Habitant Pea Soup

Growing up in Burlington in a large French Canadian family, there were always several cans of Habitant pea soup in the kitchen cabinet. If chicken soup is the Jewish penicillin, French Canadian pea soup is the nearest equivalent for those with a Quebecois background.

Several things set it apart, first and foremost, unlike their monolithic rival Campbell’s Soups, you did not add water to Habitant. That was their proudest boast, that the soup was not condensed, it went into the can and then into the mouth exactly as it had been cooked. The other thing that set it apart was that the recipe called for yellow peas, not the green variety everyone was familiar with. In fact, after being raised on this stuff, I thought it was really strange, almost disgusting when I was first exposed to green pea soup.

The soup started in Montreal at the grocery store of the Morin family. The can says “since 1918”, so we’ll go with that. The Morins started a small plant to pack jams and pickles and one day they decided to try canning the pea soup that Mrs. Morin had been making for years for her 15 children. One of her daughters, Marie-Blanche cooked the first batch of pea soup canned as Habitant, using the old family recipe consisting of yellow peas, pork fat and savory spices. The first batch was given away and people who tried it ordered more. As sales grew Habitant incorporated as Dominion Preserving Ltd. The old Montreal plant still stands, now luxury condos.

In 1938 Habitant opened a plant in an old mill building in heavily French Canadian Manchester, New Hampshire. Since the U.S. was the biggest market, particularly the northeast, it made sense logistically to have a plant south of the border. Gilles Morin, son of the company founder, moved to Manchester to run the plant. He is seen in the photo posing with two cans of the pea soup in 1978. While the plant produced many other varieties of soup, the famous pea soup accounted for 70% of their sales. At its peak the plant was churning out 80,000 cans per day.

Campbell’s tried to get a piece of the action by test marketing a condensed version of French Canadian pea soup in Providence, Rochester and Manchester. It flopped. Snow’s, well known for their clam chowder also tried out their version of the soup called “Alouette”. It met the same fate as the Campbell’s version. As Gilles Morin said “we had very loyal customers”.

In 1968 Habitant was acquired by Montreal firm Catelli, which became Catelli-Habitant. Over the years you could see the decline in the product. In earlier times the thick soup would contain lots of whole peas, but toward the end of their run you would find maybe two or three peas in a large can. The label still showed lots of peas as you can see in the images of the familiar yellow can. And the soup was not as thick as in the past. The decline in quality and changing tastes led to the closure of the Manchester plant in 1983. The soup is still made and sold in Canada, and the brand has been purchased by their former arch rival Campbell’s.

It can still be had via Amazon, but it will cost you. Three 28 ounce cans go for $25.50.

Good Reads - French Canadian Sources: A Guide for Genealogists

A six-year collaborative effort of members of the French Canadian/Acadian Genealogical Society, this book provides detailed explanations about the genealogical sources available to those seeking their French-Canadian ancestors.

Good Reads - A People's History of Quebec

Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who traveled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and “embrothered the peoples” they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote.

Connecting everyday life to the events that emerged as historical turning points in the life of a people, this book sheds new light on Quebec’s 450-year history––and on the historical forces that lie behind its two recent efforts to gain independence.

About the Author:
Jacques Lacoursière is one of Quebec's most notable writers. He is the author of the five-volume Histoire populaire du Québec, which has been a bestseller since the first volume was published in 1995. He lives in Quebec City, Quebec. Robin Philpot is a writer and translator who lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Good Reads - From the Emerald Isle to the Cream City

The Past Whispers is once again entered in Blogging from A to Z  2020

This years inspiration is 'Good Reads', books about the Irish and French in Canada and the United States. I hope you come back every day for new books to consider.

From the Emerald Isle to the Cream City by Carl Baehr.

Irish-Milwaukee history begins with the first Irish immigrants who arrived during Milwaukee's founding in the mid-1830s. Irish laborers helped shape the city by cutting down bluffs, filling in marshes, digging a canal, and creating streets. They were joined in the late 1840s by more Irishmen who were fleeing the Great Famine and starvation in Ireland.
It's a history populated with heroic figures like Patrick O'Kelly, the city's first Catholic priest and the founder of Milwaukee's first Catholic church; John O'Rourke, the first editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel; and Timothy O'Brien, who emerged as a hero during the cholera epidemics as well as other colorful characters like the scoundrel Robert B. Lynch, kindhearted Hannah Kenneally, the "White Irishman" John White, firefighting hero Patsy McLaughlin, and militia leader John McManman.

