A half-circle-shaped pastry pocket about the size of a taco with a rugged crimp around its edges, the meat pie is as popular a snack in rural Louisiana as boudin sausage. Also made with crawfish, especially on Fridays and during Lent, it sports a brittle, golden crust that is crunchy near the crimp, pliant near its mounded center, and filled with a steamy portion of spiced ground beef. While frequently eaten out of hand as a walk-around snack, the meat pie also is served on plates with dirty rice and gravy, becoming a knife-and-fork meal. Lasyone’s Meat Pie Kitchen in Natchitoches also offers a meat pie breakfast, with eggs and hash browns.
“I cannot explain for certain how meat pies first came to this place,” James Lasyone told us many years ago. He believed it happened in the nineteenth century, when Natchitoches—the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714—was a thriving trade center and outfitting point for settlers heading West. By the mid-twentieth century, however, street-corner pie vendors were fading into history. Lasyone, who had grown up a sharecropper’s son out in the country and had enjoyed the pies when his family came to town, became the butcher at a Natchitoches grocery store. When he wanted a meat pie, he knew which ladies to call. “Some were white, some were black,” he remembers. “But there weren’t many of them left.” In the mid-1960s, he began experimenting with recipes to make his own pies. He sold some over the butcher’s counter at the store, then in 1967 he opened his restaurant in a minuscule retail space near the meat market. It has since become a Southern food landmark.
The legendary crawfish pie of Cajun country.
Meat pie from Champagne’s Bakery in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.