Cottage pie

Cottage pie (or shepherd's pie when made with lamb) is a meat pie with a crust of mashed potato. The dish is commonly made with beef.

Etymology

The term cottage pie was in use by 1791, when the potato was being introduced as an edible crop affordable for the poor (cf. "cottage" meaning a modest dwelling for rural workers).

History

In early cookery books, the dish was a means of using leftover roasted meat of any kind, and the pie dish was lined with mashed potato as well as having a mashed potato crust on top.

The term "shepherd's pie" did not appear until 1877, and since then it has been used synonymously with "cottage pie", regardless of whether the principal ingredient was beef or mutton.Folk etymology has led to the term "shepherd's pie" being used when the meat is lamb, as shepherds are concerned with sheep and not cattle.

Variations

Vicky

Vicky or Vicki has multiple meanings:

See also

Gordon Ramsay

Gordon James Ramsay, OBE (born 8 November 1966) is a Scottish-born British chef and restaurateur. His restaurants have been awarded 16 Michelin stars in total and currently hold 9. His signature restaurant, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, London, has held 3 Michelin stars since 2001. Ramsay is known for presenting TV programmes about competitive cookery and food, such as the British series Hell's Kitchen, The F Word, and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, along with the American versions of Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, MasterChef, MasterChef Junior and Hotel Hell. In 2015, Forbes listed his earnings at $60 million for the previous 12 months, and ranked him the 21st highest earning celebrity in the world.

Early life

Ramsay was born on 8 November 1966 in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland. From the age of five, he was raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. Ramsay is the second of four children. He has an older sister, Diane; a younger brother, Ronnie, who Ramsay revealed had been behind bars for heroin possession as a juvenile; and a younger sister, Yvonne. Ramsay's father, Gordon James Senior (died 1997), was – at various times – a swimming pool manager, a welder, and a shopkeeper; his sister Yvonne and their mother, Helen (maiden name: Cosgrove), have been nurses.

Cottage

A cottage is, typically, a small house. The word comes from England where it originally was a house that has a ground floor, with a first, lower storey of bedrooms which fit within the roofspace. In many places the word cottage is used to mean a small old-fashioned house. In modern usage, a cottage is usually a modest, often cosy dwelling, typically in a rural or semi-rural location. In the United Kingdom the term cottage denotes a small dwelling of traditional build, although it can also be applied to dwellings of modern construction which are designed to resemble traditional ones ("mock cottages").

In the United States the word cottage is often used to mean a small holiday home. However, there are cottage-style dwellings in cities that were built primarily for the purpose of housing slaves, and in places such as Canada the term generally exists with no connotations of size at all (cf. vicarage or hermitage). In certain countries (e.g. Scandinavia, Baltics, and Russia) the term "cottage" has local synonyms: In Finnish mökki; in Estonian suvila; in Swedish stuga; in Norwegian hytte (from the German word Hütte); in Dutch keuterij; in Slovak chalupa; in Russian дача (dacha; which can refer to a vacation/summer home, often located near a body of water). In the USA this type of summer home is more commonly called a "cabin", "chalet", or even "camp".

Marco Pierre White

Marco Pierre White (born 11 December 1961) is a British chef, celebrity, restaurateur and television personality. He is noted for his contributions to contemporary British cuisine. White has been dubbed the first celebrity chef, and the enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene. He was called the godfather of modern cooking by Australian MasterChef (Season 4, Episode 53). White was, at the time, the youngest chef ever to have been awarded three Michelin stars. He has trained chefs including Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone and Shannon Bennett.

Early life

Marco White was the third of four boys born to English chef Frank White and Maria-Rosa Gallina, an Italian who had come to the United Kingdom to learn English.

Career

White left Allerton High School in Leeds without any qualifications and decided to train as a chef, initially at Hotel Metropole under Head Chef Bryan Chegwin and then at the Box Tree in Ilkley. Aged 16, he went to London with "£7.36, a box of books and a bag of clothes", and began his classical training as a commis with Albert and Michel Roux at Le Gavroche. During this time, Albert Roux described White as "my little bunny". He continued his training under Pierre Koffman at La Tante Claire (now the site of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay), moving to work in the kitchen of Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir (where he worked alongside, amongst others, Heston Blumenthal), and Nico Ladenis of Chez Nico at Ninety Park Lane. He then branched out on his own, working in the kitchen at the Six Bells public house in the Kings Road with assistant Mario Batali.