And it's a tale of overcoming some of Milwaukee's biggest tragedies: the sinking of the Lady Elgin, which cost the lives of 300 people, most of them from the Irish Third Ward; the Newhall House hotel fire, which took more Irish lives; and finally, the Third Ward Fire, which destroyed hundreds of buildings and scattered the Irish to other parts of the city.

This historical tour captures it all--from the difficulties in adapting to American ways, as seen through events like the Leahey riot and the lynching of Marshall Clark, to the successes, such as the founding of the city of Cudahy by a poor Irish immigrant, the film stardom of Tory Hill's Pat O'Brien and Merrill Park's Spencer Tracy, and the many people who have Milwaukee streets and parks named for them.

From the Emerald Isle to the Cream City describes how the Irish influenced the political, educational, religious, and sports landscape of Milwaukee and their impact on other ethnic groups, overcoming early poverty and bigotry to help make Milwaukee the city that it is today.

Good Reads - A Distinct Alien Race

In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England's burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. 

Vermette’s groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North American history. He traces individuals and families, from the textile barons who created a new industry to the poor farmers and laborers of Quebec who crowded into the mills in the post-Civil War period. Vermette discusses the murky reception these cross-border immigrants met in the USA, including dehumanizing conditions in mill towns and early-20th-century campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and the Eugenics movement. 

Vermette also discusses what occurred when the textile industry moved to the Deep South and brings the story of emigrants up to the present day. Vermette shows how this little-known episode in U.S. history prefigures events as recent as yesterday’s news. His well documented narrative touches on the issues of cross-border immigration; the Nativists fear of the Other; the rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.; and the construction of race and ethnicity.

Available nationwide.

The Churches - N is for Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

On 15 April 2019, shortly before 18:50 CEST, a fire broke out in the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, causing significant damage to the building. The fire lasted more than twelve hours, but was fully extinguished the following day. Fire crews remained to identify and extinguish residual fires.

The cathedral's spire and roof collapsed, and considerable damage was sustained to the interior, upper walls, and windows of the church, as well as numerous works of art and the pipe organ.The stone ceiling vault beneath the roof prevented most of the fire from falling into the interior of the cathedral below.

President Emmanuel Macron announced the launch of a national fundraising campaign to restore Notre-Dame...more

New Hampshire PoutineFest - 2019

New England's original celebration of

Quebec's finest import!

June 22, 2019

Anheuser-Busch Merrimack, NH

https://www.nhpoutinefest.com/

The Little Canadas of New England

Dozens of Little Canadas have contributed a significant but often ignored part of the character and history of New England since the 19th century.

They’ve given us magnificent churches, Catholic hospitals and sports heroes like Springfield’s Leo Durocher and Woonsocket’s Nap LaJoie. They’ve produced writers like Annie Proulx, who comes from Norwich, Conn., and chefs like Emeril LaGasse, a native of Fall River.

People from the Little Canadas have toiled in textile and paper mills, defense factories and logging camps. They’ve sent politicians like Norm D’Amours from New Hampshire and Fernand St. Germain from Rhode Island to Congress.

Even today, New England’s Little Canadas celebrate midnight Mass at Christmas with pancakes afterward and serve poutine – French fries, gravy and cheese curds – in restaurants and social clubs.

Creating Little Canadas

By 1990, Massachusetts had the highest number of Franco-Americans in the United States, with 310,636 – and nearly half of all Franco-Americans in New England. New Hampshire ranked fifth, with 118,857, Connecticut sixth with 110,426 and Maine eighth with 110,209. French speakers comprise at least 14 percent of the residents of Coos County in New Hampshire and Androscoggin and Aroostook counties in Maine.

They didn’t all come at once. Some were expelled by the British in the Great Roundup of 1755. Some fled the fighting between the French and British in the Patriots Rebellion of 1837.

In the 19th century, most French Canadians who left for New England’s Little Canadas were young adults fleeing poverty, unemployment and backbreaking toil on subsistence farms.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French-speaking Canadians left Québec to work in New England's factories, mills, potato fields and logging camps. The mythical figure Paul Bunyan was a Franco-American ( ‘Bunyan’ is similar to the Québécois phrase "bon yenne!").

By 1850, most Franco-Americans lived in Vermont, named from the French words vert mont, or green mountain. The state’s most famous Franco-American export was the wildly popular singer and actor, Rudy Vallee, born in Island Pond. Even today, 26 percent of the residents of Canaan, Vt., speak French.

