Sunday Story #13
The histories of pâté chinois & how I thought it was Italian
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Between bowls of pasta e fagioli, chicken feet, and pans of lasagna, the staples of our nonna’s cooking have always included pâté chinois (literally, Chinese pie - we’ll unpack this later). It remains a piatto forte of hers. Growing up, we had it so often I thought it was Italian. In our Montreal context, English, French, and Italian are often used interchangeably throughout a conversation (or even a sentence).1 It never really occurred to me, then, that it was strange for us to use a French name for this dish.
Of course, I now know that this is a recipe that she learned here. Had she stayed in Cantalupo nel Sannio, it would have never made it into her repertoire. Along with coquille Saint-Jacques, which we have at (almost) every Christmas Eve fish feast, pâté chinois became a part of our Italian-Canadian experience because we were born and raised in Québec.
In 2007, after surveying readers and calling upon a panel of experts to examine the results, Le Devoir (a French-language newspaper) named pâté chinois the national plate of Québec. These were their criteria:
Must be anchored in traditional home style Québecois cooking
Must be transmitted from generation to generation
Must have historical roots
Must be regularly prepared in Québecois homes
Must be made with local ingredients
Must be served in both fine dining and popular cooking style Québecois restaurants
Funnily enough, the chosen dish didn’t directly respond to all these criteria. The panel even felt a sense of “unease” when it came to justifying this choice to the public.2 While pâté chinois is definitely ubiquitous to the province, its origins and history remain a mystery. And maybe, some speculate(d), not Québecois at all.
Jean-Pierre Lemasson, a professor studying the culinary history of the province, was part of this panel, which inspired him to publish Le Mystère insondable du pâté chinois (The unfathomable mystery of pâté chinois) in 2009. He explains:
«Tenter de retracer l'origine du pâté chinois est, autant le dire d'emblée, un défi presque insurmontable. Les pistes sont nombreuses, plus ou moins fantaisistes, presque jamais documentées, de telle sorte qu'il faut se livrer à un travail qu'un inspecteur de police jugerait au-dessus de ses forces.»3
Basically, pâté chinois, in its glorious simplicity, is complicated to understand. Let’s dive into the curious history of this dish and what it means for Québec. Above all, what it means to navigate identity through food and language.
What is pâté chinois?
“Steak, blé d’Inde, patates,” aka the three layers at the base of “notre sainte trinité alimentaire.”4 Our holy food trinity. Pâté chinois is peak comfort food. We can call it Québecois style cucina povera, as it’s often referred to as a leftovers dish: throw in the ground beef, canned creamed corn, and mashed potatoes that remained at the end of the week and feed the whole family.
Though we often use the term “shepherd’s pie” as the English translation, it’s not exactly the same thing. Shepherd’s pie is an Irish dish traditionally made from lamb. The veggies are mixed into the minced meat, and do not necessarily include corn. Recipes tend to use mainly carrots and peas. This mixture is then topped with mashed potatoes. It seems the term cottage pie can be used interchangeably, though some say this is the name for the beef iteration (again without the creamed corn layer). This has historically been made throughout the UK.
Another particularity I kept seeing over and over again in my research on pâté chinois: there is no official recipe. It was often said that it is passed on “from generation to generation, mother to daughter. […] And it’s mostly kept within families and neighbours. Documented through recipe cards, but more often, through word of mouth.”5 It is no surprise, then, that this dish holds such importance for our province. It is meaningful because it is both personal and communal. Everyone’s grandmère - even the Italian ones, at times - has her own recipe to share. Adding to the exciting, murky history of this recipe.
Where does it come from?
There are multiple theories but no confirmed answers to this question. Many explanations have become urban legends, and circulate constantly despite having been debunked. Especially around the name. If it’s from Québec, why is it called Chinese? I’ve rounded up the main legends and possible histories below, from least to most likely (in my humble opinion):
The (false) story most people know is that it is named for the Chinese labourers who came to Canada in the 19th century to work on the railway. They were poor and lived in difficult conditions. It’s said that they prepared and ate this dish often because of their circumstances. This has been debunked by historians because, first, it has been proven that their diet consisted mostly of rice and ground salmon. Second, consumption of beef was discouraged or even forbidden in China at the time. A custom Chinese labourers respected even when in Canada.6
Pâté chinois could have been named for the Lachine area of Montreal, as a joke. Apparently, a seigneur from there had sold his land in 1669 to set off on an expedition to China. When he was unsuccessful, his fellow townspeople nicknamed his seigneury La Chine (there’s now a borough under that name) to bust his chops. Could it have been made here for the first time? Maybe, but this story has been debunked because a place called Lachine already existed before he left Montreal.
