Pâté chinois

As tradition built it

Pâté chinois

Serves 4. Prep 20 minutes, cook 1 hour.

Ingredients

• 680 g russet or Yukon Gold potato
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 onion, chopped
• 450 g lean ground beef
• one 540 ml can creamed corn
• to taste paprika and dried parsley, to top

Method

1. Boil and mash 680 g russet or Yukon Gold potato with 1/4 cup butter and 1/2 cup milk.
2. Separately, sauté 1 chopped onion, then brown 450 g lean ground beef without stirring until it colours on one side before being broken apart, a real Maillard step the dish depends on rather than a garnish.
3. Layer one 540 ml can of creamed corn next, doing a structural job of binding the meat and potato layers together rather than only adding flavour.
4. Assemble the three layers, beef, corn, then potato, in an 8-inch square dish, top with paprika and dried parsley.
5. Bake at 190°C (375°F) for thirty minutes, then broil briefly to finish and rest ten minutes. Serves four and doubles easily.

Notes

The dish's own name is best explained, on the strongest available evidence, as a corruption of "china pie," carried home to Quebec by Franco-American workers who had emigrated to China, Maine, in the late nineteenth century and returned decades later with an Americanised shepherd's pie, lamb swapped for beef, mixed vegetables swapped for corn; a popular theory tying it instead to Chinese railway-camp cooking is described by academic sourcing as largely rejected, since there is no evidence the beef-corn-potato combination was ever part of that camp's own diet.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide beef for a deliberate Maillard crust, fresh-blitzed corn, Big Green Egg char

Method

1. Cook the ground beef sous vide first at a precise temperature that renders its fat evenly, then finish it hard and fast in a pan purely to achieve the Maillard crust the tradition already prizes, so the browning step becomes deliberate and repeatable rather than a matter of how hot the pan happened to be.
2. Make the creamed corn from scratch: fresh corn blitzed in the high-power blender with a little of its own cooking milk and passed through the chinois for a silkier, less starchy-tasting layer than the tinned version, while keeping the same structural binding job intact.
3. Pipe the mashed potato top rather than spreading it, then finish the whole dish under the Big Green Egg's direct heat instead of a domestic broiler, for a deeper, more even char across the surface.