Work

By 1860, another 18,000 Canadian immigrants moved to New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This time, the economic boom after the Civil War attracted waves of French Canadians. They came to the huge textile mills in Lewiston, Maine, in Woonsocket, R.I., in Berlin and Manchester, N.H., and in Lowell, Worcester, Holyoke, New Bedford and Fall River, Mass. They were the only major ethnic group to arrive in the United States by train.

By 1875, Quebec started luring its young people back by offering them free land. As many as half returned. They were called Canucks and resented by the Irish, who had arrived earlier and viewed them as interlopers willing to work for lower wages and take their mill jobs, tedious though they might be.

By 1900 they were still clustered in crowded Little Canadas like Woonsocket and Biddeford, Maine, both 60 percent Franco-American. The densest Little Canadas, not surprisingly, are along the Maine-Canada border in the St. John Valley. There, 79 percent of Frenchville residents speak French.

20th-Century

In the first decade of the 20th century, the population of Salem, Mass., was more than one-fifth Quebecois and their children. In South Salem’s Little Canada, children attended French schools like Sainte-Chrétienne. They built French churches like Église Sainte-Anne and they started French businesses like St. Pierre’s Garage, Ouellette Construction and Soucy Insurance.

Franco-Americans were almost all Roman Catholic, and strict ones at that. They believed that abandoning the French language meant abandoning their religion, and they clung to their language and customs longer than many other immigrant communities. They called it la survivance. Battles often erupted between French parishes and the Irish-dominated parishes over their desire to hire French-speaking priests.

Life in Little Canadas

Life in the Little Canadas revolved around the neighborhood parish and the home, where families were often large. By the 1920s, Little Canadas supported thriving French-language newspapers, Catholic schools, social clubs and fraternal organizations. They established Rivier College in Nashua and Assumption College in Worcester. They built the first Catholic hospital in Maine, St. Mary’s in Lewiston, and started the first credit union in the United States, also named St. Mary’s, in Manchester, N.H.

St. Ann Roman Catholic Church was built with nickels and dimes from Franco-American millworkers and painted with such magnificent frescoes it earned the nickname ‘the Sistine Chapel of Woonsocket.’

Manchester, N.H., had perhaps the most well-known of the Little Canadas on its west side, where Peyton Place author Grace Metalious and Revlon founder Charles Revson grew up. West Sider Rene Gagnon participated in the most celebrated flag raising in history, on Iwo Jima during World War II.

The most famous Franco-American author, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac or Jack Kerouac, was born in Lowell’s Little Canada.

Tensions with the Irish continued into the 1920s, as well as with the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Catholicism fueled the resurgence of the Klan in New England, especially Maine, and  Franco-Americans stayed in their houses when the Klan roamed through Little Canadas looking for trouble.

By then, New England’s mills were in decline, and Quebec’s economy was booming. Franco-Americans began to drift back to Canada, emptying out some of New England’s Little Canadas. Finally, World War II ended their cultural isolation.

HIstory of Mardi Gras. A celebration created by French immigrants

Mardi Gras is French for "Fat Tuesday," (or actually Fatty Tuesday if you translate directly). It celebrates the last day of "sinful living" before the Lent period begins for Christians. The tradition of partying before Lent is nothing new. It actually has its roots in Medieval France where alcohol and gluttony were considered sinful so in order to prepare for the lent period people would go all out and binge- kinda like pigging out before you go on a diet right before the diet actually begins.

Mardi Gras festivities started in North America when French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his crew sailed to present day Louisiana under the orders of King Louis XIV. Iberville entered the mouth of the Mississippi river on the evening of March 2, 1699. Meanwhile another French explorer, La Salle, claimed all the land along the Mississippi river for France and called it Louisiana. d'Iberville went on to found Mobile, Alabama in 1702 and declared it the capital of French Louisiana (comprising numerous present day states). The first Mardi Gras celebration (one could say party) was organized in 1703. The celebrations took place each year without fail and the first informal mystic society, or krewe, was formed in Mobile in 1711 (the Boeuf Gras Society). 

More French settlers arrived from France AND other French possessions e.g. the Acadiens (say it fast and you get 'cajun') from Canada and French from Saint Domingue (modern day Haiti) and they all brought their own brand of Mardi Gras to La Louisiane.

It has definitely evolved over the years!

