A Tool for the Colonial Kitchen: The Tourtière

If you love a good kitchen gadget, you are not alone. Cooks throughout history have always looked for the most efficient, reliable, and useful tools to help them manage food preparation. We think the tourtière fits this description perfectly.

   The 18^th century tourtière is a cooking dish, and also the name of a double-crust meat pie. Tourtière dishes are made of heavy copper or brass and used in open-hearth cooking. Legs or a trivet allowed the dish to have hot coals shoveled underneath it to supply a slow and steady heat from the bottom. The flat-shaped lid has a shallow lip to catch hot coals to push heat down from above. As a result, the tourtière functions as a miniature oven.

   As you might imagine, most historic recipes specific to this dish are for meat pies. Those pies usually had top and bottom crusts and were filled with meat, seafood, or sometimes vegetables. Pie or tourte recipes varied from region to region based on the local specialties, and some place still have their own unique style of pie. At Michilimackinac, we know from archaeological and documentary evidence that mutton, pork, passenger pigeon, beef and especially fish were all available for use in pies cooked in a tourtière.

   Historical cooks loved a well-equipped and efficient workspace. Modern cooks still look for the tools that make it easiest to efficiently prepare delicious food. Whether it is a hearth, or a 21^st century microwave oven, preparing food wouldn’t be possible without those reliable and favorite kitchen gadgets. We hope you’ll join us at Colonial Michilimackinac in the future to see our tourtière in action for our food programs. Visit our website for more information, and don’t forget to check out Mackinac Associates, which helps make food programs and so much more possible at all of our site.