Pâté chinois is the name given to Shepherd’s pie in Quebec. I first came across this term a few years ago, and I always wondered why it was called “Chinese pie” or “Chinese pastry”. (There isn’t necessarily very much logic involved in naming foods after countries: Turkeys come from North America, Danish pastry was invented in Vienna, and Welsh rabbit is English, for example.) Yesterday I saw it again and decided I’d finally get to the bottom of it. Had I been forced to guess, I would have said that “chinois” here means “strange” (as it sometimes does), because mashed potatoes is such a strange “pastry” compared to the traditional flour-and-shortening pastry.
The answer I found on the Internet was just about the last thing I would have expected
The GQ: Is this the real explanation? It sounds a little far-fetched to me. As far as I know, shepherd’s pie is not very common in Maine, except among people with Quebec roots (who call it “pâté chinois”). But the dish is very common in anglophone Canada. It seems much more likely to me that the Québecois would get the recipe from Ontario, for example.
And would francophones really use the word chinois to describe China, Maine? That seems bizarre to me. If it were named after the town in Maine, I would expect it to be something like “pâté à la China” [or possibly à la Chine]. There are a lot of towns in Maine named after countries (I’ve lived in one), and in English, the adjective is the same as the noun. A newspaper article might say “A Mexico man was accused by a Norway woman of selling strange pies to Lebanon schoolchildren.” The whole sense changes when you write it “A Mexican man was accused by a Norwegian woman of selling strange pies to Lebanese schoolchildren.” I’ve never come across this problem in French before, so I have no idea how the French translation would run.
And one last question: since shepherd’s pie is usually made from beef and not lamb, why isn’t it called “cow pie”?
In England Shepherd’s Pie is made of lamb or mutton. If beef is substituted it’s known as Cottage Pie. At least according to the British staff at my local pub.
The CBC Radio One program C’est la Vie treated this one recently.
Among the theories was this one:
During the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a number of immigrants from Asia were employed as labourers on the lines. Being poorly-paid, they could only afford cheap staples such as potatoes and root vegetables, and a measure of meat. The dish made from combining these became associated with the labourers, and so came to be known as ‘pate chinois’.
If this isn’t it, maybe it was simply popular among the people of Lachine, Que.
I know im necroing the shit out of this but i had to. You know how Chinese tends to have everything overly complicated for nothing right? Well in Quebec there’s a saying that goes like “that ain’t chinese to do” as in “simple enough” and shepherd’s pie is just simple enough to do so they called it according to that.
Needless to say, the lamb/beef distinction is also folk etymology. “Cottage pie” was the original term for any dish of this sort, with the term “shepherd’s pie” being reserved for lamb versions arising only later.
