Flippin’ Over Seal Pate, and Flipper Pie

Frenchman Patrick Mathey comes out of the kitchen of his restaurant, Chez Patrick. The mussels in a light wine sauce are superb. So too, he offers, is the loup-marin a la canneberge--seal in a brown sauce with cranberries.

“I’ve eaten giraffe, crocodile, antelope. The seal is the best. Ah, oui,” he declares.

A few miles up the road, Le P’tite Baie offers a $20 fixed-price menu: vegetable soup, choice of scallops, cod in lobster sauce, chicken curry or seal bourguignonne, with dessert and coffee. Other choices include grilled seal tournedos in a dijonnaise sauce, and seal pate in a torte.

“People ask for seal,” says Rejeanne Langford, the waitress and owner, because it is the freshest item on the menu.

On the Iles-de-la-Madeleine in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it is hard to escape the sea creatures known in French as les phoques, and on menus as loup-marin, literally sea-wolf. In image or in the flesh, the islands are determined to make money from this Bambi of the pinnipeds.

In the gift shop of the Chateau Madelinot, a summer-season hotel that opens for several weeks in late winter to host tourists arriving to see the seals, the shelves are a cornucopia of sealdom: Picture books of baby harp seals. Postcards. Pins. Bookmarks. Chopsticks--the islands have become a magnet for Japanese eco-tourists. T-shirts, of course. Refrigerator magnets. Each bears the famous image of dark eyes peering from a face of white fur.

Sharing space with these icons are samples of the real thing: Sealskin mittens for $87, a purse for $50 and a waist pack for $35.

In Newfoundland, the flipper--the webbed paws that propel the seal on its long dives--is a favored delicacy. It is soaked and boiled, to separate the meat from the skin and bones, and baked into a pastry shell with vegetables.

“That is good, the flipper pie,” said Jacque Robichaud, the director general of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Ottawa. “It’s a big dish.”