French meat pie a onceayear indulgence

Some recipes you take for granted. They appear at holidays and special gatherings, as ingrained in the festivities as a decorated evergreen or a lighted menorah. These recipes carry emotional weight; they put the assembled in the right frame of mind.

In my family, one of these recipes is tourtière, a spiced meat pie that was always served on either Christmas Eve or New Year’s Day, and never at any other time of year. In French Canadian and French households, tourtière is often part of the latenight Christmas Eve feast known as réveillon, which awaited families returning from midnight Mass. In our house it was made in a nod to my maternal French Canadian roots, first by my mèmere and then by my mother and her sisters.

My mother has been dead two years — no time, forever — and though I’ve been missing her for that long, it took until this December for me to miss tourtière, to realize that it’s now up to me to carry on the tradition. There was one problem: I didn’t have the recipe. Somehow, it never occurred to me to ask her to write it down, even though we are a family of cooks. I guess I just assumed that she’d always be around to make it.

So I asked my aunts to share their recipes, using them as a starting point, and then did what cooks do, which is to reverseengineer the recipe until it tastes like how it’s remembered.

The meat filling, typically a combination of ground pork and beef or veal, is generously spiced, almost like country pâté. Some versions use only dried spices, but I add fresh sage and thyme, along with the nutmeg and allspice, to brighten up a very sticktoyourribs pie. The meat is bound by mashed potato in our family’s version, though I’ve also seen versions with cubed potato, then the filling is baked in a flaky pastry crust. You can use your favorite pie crust, though for tourtière I like one made with a combination of butter, for flake and flavor, along with a bit of shortening, for tenderness.

To counteract the pie’s richness, I always serve something tart alongside. It might be a tangle of salad with a bracing vinaigrette, or some whole berry cranberry sauce, or pickled red onions, all of which are a welcome foil.

Tourtière is a decidedly humble dish, especially for something served at the holidays, but somehow it feels decadent and special, too. When I make it this year, I’ll be continuing a generationsold tradition in my family. If you make it for the first time, you might be starting one in yours.