Lemasson also found a recipe for pâté chinois in a 1941 publication by the Sœurs des Saints-Noms de Jésus et de Marie in Outremont. In it, the nuns used rice instead of potatoes. Digging further, he also found another group of nuns in Outremont: the Sœurs missionnaires de l’Immaculée-Conception who had opened up a school for Chinese students. So are these things linked? In the end, Lemasson didn’t think so because he couldn’t make a connection between both groups of nuns. It seems like the presence of pâté chinois with rice in one group, wasn’t linked to the presence of Chinese students in the other. Plus, he had collected many testimonies from people explaining how the recipe had already been passed down in their family for generations. It had to exist in its potato form before 1941.
Maybe it comes from China, Maine? Many Québecois worked in New England throughout the 19th century and maybe they brought this recipe back. Though many sources speak of a “China pie” or “Chinese pie” particular to this area of Maine, I haven’t found anything putting its origins there. Mostly, sources talk about the fact that a town called China exists in Maine, and people from Québec lived around there. What came first, China pie or pâté chinois?
Or it could simply be that the advent of supermarkets in 1920s Montreal made minced beef more accessible to the working class. This coincided with the appearance of canned corn. In this case, pâté chinois began as a Montreal-based working class dish.7
While no trace of the dish was found in Maine, pâté chinois was known as China pie or Chinées pie in neighbouring New Hampshire, particularly in sawmill towns, where large groups of Québecois worked. Contrary to the China, Maine theory, in this story, it was French-speaking people living in the region who introduced the dish and, perhaps, even invented it. Why the name? In an 1881 report, Carroll D. Wright, director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote: “With some exceptions the Canadian French are the Chinese of the Eastern states [we’ll unpack this below]. They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational.”8
While #5 seems most likely to me in terms of context of place, #6 seems most likely overall because it combines context of place and context of name.
Between 1840 and 1930, roughly 900,000 French Canadians made the journey to New England, usually migrating in families. Men, women, and children worked long hours in the mills and earned very little. Ingredients and money would have been stretched thin. These early Franco-Americans lived in small communities called “Little Canadas.” They did not assimilate, but kept their customs, religious traditions, and language.
Conspiracies abounded that this was all a plan to form a new New France all along the northeastern coast of the continent. Or, editorials speculated, was this a Roman Catholic ploy to claim New England away from its Protestant clergy? In 1881, The New York Times reported that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. […] They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”9 By the 20th century, Franco-Americans became targets of the eugenics movement and of the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Digging Deeper
Whatever the truth behind its origins, by the 1940s, pâté chinois was already popular throughout the province. By the time my bisnonni and nonni arrived in Québec from Molise, it had been established as a cornerstone of its cuisine. Eventually, my nonna learned to make it. Because of our identity as Italian-Canadians (and you have to keep in mind that this was my reality growing up: most students at my elementary school came from Italian families; extended family and paesani were/are neighbours; my first language was Italian; cultural activities I took part in were Italian), it never occurred to me that this was not a typical plate from our traditions. Now, knowing that we adopted it into our family meals, it’s a way to feel part of a place I have always had a weird connection with.
Despite being born and raised in Québec, the realities of linguistic tensions and politics has always disrupted the ability to make ties to my home province. At my anglophone elementary school, my classmates and I were put firmly on the “English” side of things. Even though many of us didn’t learn to speak English until we started school. Because being Québecois is often tethered to a certain heritage, language, and culture, the repercussions have meant that I (and others like me) are not seen as of this place.10
In a context where identity is also insulted through the food you eat - Italians were the maudits spaghettis (damn spaghettis) and French-Canadians were the pea soups (another typical Québecois dish) - the name for pâté chinois is increasingly interesting. Back to Wright’s description of French-Americans as the “Chinese of the Eastern States”: this statement draws on anti-Chinese sentiment to attack the French, who should feel offended to be compared to such a group of people. Could the name have been given by those rallying against Franco-Americans and then adopted anyway, in spite? Or was it established internally, by the French community, as a kind of “eff you”? Either way, if these are the origins of the name, it would come from this history of discrimination.
A history that has, unfortunately, continued to thrive in our current reality. Back when my family immigrated here, Italians were:
Smelly because they cooked with too much garlic
Loud and suspicious because they gathered in groups in public places
Unwanted tenants because they had big, intergenerational families
Bad because they nurtured their own traditions and kept their own ways of life
The same complaints that continue to feed cycles of xenophobia and racism with each new “threat” and “invading” population. Sometimes even peddled by the Italians who overcame these discriminatory remarks just a couple of generations ago.
I would love if pâté chinois was a middle finger to the attempted smear campaign against French-Americans. Because screw pitting communities against each other. Maybe it’s the origin I will accept, since we will likely never know.
