New Brunswick Food & Traditional Cuisine

New Brunswick eats from the sea and the forest. The two coasts give it lobster, snow crab, scallops, oysters and Atlantic salmon, and the summer lobster season is a provincial event, above all at Shediac on the Northumberland Strait, which bills itself as the Lobster Capital of the World and guards the road in with a 90-tonne sculpture of a lobster. Spring brings fiddleheads, the tightly furled young fronds of the ostrich fern picked along the rivers, so much a local staple that the village of Tide Head calls itself the Fiddlehead Capital of the World, and the Bay of Fundy gives Grand Manan its dulse, a dried red seaweed eaten as a snack.

The other cuisine is Acadian, a French country cooking of the north and east: hearty, frugal and handed down. Its dishes are chowders and the chicken-and-dumpling stew called fricot, the grated-potato pie rappie pie, and, in the Brayon northwest around Edmundston, the buckwheat flatbread ployes, eaten with butter, maple syrup or fricot.

Lobster is the province's signature, boiled and eaten simply or in a roll, and Shediac's July lobster festival is built around it. Snow crab, scallops and Atlantic salmon round out the seafood, and dulse, the dried Bay of Fundy seaweed from Grand Manan, is the local snack. Fiddleheads, the young fern fronds picked in spring along the rivers, are boiled or sautéed as a seasonal vegetable.

The Acadian dishes are fricot, a chicken stew with flour dumplings that eats like a thick soup; rappie pie (pâté à la râpure), a baked casserole of grated potato from which the water has been pressed, layered with meat; and ployes, the thin buckwheat flatbread of the Madawaska and northern Maine, cooked on one side and served with butter, maple syrup, brown sugar or fricot. Moosehead lager, brewed in Saint John since 1867, is the province's beer.

The public markets are where the food culture shows. The Boyce Farmers Market in Fredericton, running since the 19th century, and the Saint John City Market, one of the oldest in Canada, sell dulse, fiddleheads in season, local cheeses, seafood and Acadian baking. Roadside lobster pounds and canteens along both coasts serve the catch plainly in summer, and community lobster suppers and Acadian fricot dinners are fixtures of the festival season.

Seasonality runs deep here: fiddleheads in May, lobster through the summer seasons set by fishing zone, snow crab in spring, and the fall harvest that Fredericton's Harvest festival grew out of. Moosehead anchors a small but growing craft-brewing scene in Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton, and maple syrup from the province's sugarbushes is a spring staple, poured over ployes as readily as over pancakes.

New Brunswick is not a wine region: the climate is too cold and short-seasoned for a significant grape-wine industry, and the province's drinking heritage is beer, cider and spirits rather than wine. A handful of small wineries and meaderies work with cold-hardy grapes and, more successfully, with the province's fruit, blueberries, cranberries, apples and maple, to make fruit wines and mead.

The real story is beer. Moosehead, founded in Saint John in 1867, is Canada's oldest independent brewery and its largest fully Canadian-owned brewer, and a wave of craft brewers and cideries has followed across the province. Alcohol is sold through the provincial retailer, Alcool NB Liquor (ANBL), and at licensed private outlets; the legal drinking age is 19.