On Sundays and on the numerous days of festival, however, the habitant and his family brought out their best.  To Mass the men wore clothes of better texture and high, beaver hats, the women appeared in their brighter plumage of dresses with ribbons and laces imported from France.  Such finery was brought over in so large a quantity that more than one memoire to the home government censured the “spirit of extravagance” of which this was one outward manifestation.  In the towns the officials and the well-to-do merchants dressed elaborately on all occasions of ceremony, with scarlet cloaks and perukes, buckled slippers and silk stockings.  In early Canada there was no austerity of garb such as we find in Puritan New England.  New France on a jour de fete was a blaze of color.

As for his daily fare, the habitant was never badly off even in the years when harvests were poor.  He had food that was more nourishing and more abundant than the French peasant had at home.  Bread was made from both wheat and rye flour, the product of the seigneurial mills.  Corn cakes were baked in Indian fashion from ground maize.  Fat salted pork was a staple during the winter, and nearly every habitant laid away each autumn a smoked supply of eels from the river.  Game of all sorts he could get with little trouble at any time, wild ducks and geese, partridges, for there were in those days no game laws to protect them.  In the early winter, likewise, it was indeed a luckless habitant who could not also get a caribou or two for his larder.  Following the Indian custom, the venison was smoked and hung on the kitchen beams, where it kept for months until needed.  Salted or smoked fish had also to be provided for family use, since the usages of the Church required that meat should not be used upon numerous fast-days.

Vegetables of many varieties were grown in New France, where the warm, sandy, virgin soil of the St. Lawrence region was splendidly suited for this branch of husbandry.  Peas were the great stand-by, and in the old days whole families were reared upon soupe aux pois, which was, and may even still be said to be, the national dish of the French Canadians.  Beans, cucumbers, melons, and a dozen other products were also grown in the family gardens.  There were potatoes, which the habitant called palates and not pommes de terre, but they were almost a rarity until the closing days of the Old Regime.  Wild fruits, chiefly raspberries, blueberries, and wild grapes, grew in abundance among the foothills and were gathered in great quantities every summer.  There was not much orchard fruit, although some seedling trees were brought from France and had managed to become acclimated.