins.

At the next table, I interrupt Danielle as she digs into her white-sauce poutine. “I was born in 1960, and when we were kids, we used to eat at Chez Jack in Old Gatineau. They already had white-sauce poutine back then. My father was born in 1939, and long before I came along, he was already eating his hot chicken with that sauce.”

The roots of the sauce, then, might actually predate poutine itself — if we accept its official birth at the end of the 1950s. But the mystery remains: how is it that, after more than half a century, this sauce has stayed confined to the Outaouais? Why do even people in neighboring regions have no idea it exists?

“It’s the kind of banality you only notice when it’s gone,” confides Valérie, a graphic designer from Aylmer now living in Montreal. “You want sweet mustard, you want white sauce… and then you realize it just doesn’t exist.

At the next table, a construction worker scrapes the bottom of his plate. He sums it up in his own way: “I never liked the brown one. Even at home, when I make skewers, it’s white sauce. Always. You should go to La Cabane in Masson-Angers,” he adds, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Chuck’s Casse-croûte

I arrive at Pataterie Hulloise, only to realize it shares the same menu as Chez Bob Pataterie. So I redirect my quest to Chuck’s Casse-Croûte, the region’s latest darling. Recently, Olivier Primeau stopped by, leaving behind one of his famous “grosses notes”—and for the place, a new headache of popularity.

In the kitchen, chef-owner Charles-Olivier Méthot is hard at work. “But everyone calls me Chuck.”

A Gatineau native, Chuck recalls roadside snack-bar runs with his grandparents. “Everybody ordered white sauce,” he says, as if it were self-evident.

Trained as a saucier at Château Montebello, he now stirs up to 100 liters a day.

The former metal-band manager brings a more technical approach, betting on the freshness of his ingredients. “Some places cut corners,” he says, without naming those who rely on a pre-made base. To him, white sauce is unforgiving: “You’ve got less wiggle room than with the brown one. One wrong ratio, and you taste it right away.”

According to Chuck, its origins are buried somewhere in the forgotten backroads of rural Outaouais. “In the small villages, the only snack bar often doubled as a family restaurant. They had everything: pizza, macaroni, hot chicken. An old-school menu, way more varied than just burgers and fries.

He moves on to a story passed down from his grandfather, who was from Saint-André-Avellin: “One night, at a snack bar, they ran out of poutine sauce. So, to make do, they used the vol-au-vent sauce instead. Customers liked it. Little by little, the recipe stuck, got refined, and spread.”

A happy accident turned tradition — and above all, a hypothesis with unshakable logic: it’s so simple, it feels plausible.

We part ways, and like the others, he leaves me with a suggestion: “If you’re driving along Highway 148, stop by Léo’s in Thurso.

La Cabane

Before that, I make a stop in Masson-Angers, on the recommendation of the steel-toed boots guy. On the menu, I frown. Written plain as day: yellow sauce. What’s that supposed to be?

“In town, it’s white. Here, it’s yellow, but they’re pretty similar,” the cashier explains, friendly enough to my quest but short on details.

This time, the hue leans into a brighter yellow, reminiscent of the artificial turmeric glow in Lipton soup.

I’m told this yellowish sauce runs from Maniwaki to Ripon, across the Petite-Nation and up into Haute-Gatineau. “In the Outaouais, it’s always white or yellow. But no two taste the same,” the snack-bar cook sums up.

At Léo’s, now turned into a loungy sports bar, no one seems to remember the old sauce. But the bartender slips me a clue: “Go see Pogo, at Aux 3 Gars snack bar. He’s got answers.”

A new lead. The hunt goes on.

Aux 3 Gars

“He’s on his way,” Gaétane calls out cheerfully from behind the counter. “You’ll have time to taste it. People come from all over just for this.”

Here, the clientele is loyal, almost fanatical. Nearly 80 percent of the poutines are served under this so-called yellow white sauce. And you’d better not get it wrong!

Stéphane Legault, better known as Pogo, shows up with a wide grin: “Guy Lafleur… this is where he used to come for his poutine.”

And which sauce did he order it with? “The yellow one! Same as his mother and sisters, who still come here to eat it.”

His parents, Georgette and Lucien Legault, opened the snack bar in the early 1980s.

Born in 1970, Pogo mostly remembers, as a child, Monsieur Trottier—the owner of Mon Copain in Thurso—and his legendary yellow sauce. “It was really good. There was a little spice, a little something. My mother took inspiration from it and adapted it her own way. That’s the one we still serve today.”

“In Thurso, we put yellow sauce on everything: hot chicken, fries with sauce, quarter chicken. It’s our gravy,” Pogo muses.

He too has never come across yellow sauce outside the Outaouais. Why? A mystery. The same enigma surrounds their sweet mustard, made in-house each morning with care.

“We’re a place of tradition. If we didn’t pay attention to the details, we wouldn’t stand out. And yellow sauce costs a bit more to make.”

Prepared behind closed doors, always by the same hands, the recipe will never change. “What we aim for is consistency. It has to taste the same, every time. It’s a sauce that’s too easy to mess up—and too important for our people.”

HELP WANTED!

Back in Montreal, all these leads blur into a hazy mosaic, none of them pointing to a real conclusion. So I put out a call on a few Facebook groups from the region. Memories pour in instantly, cascading. Everyone has their version, their anecdote, their own madeleine.

Suzanne recalls, like Danielle, that an excellent white sauce was once served at Chez Jack, on Notre-Dame Street in Old Gatineau, where her mother-in-law worked as a waitress.