-courtesy Americans of French Descent

Predicting the transmission of rare, genetically based diseases

Researchers have traced the origins of a rare genetic disease to two Quebec founding families in the 17th century...more

The Garrison Graveyard at Fort Anne in Annapolis Royal, N.S

Unraveling the mystery...more

Long-lost 325-year-old Quebec City fortifications found

Archeologists in Quebec City have discovered the first fortifications built in 1693 to protect New France from a major attack, in what is considered the first reinforced palisade of that era.

The discovery was made by an archeological firm, Ruralys, that was overseeing renovation work on a building on Sainte-Ursule street, after a worker found a small piece of wood sticking out of the black sand...more

Montreal's Forgotten History

Founded in 1822, at the British and Canadian School one teacher would oversee hundreds of students, with the older students instructing the younger ones.

Modern day teachers may not approve, but it was an effective way to teach reading, writing and arithmetic to working-class children.

The rebellions of 1837-38 ended that experiment. French parents pulled their students out of the school and it was eventually absorbed by the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal.

1907–Quebec City

©2018 The Past Whispers
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The barbers of Saint-Hyacinthe

If there is a place of sociability at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is the barbershop where news and the latest gossip are exchanged. This photo from the CH085 Studio BJ Hébert Fund was taken in 1926. We see two barbers with their clients. Who are they?

We consulted the 1915 Saint-Hyacinthe Guide for the number of barbers in our city a little over a hundred years ago. In this guide, the population of Saint-Hyacinthe is 12,000…more

(C)2018 The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

 

Dominion Corset

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the city of Quebec, which saw its port activities decline and shipbuilding disappear, reoriented its economy and became an important center for the production of shoes and corsets. Many factories established themselves in the populous districts of Saint-Roch and Saint-Sauveur and employed more than five thousand people in 1900.

The Dominion Corset of Georges-Élie Amyot was one of the largest corset factories in America. In 1886, Georges-Élie Amyot began making corsets. At the turn of the twentieth century, he became Quebec's largest employer and was appointed legislative counsel in 1912.
In production, the labor force has always been exclusively female and the workers have been supervised by female foremen. Factory work allowed single women to support themselves outside of marriage and religious life, but until the late 1950s, married women were prohibited from remaining in the employ of the company.
Note that corsets made in the late nineteenth century gave a size of wasp to those who wear them by means of "turns" in the form of hoops adapting to the dresses of the time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the rust-free whale refined silhouettes without over-constraining breathing. New corsets and bustiers reduced the unwanted curves of tubular fashion in the 1920s.
The arrival of synthetic fabrics made the whales disappear after the Second World War. The clientele adopts the first models of sleeves and bras. The 1950s are the golden age of the company, which launches the lines Sarong and Daisyfresh.
From Pierre Amyot in 1973, the management of the company is entrusted to Maurice Godbout.In 1977, the company adopted a new market strategy and took the name of Daisyfresh Creations. It is still sold in 1988 to the company Canadelle WonderBra, which abandons the manufacture of the lower town to settle in the industrial park of Vanier.
The decommissioned factory was finally reorganized to house the Center de développement économique et urbain (CDÉU) of Quebec City and the School of Visual Arts at Laval University.
The arrival of public servants and students in the early 1990s contributes to the revitalization of the Saint-Roch district. Its vast building, at the corner of Charest Boulevard and Dorchester Street has been restored and is occupied by services of the City of Quebec and Laval University. The ground floor, open to the public, evokes the memory of the hundreds of workers who once worked there.

©2018 The Past Whispers
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Les anciennes familles du Québec – Prise 2

The Ancient Families of Quebec

©2017 The Past Whispers
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For many Mainers, ‘there is no Christmas without pork pie’

Each slice of French-Canadian tourtiere comes with memories of Christmas past.

(2017) The Past Whispers
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Théâtre Français

Opened in 1884 on the south side of Ste-Catherine at St-Dominique St. Name changed to Billy Moore’s Lyceum, and Sara Bernhardt performed here in 1905. Loews chain in New York renovated the theatre in 1920 and renamed it Loews Court. Its name changed back to Français in 1924. In 1960, it began showing only French-language movies. Became Eros, a porno theatre, in 1970. Closed in 1981. Reopened as Club Metropolis in 1986.

On September 17, 2017 it reopened as a concert venue named M TELUS after a wireless provider.

©2017 The Past Whispers
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The Night of the Galleries - 2017

On September 16, 2017, discover the galleries of the Old Port of Quebec until Quartier Petit Champlain during the 13th edition of the Nuit des Galeries.

https://nuitdesgaleries.com/

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