Rural Quebec
Tourtière: Christmas meat pie.
Tourtière
Tourtière — a double-crust pork-and-beef pie spiced with cinnamon, clove and savory — is the centerpiece of the Quebec Christmas réveillon.
View page →Rural Quebec keeps the old French-Canadian table. The réveillon (Christmas Eve feast after Midnight Mass) centers on tourtière — a deep meat pie of minced pork-and-beef seasoned with cinnamon, clove, allspice, and sarriette (summer savory), buttery flaky pastry top and bottom, served with green-tomato chutney or ketchup-aux-fruits. Pâté chinois is Quebec's shepherd's pie: ground beef, canned corn, mashed potato, in three uncompromising layers (the corn is non-negotiable). Pea soup with pork hock simmers for hours. In March, the whole province moves to the cabane à sucre — sugar shacks where maple sap boils down and is poured hot on snow to make tire d'érable (taffy on a stick), where you sit at long tables eating maple-baked beans, ham, and oreilles de crisse (deep-fried pork-jowl crisps). It is a deeply Catholic, agricultural, butter-and-meat cuisine.
The Palate
Start Here
Pork-and-beef minced with cinnamon-clove-allspice, simmered with diced potato in stock, sealed in flaky pastry, baked to deep gold.
Why start here · The Christmas Eve pie is Quebec's most distinctive heritage dish. Sweet-spiced meat under butter pastry is unmistakably French-Canadian.
The Pantry
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Fruits
Grains & Staples
Sauces & Condiments
How They Cook
Techniques that define this cuisine
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Kindred Kitchens
Cuisines built on the same signature ingredients
Other regions
Siblings within Canadian — each its own tradition.
