My wife had chinese pie made with brisket and creamed corn at the restaurant tonight. I will sometimes throw in 50% peas to go with the corn, and sometimes broil the top of it considerably at the end, maybe with a little cheese.
There are a few theories where it comes from, including China, Maine, as it clearly comes from either Northern New England or Quebec, but the one that makes most sense to me is the Canadian railroad one. The owners of the railroad were English, and they wanted their shepherd's pie, made with lamb (yes, Grim's post today inspired this) and the carrots and peas common in England in addition to the potatoes. They hired Chinese cooks to feed the workers on the line because they were cheap. The Chinese cooks didn't much care about tradition, and they figured out pretty quickly that there wasn't much lamb to be had, so they substituted beef. Peas and carrots had some availability, but nothing like the corn that sprung up right away, in quantity, across the plains.
The workers on the line building ever westward in Canada were Quebecois, and when they came home they brought the idea of "Chinese" pie, thinking that it must be some oriental version of the shepherd's pie that rich English people ate. There was lots of coming and going between Quebec and the northern parts of 802, 603, and 207, and once the mills came in in the southern cities of Manchester, Nashua, and even all the way down below the Mason-Dixon line into Massachusetts in Lowell and Lawrence, they brought the dish with them even more frequently.
6 comments:
“Chinese pie” isn’t familiar to me. I don’t recall anything like a pie from my time in China, either; breads there tend to be steamed, not baked. What exactly is it that you’re eating?
Very common school lunch food in my day. Hamburg bottom layer, then corn, then mashed potatoes. People put ketchup on it or make it with gravy in the bottom. Not very chinese, no, except when hired by englishmen in canada, I suppose.
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My French Canadian parents always referred to this dish as Chinese Pie, not Shepherd's Pie. No ketchup in the dish itself but we'd often put it on top after being served.
Interesting. So it's a lot like shepherd's pie in that it's ground meat and mashed potatoes plus vegetables, baked in layers, in a pie or casserole dish but without an actual pastry?
I never actually had shepherd's pie until I moved to Savannah, where there is a large Irish community that dates to the mid-1800s. (They were very welcome compared to Irish immigrants elsewhere in America, and allowed to adopt one of the local heroes as their own. Sergeant Jasper, who was actually German, has been 'traditionally identified' as Irish to the degree that his monument in Savannah states plainly that he was an "Irish-American.") It's not a dish that has a Southern cuisine equivalent that I would have grown up with.
All the elements are regular in Southern cuisine, just not the form. It wouldn't be weird to be served a hamburger steak, with peas and/or carrots on the side, and mashed potatoes. For some reason, though, there's not an equivalent dish to shepherd's pie in common use. I'd never heard of "Chinese pie" at all (but there is not a large Chinese population in the South, except recently in Atlanta).
Sounds a lot like the origin of the most common 'Chinese' food from my Iowa childhood, chow mein.
The hamburger/vegetable/potato mix was quite often hamburger browned and then mixed with canned green beans (not frozen) and cream of mushroom soup, topped with tater tots, and baked til the tots were done. Covered all four Midwest food groups :). If you were fancy you could align the tots in a pattern.
I don't recall when I frst heard of Shepherd's Pie, but it was not young childhood. What had that name was potatoes, meat, and gravy instead of corn, with the understanding that lamb was the original and preferred choice, while hamburg was an American step-down. I was well into adulthood before I had any version that had carrots and peas and was well-browned on the top.
I had thought Chinese pie was ubiquitous, because it was served to children at every school and camp when I was young and was in most homes. But I was in Manchester, a heavily French-Canadian mill city, and the ingredients are all easily available here. Sheep were an entirely theoretical animal found in books. When i went to school in Virginia in 1971, I learned that few south of New York had even heard of it.
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