Tour de tourtière

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/02/2016 (3525 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since its inception in 1969, traditional, French-Canadian fare has been as much a part of Festival du Voyageur as horse-drawn sleigh rides, scratchy, overgrown beards and revellers screaming, “C’est à l’aube oui, oui, oui,” in your ear.

And even though organizers of Western Canada’s largest winter fête, which wraps up Sunday, have never designated one dish in particular as the 10-day celebration’s official foodstuff, Ray Beaudry, a longtime festival-goer and owner of Le Garage Café at 166 Provencher Blvd., knows full-well what he would choose, if he had a vote.

“I wish I kept count because the number of tourtières we sell at festival every year is kind of staggering… it’s easily in the thousands,” said Beaudry, whose eight-year-old bien venue is an official food supplier for Voyageur Park’s MTS Rivière Rouge Tent.

“I mean, I have one guy on staff who’s done nothing for the last (three) weeks but make tourtière day in and day out.” (In case you’ve been living under a snow sculpture, tourtière is a spicy meat pie typically containing a filling of diced pork or beef that originated in what is now Quebec in the 1600s.)

Beaudry grew up on Rue des Meurons. He has fond childhood memories of diving into his grandmother’s tourtière during the Christmas season. “It was a special occasion, once-or-twice-a-year kind of thing, and when we were coming up with a recipe for the tourtière we serve in the restaurant, we spent a lot of time trying to get it as close to my grandmother’s as we could,” Beaudry said.

Did he succeed?

“Well, let’s put it this way. My mother and her cottage friends do ‘Christmas at the lake,’ every July. But instead of making her own tourtière anymore, she gets it done here.”

Even better, Le Garage also serves a concoction Beaudry described as “the best of both worlds” — poutine topped with gravy and a slice of tourtière. “We added it to our poutine menu five years ago, and it’s been our No. 1 seller, ever since,” he said.

For those of you who didn’t make it out to Festival du Voyageur this year and are wondering where else tourtière is served — and for those of you who adore tourtière and want to get your mitts on more — we hit the streets to see which restaurants in Winnipeg serve the succulent pie, year-round. Here’s what we turned up.

Promenade Café and Wine, 130 Provencher Blvd.

It’s hard to be certain without cracking open a history book, but we’re willing to go out on a limb and say voyageurs who arrived in these parts during the fur-trade era never uttered the words “tourtière” and “hotdog” in the same sentence.

“We make most of our own sausage, and last year around this time we were fooling around with different things we could put on them, if we served them on an Italian-style bun,” said Shawn Brandson, owner of Promenade Café and Wine.

First, Brandson’s kitchen put together a hotdog slathered with pulled pork, bacon and coleslaw. (Brandson declared the result a success and we’re prepared to — burp — take his word for it.)

Next, his staff topped a frank with crumbled-up tourtière meat.

“We debuted (the tourtière dog) at Festival du Voyageur last year, and it was one of our biggest sellers, for sure,” said Brandson, whose restaurant is an official food supplier for two tents at Voyageur Park when the festival is going on.

Because his business is located in St. Boniface, Brandson felt it was “important” to include tourtière on his menu, when he and his wife established Promenade Café five years ago. Brandson’s former restaurant, Provence Bistro, was roundly praised for its bison tenderloin and bison rib-eye, so Brandson chose to build on that tradition by using ground bison in his tourtière.

“Early on when we were perfecting our recipe, our servers, who are all bilingual, were very much in tune with what the francophone community was saying (about our tourtière),” Brandson said. “Tourtière has been a big part of many of their lives for a long time, and we definitely paid attention when they discussed how ours compared to their mother’s or grandmother’s.”

 

 

Resto Gare, 630 Rue des Meurons

Eight years ago, Linda Love decided La Vieille Gare, the St. Boniface restaurant that had been in her family for years, needed a facelift. She shuttered the Rue des Meurons icon March 1, 2008, and reopened two months later with a new moniker, Resto Gare, and an overhauled menu. One of the immediate hits was an entrée titled “Tourtière de ma Mère.”

“It is my mother’s recipe, just like it sounds,” Love said, seated in her locale’s rail-car lounge. “My father, who cooked here and at his other restaurant, the Red Lantern, before he passed away, was a classically trained French chef, but he rarely did the cooking at home. Fortunately, he was married to my mom, who was an excellent cook in her own right.”

Thing was, Love wasn’t sure how her mother, Irene Kirouac, would react if she entrusted her kitchen staff with Kirouac’s decades-old family recipe. So she enlisted her mom to teach her how to make tourtière from scratch. 

“The first time I watched her do it, the second time we did it together and the third time she watched me. Then she watched me ‘a few’ more times after that, until I had it down pat,” Love said. 

Resto Gare’s tourtière combines ground pork and ground beef, as well as onions, celery and “secret spices.” It is served with gravy on the side, but don’t worry: Love won’t throw you out if you ask for a bottle of ketchup instead.

“I know a lot of French Canadians think it’s sacrilegious to put ketchup on tourtière, but between you and me, that’s the way I like it, too.”

Stella’s au CCFM, 340 Provencher Blvd.

What started off as a seasonal special at Stella’s Café & Bakery’s other locations has found a permanent home at the chain’s St. Boniface setting, Stella’s au CCFM.

“When we opened last April, we wanted to celebrate our connection with the CCFM (Centre culturel franco-manitobain) as well as the French-Canadian community,” said company CEO Grant Anderson. “Having tourtière on the menu, as well as things like vegetarian baked beans and saumon en croutû, seemed like a natural fit.” 

Anderson said Stella’s chefs went “in a completely different direction” when they decided to pair their pie, which is made with ground pork and grass-fed beef, with maple cream sauce instead of the usual condiment choices.

“It’ a very nice complement,” Anderson said. “The maple component seasons it up a bit, but the cream smooths it all out.” 

Anderson laughed when he was asked about St. Boniface residents’ reaction to the unique combo. 

“I think most people are hesitant to say something is better than what they grew up with,” he said. “But I have had people pull me aside later and say, ‘Honestly, it is (better).’” 

 

Peasant Cookery, 283 Bannatyne Ave.

Tort-E-A. Torch-air. Torture: Carly Durston, general manager at Peasant Cookery, is used to hearing out-of-town customers trip over the word tourtière, when they’re trying to decide what to order for lunch or dinner.

“Sometimes they give up and point to the menu and say, ‘I’ll have this,’” she said with a chuckle. “Because we’re situated near a lot of downtown hotels, we get quite a few tourists coming in for a bite, and we spend a fair amount of time explaining what tourtière is to them and where it originated.”

Tourtière has been a top seller at Peasant Cookery since the Exchange District hot spot opened in 2011. Durston is fairly certain her regular clientele would “revolt” if chef Tristan Foucault, who came up with the recipe, ever replaced it on his menu.

“It’s not the sort of thing you see (on menus) too often, and for a lot of people, it’s become their go-to meal when they’re here,” Durston said. “They’ll hum and haw and say maybe they should try something different for a change, but then they end up ordering (tourtière) after all.”

Peasant Cookery’s deep-dish tourtière is made with Berkshire pork and comes with fries or salad. Because of demand, the restaurant began offering whole tourtières a couple of years ago for takeout.

“All we need is a day or two’s notice and we’ll bake a few extra pies and give you the instructions what to do with it, once you get it home,” she said.

 

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca