A French-Canadian Christmas Carol

There are a great many reasons to recommend the Christmas season in Francophone Canada and northern New England (let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!), but chief among them is tourtière. A tourtière is a pie, and one of the most delicious: a savory confection that can variously be packed with ground pork or a mixture of ground pork and game, encased in lardish dough. At highflier temples of Montreal gastronomy like Au Pied de Cochon (and at New York outposts, like M. Wells Steakhouse in Queens), you’ll find a great variety of meats in the tourtières, and occasionally slices of truffle or coins of foie gras. The classic accompaniment is a fruit ketchup or green-tomato relish, something piquant and bright against the rich, cinnamon-and-clove-scented taste of the meat, the vague porkiness of the dough.

You can make a tourtière well or badly and still succeed in delivering a handsome and satisfying meal, a balm against the bleakness of winter. “I’ve never had a slice of tourtière and spoonful of ketchup and not liked it,” David McMillan, the bearish chef and an owner of Joe Beef in the Little Burgundy section of Montreal, told me recently. “I especially love a tourtière made by someone who can’t really cook. It’s honest.”

McMillan called tourtière an example of “the cuisine of the occupied,” food that is French by way of the British, who took Quebec in 1759. “Show me where in France they serve ketchup with a meat pie,” he said. “Cinnamon? Clove? Parisians would gasp: C’est bizarre!”

McMillan’s partner at Joe Beef is the chef Fred Morin, who sometimes plays the role of McMillan’s foil. “We are not the kings and queens of England to put our thumbs on the scale and say tourtière is or is not a classic French dish,” he told me. “It’s just an obvious one, where you can take meats that are not fantastic by themselves and put them in a shell, with potatoes so that it is not too watery.”

And so I have done: ground pork, braised pork, roasted poultry. You could also include leftovers from other holiday meals: brisket and melted mushrooms, say; or ham, venison, veal; even, if you’d like to follow a Morin suggestion, smoked sturgeon. Recipes for tourtière are as various as the cooks who make the pies. Julian Armstrong, a reporter for The Montreal Gazette who wrote “Made in Quebec: A Culinary Journey,” told me she had witnessed contentious arguments between family cooks over how to prepare one. When she sent me an email about it, the subject line read, “The Tourtière Saga.”

“There’s no classic recipe,” McMillan said. “There can’t be one. It’s one of the last guarded recipes in French-Canadian cuisine. The one you make is the right one, and it will always be delicious.”

I asked him what to serve with a tourtière. “What’s the vegetable?” he repeated. “Meat pie is the vegetable. Don’t make this complicated.”

Recipe: Tourtière