Tourtière Trials

By Patricia Racine

December 2025

For those who don’t know, I am of 100% French Canadian descent and very proud of that fact and the traditions that my family has kept alive all these years. One that they passed on to me was making French-Canadian Meat Pie (Tourtière) for Christmas.

Years ago I took over the making of our Christmas meat pies from my Mémé, a task I didn’t know was so involved. A few weeks before the holiday I got together all of the ingredients listed on the card from my mother’s recipe box entitled “Mom’s Meat Pie” and set to work. I spent the entire day cooking the filling and rolling out the dough and was rewarded with two beautiful pies. On Christmas night I proudly served them to the family and was told that they tasted wrong. How could that be, I followed the recipe to a tee? When I showed my Mémé the recipe card, she said that it was not her meat pie. My mother had some other mom’s recipe, and I had slaved over a hot stove all day to create some other family’s traditional Christmas meat pie. I’m sure you can imagine my irritation.

The real recipe card in the author’s grandmother's handwriting. Photo: Patricia Racine

So, the next year when I was ready to try again, I called my Mémé and had her personally give me her recipe before I began. What I got from her was very vague: two parts ground beef to one part ground pork, diced celery softened in butter, salt, pepper and poultry seasoning to taste, a few potatoes mashed plain and pie crusts. She told me to call her if I had any questions. Of course I had questions, what were the exact amounts of the ingredients? This time I had that Pillsbury pie dough because there was no way I was making dough from scratch again. (I’ve come to find out the old lady uses this product also, how shocking!) So, I went to work putting together my pies, all four of them, and then baked them at 350 degrees for about thirty-five to forty minutes. They turned out beautifully and now all I had to do was freeze them and wait until Christmas.

On Christmas Eve I brought them home from the store freezer. I could only fit two of them in the fridge, so my father told me to put the other two on the screened in porch. He assured me that they would be okay. Come morning I discovered that overnight some critters had broken through the screen and had their own holiday feast on my pies. Great advice dad! Oh, was I hot. All that hard work just to feed some dirty little critters. Later that day when we served the remaining pies I was once again told that something was a bit off about them. Two years, two strikes.

Over the next year I did some CSIing (research) and figured out that what was different about my pies: I used a leaner ground beef than my Mémé’s. She bought her ground beef from the grocery store, so it wasn’t as lean as from my parent’s store. But there was no way I was going to the grocery store for the meat. The third year I made the pies I explained this to the family and the complaining stopped. (It could also have been due to the Bite Me I carved into the crust). My version of the family traditional meat pie was just a bit healthier for us.

PS: Joey’s Deli and Market in Feeding Hills makes a meat pie that tastes just like Mémé’s, but please don’t tell my mother.