A Tool for the Colonial Kitchen: The Tourtière Posted June 5, 2020 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 18th 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 21st 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.
The Winter Table at Michilimackinac Posted January 17, 2020 Michilimackinac in the 18th century was an important transshipment point for the fur trade. With the abundance of material goods and huge shipments of supplies coming through the Straits of Mackinac on the waterways all summer long, there were many opportunities to source fresh and tasty foods. Some items were sourced from the farms at and around Detroit, while others came through the Great Lakes from Albany, New York and beyond. Once the lakes and rivers froze, however those shipments stopped and the eating habits of the Michilimackinac population had to change. (more…)
Historic Food Tasting, Part 3 Posted April 1, 2019 We’ve had fun throughout the winter sampling historic food recipes, and here now is our third installment. You can try all of these historic recipes throughout the summer at Colonial Michilimackinac.
Historic Food Tasting, Part 2 Posted February 8, 2019 If you have ever visited Colonial Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City or possibly the Biddle House on Mackinac Island, you know that cooking historic recipes is a major part of what we do. We thought it would be fun to make a historic recipe and have our coworkers sample it. A couple of months ago one of our lead historic interpreters, LeeAnn, made a liver pudding for our staff to try. This time, it’s a 1770s broiled trout recipe. Enjoy!
