Actually, "maple flavored corn syrup" is a lot of what you will find in the states too if you aren't reading the label carefully.
Pancakes here in Brazil are similar to French crepes rather than the fluff goodness they are in the US, and they're usually savory and eaten as dinner/lunch instead of breakfast. Like, the PF I'm eating today for lunch/dinner is rice, beans, ground meat and cheese pancake, some sort of chicken concoction, and fried banana. I knew what to expect of pancakes in the us because Hollywood, but it still felt weird to order it and not specify a flavor.
things i frequently forget are not really A Thing outside of canada, or even Ontario: timmies MEC Shoppers independent grocers milk in a bag all-dressed chips and ketchup chips the bay SEVERAL types of chocolate bar (coffee crisp, crispy crunch, apparently Americans don't have aero bars? What a world) everything being both french and english, no exceptions Kraft dinner!!! it is distinct from macaroni, to call it Mac and cheese insults them both Smarties!! Second cup, aka Starbucks' less successful cousin And. So much food. Do you guys do, like. Beaver tails? Butter tarts? nanaimo bars, tortierre, poutine (other people probably do poutine? new York fries does poutine so it's gotta be A Thing. Fake edit, apparently new York fries is Canadian. Holy shit) LCBO is apparently an Ontario thing... I am in shock, I've been so sheltered.
Beavertails (I assume you mean the tasty pastries?) are a thing in Northeast Pennsylvania at least. (Sometimes they're sold as bearclaws/bearpaws too, but they all look and taste roughly the same.)
... Kraft Dinner is mac and cheese, though? It's labeled as Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in the US, but it's the same stuff in the box.
Iirc, poutine and cheese curds are actually banned in the US? I think certain border states have it still, but I know that down further south you'd never find it. We do have beavertails though, or at least California and Virginia did.
Canadian Kraft dinner, at least, is really different from generic mac and cheese! The noodles are straighter and thinner, the default colour is bright orange, the taste is Not The Same. They are not siblings but cousins.
I've never been outside the US, so my first "culture" shock came from a middle school trip to Washington DC. We ate at Hard Rock Cafe, so there was this massive hoard of little Tennessean children cramming their faces with burgers and fries, and when they asked for our drink orders almost everyone wanted sweet tea (thats just what you drink with burgers down here!!!) and we were mortified when they said "I'm sorry, we don't have sweet tea!". Another thing that weirds me out is how other people (at least in the US, especially in the upper-middle class) view eating game meat, like deer and rabbit and squirrel! I guess it's just my rural upbringing, but I have no idea why someone would turn down fried squirrel or rabbit gravy or deer stew just because it isn't store-bought or something. I was telling a couple of cousins from Maryland about how I was looking forward to deer season so we could re-stock the freezer, and they acted like it was such a savage thing to do. Buddy I just want fresh free meat chill out it's not like i'm killing Bambi or anything. Are other countries weird about that stuff too?
Er... from looking at the packaging I can find on Google, Kraft Dinner looks like an identical product to what I'm familiar with. Apparently Kraft has a billion variations of mac and cheese now, but the basic blue box stuff is the same stuff, regardless of the name they put on it for different countries. Wikipedia agrees with me.
FEELING YOU ON THIS. It wasn't much of a deal in my hometown because it seemed like everyone went hunting or had a family member who did so anyone who sneered at hunting was considered the weird one, but talk about it to anyone from a big city and they got the strangest damn looks on their faces.
So after a bit of hunting, it turns out the Midwest has cheese curds, but the FDA has bans on "young raw milk cheeses", which is applied to cheese curds in some jurisdictions because???? So that would explain why Cali isn't supposed to have them. Restaurants in a lot of states have stricter regulations than groceries or individuals, so the likelihood of you being able to buy poutine goes down exponentially the further away from Canada you go.
Apparently there are things called Smarties in the US, but they're like Rockets? Those little chalky sugar pill type candies that remind me of the dextrose tablets i take for low blood sugars. Well, I mean, it is the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. But yeah I think if I moved to another province I'd be like "where's the lcbo at" As a city kid (from ontario tho), yeah the idea of eating animals you've hunted yourself is a little weird, because that's not A Thing in my family, at least. We don't do that, so it's unfamiliar and people probably have weird associations about it
yes the product is macaroni and cheese, but it is literally never referred to as such!! culturally, it is Its Own Thing. Spoiler: big images every canadian I've ever known would call the first one kraft dinner and the second one macaroni. yeah they're technically the same, but i can count the number of times I've heard anyone call KD "macaroni" on one hand.
@applechime if it makes you feel any better, those are all very much things here in Manitoba, too (apart from milk in a bag, which we don't do) - except it's the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission, 'cause, well, Manitoba. we call it the LC.
I really miss Timmies. And poutine. Like, I live in the Midwest now, so there's a local brewpub that does poutine with garlic dill cheese curds and nice gravy, but sometimes you just want the sad nasty trash that is McDonald's poutine or KFC poutine, or the astounding variety of poutine you can get in food trucks.
i sympathize with your plight. i also really, really want poutine with garlic dill cheese curds. gosh DANG.
I know a thing called tortierre but I don't know if it's the same as Ontario tortierre, it's a meat pie of pork and shredded potato and onion, and you eat it with mustard? The version I know is from my dad's Upper Peninsula family, so it's probably like... US-ified Quebecois, or something.
i did not even question its name.... which is silly considering what i'm literally about to say below (i did not put together "SAQ" with its logical long name, societe des alcools du quebec WHOOPS) quebec's got the SAQ, or "sack", which is where first year uni students in ottawa go to legally get their booze that they then illegally drink in ontario. not that i would know anything about that. that sounds like the tortierre i know! it's mostly a quebec thing, but it's certainly not unusual in ontario. it's good to know that some canadian things seep into the northern states. like a leaky ceiling
