Le Québec Expliqué : la Tradition Derrière L’épluchette de Blé D’Inde

Quebec Explained is a series from The Main on the traditions, words and customs that shape life in Quebec, and the history behind them.

Once the August peak comes in Quebec, you’re bound to find a table with a mountain of corn on it and a dozen people standing around pulling husks. There's a pot going big enough to bathe in, along with butter and salt and more corn than anyone can reasonably eat.

The épluchette de blé d'Inde is the traditional Quebec corn cookout. It's understood to be very old and very Québécois, and it is a signal summer is packing up in backyards and farmland alike. The name breaks down to épluchette, from éplucher, to peel, and blé d'Inde, which literally means "wheat of India." Corn is neither wheat nor from India. We’ll get to what's strange about the name later.

For now, it's worth knowing the tradition isn't quite what it seems. In August 1962, Radio-Canada sent a reporter out to see what was becoming of the épluchette. Some farms had started reinventing themselves as ranches for the season, and tourists would arrive to folk dancing, campfires in the field, hay-wagon rides by moonlight, and lots of corn.

The broadcast noted that the husking used to be a family affair, and that the only outsiders were the neighbours from the same rang (a term for the row of long skinny farms that shared a road). The ranch nights were Disney-fied versions of real fêtes de grange, proper barn parties. But the "real" version wasn't all that old either.

The kernel of an idea

The épluchette is a real Quebec invention. It's just younger than it lets on; the oldest part of the tradition is more the name than the celebration itself.

For the Office québécois de la langue française, the provincial linguistic watchdog, the word "épluchette" probably drifted over from regional French, where it shows up occasionally meaning something like "peelings." But the sense we use, stripping corn and then the party built around stripping corn, hasn’t been found in the old regional dialects of France. For the moment, they conclude, we can call it a Canadian invention.

France had the practice of effeuillage, or dépailloutage, or débourrage, or échenillage, and Americans had husking bees, but Quebec is the place that came up with its own French word for the affair.

"Blé d'Inde," literally "wheat of India," is the stranger case. The typical story hands the credit to Columbus, who thought he'd landed in the Indies. The Maison LePailleur, a small museum in Châteauguay, tells it the other way around: the word Columbus carried back to the Spanish court was the one the Taíno were already using on the islands he'd actually landed on, which is why the Spanish still say maíz and Italians still say mais. The place names came afterward, as the plant spread through Europe and every language reached for somewhere far away to exoticize it: blé d'Espagne, blé de Turquie, blé d'Inde. A linguistic twist like this is what named the turkey, which in French is a dinde, from poule d'Inde.

Only one of those labels stuck, and it stuck in French. Then France dropped it, after two centuries of using it, and Quebec didn't. According to the OQLF, holding onto "blé d'Inde" through the 1800s let Quebec feel independent and rooted at a time when French Canadians felt their language was surrounded and being overwhelmed by English.

A crop with history

It goes without saying that corn’s been around a great deal longer than Quebec and its harvest parties. Corn’s ancestor is téosinte, a scrappy little plant carrying a handful of kernels, and the cob on your picnic table is the result of a few thousand years of human tinkering. The biologist and broadcaster Boucar Diouf calls it "un pur produit du génie humain," or a pure product of human genius.

By the time Jacques Cartier came up the river in the 1530s, it was being farmed here at serious scale. Christian Gates Saint-Pierre, an archaeologist at Université de Montréal, describes Iroquoian women working fields so large that missionaries worried about getting lost in them. Corn was food and currency traded between nations. At Hochelaga, the Iroquoian town that stood where Montreal is now, Cartier compared it to Brazilian millet, reaching for something he already knew the name of.