The tug of remembrance

and a recipe for Québécois tourtière, a classic French-Canadian meat pie.

To everyone new here, welcome. I’m Elizabeth, the writer of The Delicious Bits Dispatch, a weekly missive for the curious, blending discovery, reflection, and musings, always wrapped up with a seasonal recipe worth lingering over.

As October winds down, I’m starting to get that familiar feeling of anticipation and dread: the holidays are coming.

With Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas duking it out for attention on shop shelves across Canada and the U.S., I find myself wrestling with that odd mix of restlessness and nostalgia that this time of year inevitably brings.

There are so many things that the holidays surface…the joy of being with loved ones; the sorrows of those no longer here. The inevitable too much of everything: of eating, drinking, spending money on frivolous things…seasonal indulgences that come with their own special brand of regret.

And threaded through it all, a kind of ache. The reminder that time keeps moving.

When I get into a pre-holiday funk, I think of the traditions that always keep me grounded, no matter what whirling dervishes may be dancing around my head.

Turning back time

As we grow older, the precious fragments of memory that make up our traditions are woven into a patchwork quilt, each square distinct yet whole. For some it might be the soft glow of candles as the menorah is lit, night by night; tables dressed in heirloom linens and well-loved china; candlelit services and holiday concerts; watching It’s a Wonderful Life year after year.

Like the best of our memories, tradition is so often tied to food, isn’t it? A taste, a smell, a combination of flavours – with a single bite, we are back to our six-year-old selves, full of magic and wonder.

The aromatic spray of scent from a clementine peel recalls the stockings of my childhood, where a tangerine tucked at the very bottom was the best kind of exotic treat on a frosty Christmas morning.

Sipping a luxurious espresso topped with zabaglione brings to mind another moment in time. Waking to the smell of strong coffee brewed in a Corning Ware percolator. Low murmurs, the crinkle of waxed paper, the snap of a lunchbox closing. If I sneaked down quietly enough, I could slide onto a chair in the kitchen and watch sleepily as my mother made my father’s lunch for the day shift at the factory. And if I was especially lucky, she’d whip some egg yolks with sugar until they were creamy and top a thimbleful of coffee with that delicious treat.

My grown up version of my mother’s coffee with zabaglione

But what if there’s something even more fundamentally important, something vital to our well-being, behind the tug of remembrance and rush of warmth that holiday traditions and cherished routines stir in us? Research suggests there’s a real health reason they matter. They form a kind of stabilising gravity that keeps us centred. And ignoring those traditions can pull us off our moorings.

As Kimberly Key noted in Psychology Today, reflecting on why family traditions make us grateful instead of frazzled can give us a new perspective. Asking ourselves exactly what about that tradition is meaningful reframes it in a way that connects us emotionally to what matters most. What is it about the smell of those clementines, the taste of an always-on-the-table family recipe, the laughter that ensues from family charades? As Key says,

“Something magical happens when you approach your traditions with these types of reflective questions. Creativity flourishes. Discovery sets in. New things reveal themselves as crystallization stirs new revelations.”

As another holiday season starts to unfold, I’m planning on not just enacting traditions by rote, but really reflecting on what they mean to me, why they matter, and perhaps most challenging and exciting of all, how I can make them even more rooted in feelings of joy rather than obligation.

They may morph into new traditions, or stay resolutely grounded in the past. But either way, I’m looking forward to the fresh discovery the creative process will bring.

If you liked this post, let me know by clicking the ❤️ button. It helps spread the word about Delicious Bits and brings me joy. Thank you, dear readers and eaters!

A really good tourtière

a classic French-Canadian meat pie

makes one 9 inch pie double crust pie

This post will also be featured in my friend

Betty Williams

’s Pie Palooza, a Substack celebration of holiday pies shared among writers and bakers. I’m contributing our family’s tourtière, a savoury slice of French-Canadian tradition, to the mix of stories and recipes marking the season.

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Baking may be the most tangible way the holidays find their way into memory. Flour dusting every surface as cookies take shape, the kitchen sweet with the scent of cinnamon, vanilla, and something good in the oven.

Might I suggest a savoury take on your holiday tradition instead?

Every year, when late November rolled around, my late mother-in-law would make a dozen tourtières for the season. It was a production carried out over the course of a weekend: filling made, dough rolled out, pies assembled and frozen — sometimes unbaked, other times pre-baked, ready to pop into the oven for a slow reheat.

I wish I could tell you that I learned to make tourtière at her side, carefully observing her nuances and little secrets. But that weekend would come and go, and I’d only find out I’d missed it by happenstance. Somehow I knew the slip was intentional but not mean-spirited: guarding the family recipe and being the standard-bearer of its praises were as much a part of the tradition as the pies themselves.

And so I set about to master my own version. With Richard as the ultimate taste tester, he who grew up on that tourtière, it was fun to learn and tweak together, secretly comparing notes of our versions against Lise’s. In the end, it was the making of our own tradition that was as important to us as the pie itself.

This recipe originally appeared in The Horizon Cookbook, published in 1968. The tourtière appears between Mexican Enchiladas and Bollito Misto, reflecting the wide-ranging and eclectic nature of this collection. Over the years, we’ve modified it to suit our taste. Here’s that version.

Note: Traditionally served with fruit ketchup, you will find the bottle of Heinz ketchup on many a Québécois table alongside the tourtière.

Ingredients

1 recipe of your favourite double crust pie dough (this is my go-to)

340 grams/¾ lb ground veal

680 grams/1.5 lb. ground pork

1 large onion, cut half and then quartered

1½ teaspoons salt; more to taste

a few grinding fresh ground pepper

½ tsp ground mace

½ tsp dried savory

3 tablespoons bacon fat, duck fat or 1½ tablespoons each olive oil and unsalted butter

125 ml/½ cup beef broth

1 egg diluted with 1 tablespoon water and mixed until combined

Your favourite accompaniment (see headnote)

1. Make the pastry, chill well, at least one hour. Divide the dough in half, roll out one half and blind bake the bottom crust in a 23 cm/9 inch pie plate . Keep the top crust dough chilled until you are ready to bake the tourtière.

2. Heat the oven to 220°C/425°F

3. Regrind the meats together with the onion and the salt, pepper, mace and savory. If you don’t have a meat grinder, make sure to mince your onion very finely before mixing it together with the ground meat and seasonings.

4. Heat bacon fat in a large skillet, add the meat mixture, and cook, stirring for a few minutes until the meat starts to lose its red colour. Add half the broth, and simmer, covered for 20 to 25 minutes. Stir occasionally, adding broth as needed so that the mixture doesn’t dry out. Cool to room temperature. Taste and adjust for seasonings, adding salt and spices to your taste.

5. Fill the prebaked bottom crust with the meat mixture. If there are a lot of pan juices, use a slotted spoon to transfer the filling, then spoon a little of the juices over the top—you want the pie moist, not swimming, but definitely not dry.

6. Roll out the top crust, cover the meat filling, and seal, trim and flute the crust. Prick with a fork or create a vent hole and brush the pie top with the egg wash.

6. Bake for 15 minutes. Lower the heat to 180°C/350°F and continue baking for 40 minutes longer, or until the pie is golden brown. Cool and serve warm or at room temperature with the fruit ketchup or for my husband’s tourtière tradition, Heinz ketchup.

Source:

Kimberly Key, “Why Traditions Matter,” Psychology Today, November 2020. Link