Tourtière

Ingredients

• Minced pork700 g
• Minced beef300 g
• Potatoes — boiled and mashed400 g
• Onions2
• Garlic3 clove
• Cinnamon1 tsp
• Ground cloves½ tsp
• Allspice1 tsp
• Nutmeg½ tsp
• Chicken stock250 ml
• Shortcrust pastry700 g
• Egg — for glazing1
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Fry the onion and garlic until soft, add both minces and cook, breaking up lumps, for ten minutes.

   15 min

2. 2

   Add all the spices, season, and pour in the stock.

   4 min

3. 3

   Simmer gently for forty minutes, until the liquid has almost gone.

   42 min

4. 4

   Stir in the mashed potato and cool the filling completely.

   25 min

5. 5

   Line a tin with pastry, add the cold filling and level it.

   12 min

6. 6

   Cover with a second sheet, crimp the edges, cut vents and glaze with egg.

   10 min

7. 7

   Bake at 200 °C for fifteen minutes, then at 180 °C for forty more, to a deep golden crust.

   58 min

About the dish

The spices are unexpected in a meat pie: cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and allspice. That is an inheritance from seventeenth-century French cooking, where sweet spices in meat were normal.

Mashed boiled potato is worked into the mince. It binds the filling and takes up the fat, so the pie does not run when cut.

Tourtière is served at réveillon, the meal after midnight mass. In Québec it is baked ahead and frozen so that on 24 December it only has to be reheated.

Worth knowing

• — Measure the spices exactly. One clove too many buries everything else, and there is no correcting a baked pie.
• — Cut it warm rather than hot: even with the potato, the filling needs twenty minutes to set.
• — It is served with green tomato ketchup or pickled beetroot. Something sour is necessary here, or the spiced pork cloys quickly.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

700 kcal

Protein

30 g

Fat

42 g

Carbs

50 g

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