Suckers, this is a tour of Quebec’s best candy stores. Gird up your sweet teeth and read on. Hoard your cavities. Brush beseeching those of your parents who still survive. Let’s fill our pouches with mints, those last glittering consumables we will ever know, and head to Les Tartes Maudits. Sucreries Harrington: Holy fuck. Candy-making as an art form, forwarded to us from an era when Europe was chock full of adventure-seeking tradesmen and god. They brought us scurvy, syphilis, map kits and the wonders of sugar work, a craft cruelly abandoned by the Hollanders. Heading north, the treat sprawls before you, a Blue Highway our New York mid-western-winter pastes we put on the dashboard hoping to coax the speedometer back to three digits around the mighty Hudson: Bennington VT (Candyland), White River Jct (Sugarmade), Hardwick (Harrington’s World Famous), Newport (Willards). Here’s a harbinger: immediately across the Canadian border the placard screams up to you 34 mi/hr. Trust me: You’ll slow down anyway. People, cars, buildings and infrastructure are different on the other side of the line. It’s a subtly altered reality, governed by a checklist of infrastructural peculiarities painstakingly drawn up by plainclothes security officials and a gaggle of bean counters backed by interventionists and human rights activists. You can’t discern them at a glance. You have to live there awhile. My wife held in her teeth a confection, a near perfect geometric sphere composed of chocolate, white and orange, bisected through a crucial longitudinal axis by a shard of concentrated decadence, a minty stick. She was in a fix, a standstill, don’t-you-dare-eat-that look that hinted full disclosure would provoke a little fury and a little shame. She’s Chinook. We got married three years ago (of course this is a few years back of our current present tense) with a full-on northern Picasso smack across her midsection. A neat pattern, protecting the treasure, open for business.
Conserverie du Quartier
First is the Conserverie du Quartier, which looks like a factory but is in fact a wonderful shop filled with jams, mustards and honeys. If mustard were a national anthem, they’d have you screaming ‘O Canada’!
504 Chemin de la Canardière Quebec City, QC G1J 2B4
Bec et Bonbon
Admittedly, Bec et Bonbon looks nothing special but then as they say, beauty lies in the eye of the candyholder. Looking at the crowd that they always got here, it says a lot. They were the chocolates of the bag.
48, Côte de la Fabrique Quebec City, QC G1R 3V7
La Fudgerie - Les Mignardises Doucinet
Then, to La Fudgerie – Les Mignardises Doucinet, packed to the gills with world-class, creamy, chocolatey fudge of the nearest thing I’ve ever found to the size of your face.
717 Boulevard Louis-XIV Quebec City, QC G1H 4M9
Les Confiseries Pinoche
Then on to Les Confiseries Pinoche, the kind of candy shop that makes Willy Wonka look like the ugly duckling of the candy business. Their berry jellies coated in sprinkles are a house specialty. I count at least nine different flavours of jelly melting on my tongue, and I wonder just how long it will take me to guess them all.
1048, Avenue Cartier Quebec City, QC G1R 2S5
C'est si Bon
Bonjour! Drop into C’est si Bon, a candy-coloured curio of a shop stuffed with lollies from the provinces of Quebec and the Canadian countryside. Maple sweets, licorice and chocolate vie for space.
1111 Rue Saint-Jean Quebec City, QC G1R 1S3
La Fudgerie
Another jewel in our confectionary crown is the La Fudgerie, fudge as art form incarnate, so we leave our visit to their garam spiced fudge to the Louvre.
16 rue du Cul-de-Sac Quebec City, QC G1K 8L4
Tabagie Casse-Cou
Last but not least is Tabagie Casse-Cou, readily identifiable by its vintage advertising for cars and generally not just another tôyeux (candy shop): it might as well have the by-line ‘Cauchemar pour les personnes peu patientes’ (Nightmare for people with short patience), for its owner has a colourful character and it’s a given he won’t be afraid to give you a spicy dose of his French-accented spiel while you’re shopping.
59, Rue Sous-le-Fort Quebec City, QC G1K 4G9