Pass the Meat Pie

Does turkey make you think of a Christmas dinner or a Thanksgiving feast? If you lived in North Carolina in the 1700s, you might have often eaten roasted turkey, chicken or goose. But the really special dish for celebrations was a meat pie. It required more ingredients and was harder to cook than a roasted bird. A meat pie didn’t contain seafood but was also often called a “sea pie,” because its meat was preserved with salt, which kept well on a sea voyage. A typical meat pie might have included ham, chicken and onions, and potatoes or apples.