In my story, this is how an Italian immigrant ends up perfecting her own version of a Québecois dish called Chinese pie.
Has your family immigrated and adopted any new dishes? What and how?
Share your own pâté chinois memories!
See my recipe for pâté chinois below.
Cass
Nonna Lucia’s Pâté Chinois, Remixed
This recipe fills up our 9” x 13” baking dish to the top.
Ingredients
For the mashed potatoes:
4 lbs potatoes
Pinch of salt
½ tsp garlic powder
Milk and salted butter - I never measure these, you want a creamy consistency
For the meat:
Drizzle of olive oil
2 small onions
2 lbs ground beef
Small glass of red wine
Salt, pepper, chili flakes, dried oregano to taste (you can also add paprika, or whatever spices you like)
1 can of corn
For the creamed corn:
1 can of corn
1 c heavy cream
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp granulated sugar
¼ tsp black pepper
2 tbsp butter
1 c milk
2 tbsp all-purpose flour or cornstarch
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 375° F.
Peel and quarter potatoes. Put into a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, add some salt to water, and simmer for 15-20 minutes, until the potatoes are very tender. Drain and add a knob of butter and garlic powder. Add some milk and start mashing, adding milk as you need so that they become smooth. Set aside.
Chop onions and drain a can of corn. Set the drained corn aside.
In a large skillet, heat a drizzle of olive oil. Fry the onions over medium-high heat until golden. Add the ground beef and “fry it good” (as Nonna Lucia says). Add wine and spices, stir, and let it evaporate.
Mix in the drained corn and let cook for 2 minutes. Remove pan from heat and set aside.
Drain the other can of corn. To preapre the creamed corn, add corn, cream, salt, sugar, pepper, and butter to a small pot over medium heat. Meanwhile, whisk together the milk and flour or cornstarch. Add it into the corn mixture.
Cook, stirring over medium heat until the mixture is thickened and corn is cooked through.
Get your baking dish. Put a thin layer of mashed potatoes at the bottom. Then, pour the beef mixture over it. Pour the cream corn over that. Finally, top it all off with the mashed potatoes, spreading them evenly to create a top crust.
Nonna Lucia always grates some mozzarella over the top. I don’t always.
Place the dish in the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes, until the top is golden brown.
When you take it out, let it set for 10-15 minutes before serving.
This is a whole other incredibly interesting topic! Many have referred to this as a particular “Italian Montreal dialect.” Most recently, scholar Fabio Scetti has been researching the particularities of this phenomenon. Interviewed for Panoram Italia magazine this past spring, he explained: “By mixing dialect, Italian, French and English terms, an idiom typical and exclusive to the city of Montreal emerged.” He calls it “italianese.”
Genest, Bernard. 2013. “Lemasson, Jean-Pierre. Le Mystère Insondable Du Pâté Chinois. Montréal, Amérik Media, 2009, 139 P. ISBN 978-2-923543-13-0.” Rabaska 11: 230–36. https://doi.org/10.7202/1018545ar.
Jean-Pierre Lemasson quoted in Stéphanie Bérubé, “Mais d'où vient donc le pâté chinois?” La Presse, Oct. 26, 2009. https://www.lapresse.ca/vivre/cuisine/200910/26/01-914975-mais-dou-vient-donc-le-pate-chinois.php. Translation: “Attempting to trace the origins of pâté chinois is, let's face it, an almost insurmountable challenge. There are so many, more or less, fanciful leads, almost always undocumented, that you have to undertake a job that a police inspector would consider beyond their abilities.”
Steak (ground beef), corn (which is called blé d’Inde in Québec), and potatoes. Genest.
Amanda Beland and Nora Saks, “The truth about Quebec's most famous and mysterious pie,” Wbur, November 29, 2022. https://www.wbur.org/lastseen/2022/11/29/truth-about-quebecs-chinese-pie-pate-chinois.
Jean-Marc Agator, “Québec. L’énigme du pâté chinois,” https://agator.org/amerique-du-nord-francophone/quebec-lenigme-du-pate-chinois/.
This is a theory advanced by Lemasson in Le Mystère Insondable Du Pâté Chinois.
https://ia800700.us.archive.org/cors_get.php?path=/15/items/thechineseofeast00favr/thechineseofeast00favr.pdf
David Vermette, “When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans,” August 21, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/french-canadian-immigrants-struck-fear-into-new-england-communities-180972951/.
I will never forget the time I was on a trip to the States with my college. I was sitting on a bench with two friends, one Italian-Canadian and one French-Canadian. Our French-Canadian friend exclaimed: “I just realized I’m the only Québecois here!” To which we both responded, “We’re from Québec, too.” He followed-up with: “Well, you know what I mean.”