For more information on the Festival FrancoFun, visit francoamericanheritage.org.

LEWISTON — Diane Valliere Mailhot holds up a loosely wrapped sandwich. She wags it a little bit in front of the crowd.

“When I went to school, I didn’t have a hot lunch,” she said. “Back then, everyone went to school with a creton sandwich.”

There were so many nods across the room, it almost looked choreographed. They remembered creton sandwiches, oh, yes.

At the Franco-American Heritage Center, where the Festival FrancoFun was kicking off Friday afternoon, nearly 200 people were in agreement — creton was a part of their history.

And then there’s tourtiere, another fine example of what happens when pork gets minced and introduced to spices. At the Franco fest, they like it so much, they decided to have a contest to see who could make the best.

“It’s all about taste and texture,” said Roger Roy, one of the judges for the tourtiere contest. “Everybody has a different recipe.”

Like most people who have spent most of their lives in Lewiston, Roy has been eating tourtiere (meat pie, to the unschooled) since he was a kid. His grandmother made it. His mother made it. Roy eventually married a woman who had her own recipe.

“When she first made it for me,” Roy said, “it was too spicy. It took me 45 years to teach her how to do it right.”

He’s still married, in spite of cheap shots like that. In fact, he was working side by side in the kitchen Friday with his wife, Cecile.

When it comes to tourtiere, it’s OK to joke. Everybody does it a bit differently. Take the matter of cinnamon, for instance. Some like it in their tourtiere, some don’t.

Mostly, they don’t.

“Cinnamon?” Roy said with a faint look of distaste. “No. That’s for apple pie.”

Dick Martin, another judge, grew up in Little Canada. He has lived in Lewiston all of his years. Dick is a man who knows his way around a tourtiere pie.

“I’m not a cinnamon man, myself,” he said.

Tourtiere, the scholars will tell you, originated in Canada. It is named for the ceramic casserole dish it was originally baked in — the “tourte.” For one reason or another, it is associated with the Christmas season and it’s a major part of the French celebration of the holiday.

“My mom would start making them around Thanksgiving,” Roy said.

But enough reflection. It was contest time. Roy, Martin and the others nibbled their way through more than a half-dozen pies before declaring the winners.

No. 1?

Pauline Fenton of Winthrop. And right behind her, Paulette Martel of Lewiston.

“The consistency was there for me,” Roy said. “And the crust. The crust is very important.”

And that was that for the tourtiere contest. Only the Franco festival was just getting started. It continued into Friday night and will carry on through Saturday.