Éric and Monique point to La Crêperie, a cult spot of Gatineau nights. “I don’t think they invented it, but they definitely popularized it. That’s for sure.”

Like Pogo, Sofie brings up Mon Copain in Thurso, well known in the 1970s for its famous sauce. It’s an intuition shared by Guylaine, who insists its true origins lie in Thurso.

“Every time we ate somewhere else, in Hull or in Montreal, nobody knew what it was. People looked at us like we were crazy.”

She describes a spicier sauce, with an inimitable taste. “Monsieur Trottier never wanted to share his recipe. He died with his secret. For me, it’s clear: that’s where the real, true one was born.”

The Trottiers

Robert picks up the phone. On the line, Serge Trottier’s son, born in 1962, remembers vividly: “I was eight or nine years old. I literally grew up with that sauce.”

His father and uncles—Omer, Léo, and Wilfrid Trottier—members of a large Franco-Ontarian family from Hawkesbury, each ran their own snack bar scattered across the Outaouais.

“Omer and my father developed this sauce together at the end of the ’60s, after countless nights of trial and error,” Robert recalls. “They wanted to create a different kind of sauce. It took many attempts… but they finally got it right. And they shared the recipe among themselves.”

According to Lucie, Robert’s wife, one particular ingredient makes the recipe unique: “There’s one ingredient that’s very hard to find, specific to the region, that other sauces don’t have,” she says with a deliberately enigmatic tone.

Today, the brothers are gone, but the recipe endures, carefully preserved by Robert.

Unlike classic poutine, this version seems to have slipped under History’s radar. It belongs more to an oral tradition, almost underground.

At the national archives, I combed through fair brochures, scribbled recipe cards, spiral-bound books. Nothing. The same was true with the Cercles de fermières and their community cookbooks.

A few historical leads

Poutine Nation—that’s the title Sylvain Charlebois chose for his 2016 essay, subtitled The Glorious Rise of a Humble Dish. A rise all the more spectacular for having started at the very bottom of the ladder:

“Eating poutine, in the early days after its creation, was almost shameful. It was seen as a low-quality dish, made for the working class. Neither Quebec’s elites, who preferred to look to France for culinary reference, nor Anglo-Canadians, who mocked it as a ‘one-way ticket to the cemetery,’ wanted anything to do with it.”

For decades, poutine was perceived as late-night food—greasy, heavy, vulgar. A meal for workers, drunk kids, or the poor. In the media and mainstream discourse, it crystallized every cliché about Quebec junk food: lack of refinement, obesity, bad taste.

Before its consecration at the turn of the 2000s, ordering poutine was almost a way of owning up to its modest origins—a kind of culinary shame.

Nothing that would make anyone eager to shout their recipe from the rooftops, or immortalize it in the family cookbook.

Michel Lambert is the author of numerous works that have become references on local culinary traditions. Yet he is categorical: he had never heard of the Outaouais white sauce before I brought it up.

According to him, the absence of written records is hardly surprising. “Official culinary history remained centered for a long time on the big cities, bourgeois kitchens, and hotel dining rooms—in other words, on those who could afford to buy cookbooks.”

As for white sauce, he suggests looking into the trail of American white gravy, the one served with biscuits and gravy, still widespread in the United States and strikingly similar. A lineage made all the more credible by the fact that the first non-Indigenous settlers in the Outaouais were Loyalists who came north after the American Revolution.

For the yellowish variant, he puts forward the hypothesis of an early snack bar that used powdered chicken broth to prepare its gravy.

Invented in 1938 by the German brand Knorr, the product began to be exported on a large scale after the Second World War. Quebec was no exception: the powder appeared here in the late 1960s.

Cheap and convenient, it quickly replaced homemade stock, finding its way into family kitchens as well as snack bars, rotisseries, and fast-food joints—notably enriching the sauce for vol-au-vent.

The dates line up.

But how can we explain that a culinary tradition both old and beloved has remained so strictly confined to a single region of Quebec?

Originally from Saguenay, Michel Lambert recalls the 1960s, when many artists from his region migrated to Montreal, often through Radio-Canada. That’s how the Lac-Saint-Jean tourtière, until then little known outside its territory, gained visibility and became a culinary emblem.

The Outaouais sauce, by contrast, never shared that fate. “Lacking ambassadors to carry it proudly, it remained confined to its place of origin. For lack of opportunities, no doubt. But perhaps also out of a certain embarrassment—even a kind of culinary shame,” he concludes.

For the past four years, teacher Vincent Lagrange has been working on a book devoted to poutine, tracing its evolution from local roots to international icon. He’s tasted all its variations—including the mysterious white sauce of the Outaouais.

For him, sauces tell a story of regional heritage: sweet BBQ sauce in Drummondville, clear sauce in Princeville, hot chicken gravy in Saguenay. Each place adapts, renames, and eventually turns its version into a local standard.

“But as with any creation that comes from the people, tracing the inventor or the exact year of a recipe’s birth is next to impossible.”

So where does this damned white sauce come from?

A mystery. Nothing certain, apart from a few crumbs of memory, a whiff of another era, and the same refrain: “We’ve always eaten it.”

Maybe it was born in the grease of everyday life, between shouted orders in a roadside snack bar. A working-class folklore, passed along far from the chefs and the cookbooks.

For some, it evokes childhood. For others, a regional oddity. In the end, only suspicions remain, lingering questions.

Like a sauce simmered over low heat, its ingredients guessed at—but its secret never revealed.

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