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The Canadian province of Québec has some impishly named foods, dishes like les oreilles de Crisse and les pets de soeur (literally: Christ’s ears and nuns’ farts). Lingering in the very esprit quotidien of a province once crushingly dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, there is a pleasing remnant of anticlerical rebellion left in Québec French too.

But la tourtière belongs to a more pious and literal tradition of food naming. A tourtière is a shallow meat pie with onions, often a pork pie, flavoured with the traditional French medieval spice combo of cinnamon and cloves. In kitchens along Québec’s majestic Saguenay River, a tourtière can be quite a production, consisting of cubed meat, potatoes, onions baked in many layers in a deep, pastry-lined casserole: in other words, what would have been called a cipaille or pâté de famille in older days is here a tourtière de Saguenay.

In 1836 in Québec, a tourtière was a pork pie. One local tourtière became a favourite of Scottish and British soldiers posted to the citadel at Québec City who then stayed on, buying outskirt farms and growing oats. Thus, in one Québec-City tourtière, oatmeal thickens the ground pork filling instead of the traditional French potatoes.

The Utile Utensil

The food tourtière took its name from the utensil in which it was baked. The original tourtière, in French print by 1573, was a pie pan for baking tourtes. In old French cookery, a tourte was a round pastry pie with a pastry top and filled either with meat and vegetables if it was a savoury or with fruit and cream if it was a dessert tourte. This word stems from the street Latin phrase tortus panis ‘a round of bread.’ The word tourtière also names the mould used to make these pastry tourtes. This tourtière has an expandable circumference, can be made of porcelain, clay, or glass, and can serve as a pie dish, a tart mould, or a flan ring. There is even an electric tourtière.

At the bottom right is a tourtière de Lac St-Jean

 

 

Omelette

Another familiar food named after the kitchen pan in which it was cooked is the omelette: a dish of eggs beaten to a froth, cooked until set and served by folding one half over the other half.

The spelling ‘omelette’ evolved in old French from une amelette: a wide, flat frying pan. After a good spin on the orthographical Ferris wheel of Middle French, after many spelling alterations, ultimately amelette does derive from Latin lamella meaning ‘thin layer,’ ‘thin blade’ or ‘slender leaf,’ referring to the thin blade of iron from which a blacksmith would have hammered out at the forge the earliest frying pan.

 

 

Lamella

Lamella is still used in scientific English, especially in botany, anatomy and zoology, to label a thin scale or layer of bone or a slender, filmy tissue of some organism.

 

Laminate

Lamella literally is a Latin diminutive form of lamina which to the ancient Romans meant ‘a flake of metal,’ ‘a thin plate’ or ‘a layer of material more substantial than a lamella.’ It is also the source of modern phrases like laminated wood or plastic lamination, in which a substance is coated with a layer of some, usually protective, overlying material.

 

Et maintenant, sortissons-nous de la cuisine sur la pointe des pieds.

 

Copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

 

 

 

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