Store-bought Rappie Pie, From Frozen

This year we vacationed again in Nova Scotia; we loved it so much last year that we ended up going for two weeks this time around, which gave us time to see some of the places we’d missed out on the year before. The first thing we did, of course, was pick up some more of D’Eon’s frozen rappie pie from the local grocery store.

We also had a chance to spend an afternoon in Yarmouth, N.S., and discovered to our delight that the restaurant we’d stopped in at for a mid-day snack served rappie pie.

Rappie Pie served in Yarmouth, N.S.

Rather surprisingly, we both thought that D’Eon’s Rappie Pie had a more intense chicken flavor than the rappie pie we had at the restaurant.

If you’ve never heard of rappie pie, it’s a traditional Acadian dish that’s made of potatoes and chicken. It has an almost glutinous texture inside, and it’s got a very intense chicken flavor – think about how roast chicken smells when it’s cooking and that’s the way it tastes.

Luckily, we picked up a copy of A Taste of Acadie at a local store in Yarmouth that very same day; it has a recipe for rappie pie, so yesterday Ward decided to give it a try.

While it didn’t turn out looking quite as good as the one we were served in the restaurant – Ward figures he didn’t get as much starch out of the potatoes as he should have – the flavor was definitely there. The bonus? The entire house smelled so delicious the entire time.

Fresh Out of the Oven

The potatoes also stayed in strands, rather than becoming a more glutinous solid. I know “glutinous solid” doesn’t sound very good, but trust me on this one – it tastes much better than it sounds!

Ready to Eat

Interested in making rappie pie? Here’s the recipe we used, adapted from A Taste of Acadie. Next time we try this recipe, we won’t use as much bacon (we found the bacon flavor took away from the intense chicken taste), and we might also order the frozen potato mixture that D’Eon’s sells, as suggested in this FoodTV.ca article.

Rappie Pie

Ingredients:

1 medium-sized chicken

3 large onions, chopped

12 potatoes

salt and pepper

1/2 pd/250 g bacon, cut into small pieces

1/2 tsp-1 tsp dried savory, or to taste

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F/180 degrees C.

2. Cut chicken into large pieces. Place in pot with just enough water to completely cover. Add onions and simmer until chicken is tender.

3. Remove chicken from the pot, reserving the broth. Remove meat from the bones. Cut meat into smaller, bite-sized pieces.

4. Grate potatoes. Place grated potatoes in cotton bag and squeeze vigorously to extract all the water. The goal is to get rid of as much starch as possible by squeezing out all the water.

5. Bring the reserved chicken broth to a boil. Scald the grated, de-starched potatoes in an amount of broth equal to approximately 2/3 of the water you extracted from the potatoes. Blend the broth with the potatoes and season with salt and pepper.

6. In heavy pot, sauté half of the bacon. Add half of the potato mixture. Spoon into greased rectangular baking pan. Add the chicken, sprinkle over with savory, then top with remaining potato mixture. Place remaining bacon on top.

7. Bake for 1-1/2 hours, or until top is uniformly brown.

A Taste of Acadie, by Marielle Cormier-Boudrea and Melvin Gallant

About this Cookbook:

For A Taste of Acadie, Melvin Gallant and Marielle Cormier-Boudreau travelled all over Acadia, from the Gaspé Peninsula to Cape Breton, from the tip of Prince Edward Island to the Magdalen Islands, and around northern New Brunswick and southern Nova Scotia. They gathered the culinary secrets of traditional Acadian cooks while there was still time, and then they adapted more than 150 recipes for today’s kitchens. A Taste of Acadie, the popular English translation of the best-selling Cuisine traditionelle en Acadie, is available once again this spring.

The indigenous cuisine of Acadia is a distant relative of French home cooking, born of necessity and created from what was naturally available. Roast porcupine or seal-fat cookies may not be to every modern diner’s taste, but the few recipes of this nature in A Taste of Acadie hint at the ingenuity of women who fed their families with what the land provided. Most of the recipes, however, use ingredients beloved of today’s cooks. Here you’ll find fricot, a wonder of the Acadian imagination, pot en pot, a traditional Sunday dinner sometimes called grosse soupe, and dozens of meat pies, variations on pâté à la viande. There’s also pâté à la rapure, with a crust made of grated potatoes, and the popular poutine rapée, one of the few French dishes to survive the transition to the New World, although certainly not in its original form. For those with a sweet tooth, Gallant and Cormier-Boudreau include recipes that use maple syrup and fresh wild berries, from poutine à trou, a delectable mixture of apples, cranberries and nuts in a rich pastry purse, to the cheekily named pets de soeurs (nun’s farts), a biscuit with a puckered middle and a saucy Acadian name.

A Taste of Acadie is traditional cooking at its best, suffusing contemporary kitchens with country aromas and down-home flavours. Decorated with evocative woodcuts by Michiel Oudemans, it is a pleasure to look at and a charming addition in its own right to contemporary country-style kitchens.

Table of Contents:

Preface | Introduction | Soups | Fricots | Fish | Shellfish | Meat | Vegetables | Desserts & Pastries | Breads, Biscuits & Crépes | Miscellaneous | Substitutions | Index

Our initial thoughts:

We can never resist searching out local cookbooks when we travel, and during our recent trip to Nova Scotia we made some lovely finds. A Taste of Acadie was one of these finds, and we’re very eager to put some of the recipes in this book to the test. The first recipe we’ll be trying? Rappie pie (on page 121)!

Related Links and other Fun Stuff

Poutine Râpée recipe

Rappie pie recipe

Acadian culture

Where to buy A Taste of Acadie:: U.S. (Amazon.com) | Canada (Chapters) | UK (Amazon.co.uk)