Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Tourtière Genealogy

My ancestry is French-Canadian on my mother's side of the family so one dish we had every Christmas was tourtière: a meat pie. In our household, the meat was always pork and I always assumed that tourtière meant "pork pie." However, in later years I learned that some people make tourtière from veal or beef. However, not until this week did I realize that tourtière is also often an indication of your ancestry.

Susan Semenak has published an article in The Montreal Gazette, pointing out that the various recipes for tourtière vary from region to region. She points out that in Quebec City, tourtière is called pâté a la viande and is made with diced or cubed pork (and even rolled oats.) Indeed, I did later prove by other means that the majority of my mother's ancestry came from Quebec City and its suburbs. The spices used in tourtière also are an indication of the region of Quebec where our ancestors lived.

Moxie … It’s Maine in a Bottle

Here's a bit of Americana. Well, maybe I should call it Maine-iana. When I was growing up in  small town in Maine, Moxie was a very popular soft drink. It seemed to be consumed by older residents of the area. I don't remember any of my schoolyard chums every drinking the stuff. I always thought it tasted like cough syrup.

Lisbon, Maine, will be the site this weekend of the annual Moxie Days Festival, carrying the 2011 theme of: “Moxie … It’s Maine in a Bottle.” A turkey supper will be held at the Lisbon Falls Masonic Hall on Route 196, and I assume there will be plenty of Moxie available to wash down the turkey.

Let's Have Haggis for Lunch

April 6 is National Tartan Day in the United States, a day when anyone with Scottish ancestry is invited to celebrate their heritage. (See my earlier article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/03/national-tartan-day.html for details.) What better way to celebrate your heritage than to eat the food that your ancestors enjoyed so often?

Haggis is regarded as the national dish of Scotland. Haggis is a sausage-like dish of meat. Wikipedia.org describes haggis as "a dish containing sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally simmered in the animal's stomach for approximately three hours."

The thrifty Scots of old made sure that nothing went to waste on an animal. They made haggis by cooking whatever was available, such as kidneys, liver, tripe, heart, and other internal organs, including the lungs.

Haggis is... English?

A haggis recipe was published in an English book almost two hundred years before any evidence of the dish in Scotland, a historian has claimed.

Historian Catherine Brown said she found references to the dish inside a 1615 book called The English Hus-Wife. The title would pre-date Robert Burns' poem To A Haggis, which brought fame to the delicacy, by at least 171 years. The first mention she could find of Scottish haggis was in 1747.