All posts tagged pie

Map for reference.

Lunch #1: A granola bar and an apple in the car, because I was running late.

Note #1: If you’re packing an apple from home, always wrap it in a napkin and tuck it in a plastic baggie — that way you can wipe your fingers and dispose of the core without making a mess. My mother taught me this when I was very small.

Supper #1 after a long day of travel and research: Perfect baked haddock (slab of fish, coat of Ritz crumbs) served in a cream-colored oval gratin dish alongside a blistering hot baked potato, the whole plate a study in beige except for the lemon wedge; a slab of homemade bumbleberry pie and a couple mugs of hot black coffee.

Breakfast #1 in preparation for a long day at a sled dog race: Fried egg over very hard (on purpose), three strips of blistering-hot bacon (I’d ordered Canadian, but it was fine), a homemade blueberry muffin split in half and grilled, multiple cups of hot black coffee.

Lunch #2 in Kokadjo after the mushers had taken off and before they returned: A hot, greasy, pink-in-the-middle hamburger and some hot, salty french fries, both doused in ketchup; several styrofoam cups of hot black coffee from a pot in the adjacent general store.

Note #2: The temperature of foods becomes very important when it’s -2 before the windchill.

Supper #2: After the long day at the dog sled race all I wanted was a hot bath; after taking a hot bath the last thing I wanted to do was to put on pants and go out again, so I was lazy and had another granola bar and some almonds and an apple while I lounged in bed with my books and notebooks and actually it was quite lovely.

Breakfast #2: Because I was traveling on a budget I’d stashed a yogurt I’d brought in the motel fridge, but when I opened it I realized it was frozen solid, much like the landscape outside the window. Solution: do not get annoyed about having to eat a  container of icy yogurt for breakfast — get excited about eating ice cream for breakfast! (Copious amounts of hot coffee followed.)

It is almost Christmas and that means it is time to make tourtière, the French-Canadian meat pie that’s served at réveillon or any time thereabouts. Apparently the proper pronunciation is “tou’-tYARE,” with the rolly R, but in my homeland of central Maine we say “toochay.” I’ve heard that there are $30 tourtières for sale in my former/adopted homeland of New York this Christmas, courtesy of a Montreal restaurant called Au Pied de Chochon. These tourtières are made with Heritage Foods meats, including guinea hen and brisket! They come with a side of cranberry ketchup! I’ll bet they are delicious. But if I told a local French-Canadian grandma (mem-AYRE/memmay) that the toochay cost $30, mémère would roll her yeux and laugh.

All you need to make a toochay is 3/4 lb. ground pork, whatever’s cheap at your nearest store, and 3/4 lb. ground beef, ditto — not too lean but not too fatty either, maybe the stuff labeled 85%. If the 80% is cheaper, though, go for it. Then you need one finely-chopped onion, two small yellow potatoes, some salt and pepper, allspice, an egg, and a double pie crust. The Pillsbury kind in the red box is fine if your memmay never taught you how to make crust.

(Note: You may not have allspice in your cupboard, unless you’ve been making gingerbread cookies, but it is absolutely not optional here. Go buy some allspice. You can substitute cloves, which are equally traditional, but if you are the sort of person who has ground cloves on hand I feel like you’d also be the sort of person who has allspice on hand.)

To prepare the filling, put the ground meats and the chopped onion in a large pot with half a cup of water, bring it to a boil, then stir well and lower the heat. It will look disgusting. Put a cover on it and let it simmer on very low heat for two hours. Yes, ground meat cooks quickly. No, this isn’t a pot roast. I don’t know. You cook it for two hours.

When the meat has about half an hour left to go, get the rest of the filling ready. It’s the opposite of complicated! Boil the peeled, diced potatoes in salted water, then drain them and mash them. Do not think about using a mixer or a food processor for this task. Use a potato masher. The French-Canadians traveled down the Kennebec-Chaudière corridor in carts containing all their worldly possessions; you are lucky to even have a potato masher.

After the potato is mashed and the meat is almost done, preheat the oven to 325 and line a pie plate with half the crust. Has it been two hours? Yes? Then skim any visible fat and excess liquid from the cooked meat and mix the meat into the potato, or vice versa, if your pot is bigger than your bowl (inadvertent stoner reference!). Use the potato masher to smush the filling around, then add a teaspoon of salt, a half-teaspoon of allspice, and several grinds of black pepper. The mixture will still look disgusting, unless the thought of mashed meatloaf appeals to you, but at this point it will smell intoxicating.

Scoop the filling into the pie pan and apply the top crust. Crimp the edges and cut a vent in the middle — a couple of slashes is customary, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t carve your initials or a patriotic fleur-de-lis. Remember the egg? Get it out of the fridge, break it into a small cup, beat with a fork, brush over the crust.

Into the oven! It only takes 20 minutes to bake, which is nice considering how long the meat has to simmer. The hard part is letting the toochay stand until it’s cool enough to slice. Like meatloaf the taste and texture get better with time, so if you can leave it alone for a few hours that’s the way to go. In my opinion toochay is best the day after it’s made, reheated or not, with plain old tomato ketchup from a squeeze bottle or your memmay’s Ball jar.

Bon appaTEE/Enjoy.

Bonus: A heated tourtière “debate” from 1991, via the CBC digital archives.