Louisiana Wrote the Natchitoches Meat Pie Into State Law in 2003. The Town Has Been Making Them Since at Least the 1820s.

Louisiana has an official state meat pie, and it is spelled out in law. "There shall be an official state meat pie," reads Section 170.9 of Title 49 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes. "The official state meat pie shall be the Natchitoches Meat Pie." The Legislature passed it in 2003, and the act even authorizes the pie's use on official state documents and alongside the state insignia.

The pie itself is simple to describe. It is a half-moon hand pie with a crimped edge, filled with ground beef and pork cooked down with onion, bell pepper, green onion and garlic in a seasoned gravy, then usually deep-fried, though it can be baked. Visitors tend to compare it to an empanada, and the comparison may be closer than it looks.

Natchitoches (say NAK-uh-tush) is the oldest permanent European settlement in Louisiana, and the meat pie has been tied to it for a long time. According to the 64 Parishes encyclopedia, the earliest known written mention comes from the travel journal of Massachusetts missionary Timothy Flint, published in 1826. Nobody knows exactly where the recipe came from. One theory points to soldiers at Los Adaes, the nearby Spanish outpost, who would have known empanadas. Another looks to the French-Canadian tourtière, a pork-and-beef pie that the town's founder, the French-Canadian soldier Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, may have had a taste for when he arrived in 1713. The encyclopedia's own conclusion is that the pie almost certainly grew out of borrowing among the many groups who mixed there.

Some of the most sought-after pie makers came from the Creole of color community of Isle Brevelle, about 12 miles south of town. Ascher Rouqier's pies were so popular that the Natchitoches Enterprise ran a column mourning her death in 1913. Louise Sarpy was still selling meat pies to tourists through classified ads in the 1950s and 1960s. Restaurants such as Poete's Inn, the T-Shoppe, Allday's Coffee Shop and Jimmy's Lunch Room sold them in the first half of the 20th century, but anyone who wanted pies in quantity usually had to track down a home cook.

That changed in 1967, when a butcher named James Lasyone opened Lasyone's Meat Pie Kitchen and Restaurant at 622 Second Street. Lasyone had been selling ground meat to the women who made pies at home, JSTOR Daily has noted, and his restaurant made the pie something a traveler could order any day. It soon added two more dining rooms that could seat about 100 people.

National attention arrived in February 1974, when House Beautiful published a story praising Natchitoches and its pies. Craig Claiborne wrote about them for The New York Times and Calvin Trillin for The New Yorker, and Good Morning America, Glamour and Southern Living followed. In 2002 the Times reported that Lasyone's served between 400 and 1,000 meat pies a day. That story ran on the front of the Times travel section just before New Year's 2003, with the restaurant's phone number, and in the weeks that followed Lasyone's turned out 4,000 to 5,000 pies a day to ship around the country, JSTOR Daily reports.

The legislative honor came that same year. JSTOR Daily credits the bill to state Rep. Taylor Townsend, a Natchitoches native, and says it passed unanimously. The town had been planning a food festival of its own around the same time, and today the Natchitoches Meat Pie Festival is usually held the second weekend of September with free admission. It is run by volunteers from a local motorcycle club, the Independent Motorcycle Riders of Natchitoches, and the money raised goes to local charities. There is even a Meat Pie Tri, a triathlon named for the dish.

Cooks still argue about the filling. The festival's official recipe, credited to Mrs. L.J. Melder of Natchitoches, calls for a pound of ground beef and a pound of ground pork. JSTOR Daily reported that Lasyone's uses a four-to-one ratio of beef to pork. The festival's recipe makes about 18 pies, with dough rolled very thin and cut into rounds using a saucer as a guide.

James Lasyone died in 2015 at 84. His daughters, Angela and Tina, were running the restaurant as of 2023, according to 64 Parishes, and it still serves breakfast and lunch six days a week on Second Street. The pie has spread well beyond it. It now turns up at restaurants, bars, convenience stores and festival booths across Louisiana and the Southeast, a long way from the home kitchens of Isle Brevelle.

Photo: amanderson2 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.