Shepherd’s Pie, Cottage Pie and Fish Pie may all have those names, but they’re not really pies. If you said “I’m making a pie” or “I’m in the mood for a pie” it wouldn’t be a shepherd’s pie or similar, it would be something with a crust. Shepherd’s Pie is a name: both words are needed.
A bit like “pudding” discussed several pages back: Yorkshire Pudding and Black Pudding are not members of a category of things which anyone would think of as puddings nowadays. It’s the name of a dish. "What sort of pudding? " wouldn’t be answered with “Yorkshire”; “What sort of pie?” wouldn’t be answered with “Cottage”.
It’s basically a fish casserole, with chunks of salmon/smoked fish/prawns (combos may vary) in a bechamel sauce, topped with mashed potato. Very nice, as it goes.
I’ve also heard of fish pie being described as like a fish-based tartiflette, for those familiar with tartiflette.
Cottage Pie, as a name, is much older than its sheep-herding counterpart, and originally referred to that type of dish regardless of meat type - spuds are cheap peasant food, peasants live in cottages. Shepherd’s Pie is more recent, and was an interchangeable term with Cottage Pie, but etymological assumptions (sometimes really quite assertive assumptions) have pretty much crystalised it into beef/lamb cottage/shepherd’s.
OK, pizza is sometimes referred to as a pie, but even that’s usually an affectation. But lasagna? No way, no how is that a pie.
I’d never heard of fish pie before, but the difference there might just be that Great Britain is an island, and there’s therefore no part of the nation that’s all that far from the ocean, and so seafood is naturally a more significant part of the diet. I mean, you can still get frozen fish anywhere, but there are a lot of places in the US where you can’t get fresh fish, or only of a few varieties.
OK, pizza is sometimes referred to as a pie, but even that’s usually an affectation. But lasagna? No way, no how is that a pie.
I’d never heard of fish pie before, but the difference there might just be that Great Britain is an island, and there’s therefore no part of the nation that’s all that far from the ocean, and so seafood is naturally a more significant part of the diet. I mean, you can still get frozen fish anywhere, but there are a lot of places in the US where you can’t get fresh fish, or only of a few varieties.
A Dutch oven to me would probably have legs, definitely have a lid with an inset rim you could heap coal on, and wouldn’t be enameled. Like this. If you can’t get the coals to stay on top, it won’t act as an oven, just a pot.
South Africa as well. I mean, I understand the American usage, and it might get used for some dishes - I think people would understand “tuna casserole” to be the same thing as an American would mean. But if I said “I’m making ostrich casserole”, people would expect an oven-baked stew.
Here we differ, we definitely know what they are, or at least the outdoor cooking variety. Although they’re considered the poor cousin to thepotjie.
Yes, this, only you do it in the oven, in a lidded casserole dish, not on top of the stove.
usually you’d brown the meat and aromatics first, either in the casserole itself if it can be put on the stovetop (how I do it) or a pan if it can’t (a lot of stoneware casseroles).
The very Wikipedia article you’re linking too notes that that’s a picture of what was considered a Dutch something like 120 years ago. Further down, there’s a picture of a modern Dutch oven.
But you could make a thick, hearty, chunky, stew-type dish in a big iron pan, which you start on the hob then put in the oven. So it would be stewed (it’s a load of stuff cooked in a greater or lesser quantity of stock/broth/wine/beer/etc.) and baked (it’s cooked in the oven). And it would be, in Britain, a casserole.
The vessel would be a casserole, the food would be a casserole, and the vessel would also be a casserole dish, while this is all going on, to distinguish it from the food.
I’m not even entirely certain what you mean by “stew” at this point - but I will say that in the US, a “stew” has less liquid than a soup, but more than a casserole. This is an example of a “casserole” and this is a stew. I’ve never heard of someone cooking a stew in the oven, but we do brown meat on the stovetop and cook it in a pot in the oven with vegetables like this, but pot roast is neither a stew nor a casserole to me. It’s braised meat and vegetables, just like I might roast some meat with vegetables, the difference being that “roasting” doesn’t involve liquid ( yeah, it’s called “pot roast” , but that “pot” implies it’s not the normal roasting method. Kind of like air-frying isn’t really frying)
That’s why I said people/places that use both terms- if you had a shepherd’s pie made with ground beef ( and I have many times) I can almost guarantee that place/person never make’s the lamb version.
As I mentioned upthread, Cottage Pie was the original term. The meat wasn’t specified: it was whatever was available. Shepherds Pie is a later name, and was originally interchangeable with Cottage Pie, but in Britain - where lamb (and historically mutton and hoggett) and beef are both common, a distinction has developed based on the assumption that “Shepherd’s” implies the involvement of sheep.
“Shepherd’s Pie” is still a usably generic term in Britain though, despite all that. I’ve made vegetarian versions with beans and lentils, and nobody’s complained about the name!
Call that stew a casserole in the UK and no-one would bat an eyelid. Call it a stew and it would be fine too. If a distinction is drawn then a casserole needs to go in the oven, whereas if it stayed on the hob (but turned out much the same) it would be a stew. But it could still be a stew if it went in the oven.
Your casserole link redirected to Food Network’s UK landing page, but the url is enough to tell me that that is in no way a casserole in British parlance! Not a chance. That’s Macaroni Cheese (note lack of “and”).
Now, this may suffer the same fate for you as your casserole link did for me, but here is what you get if you search for “casserole” on BBC Food.
