The happy coincidence of again watching the pate making episode of Jacques and Julia’s “Cooking at Home” and Michael Dickman’s suggestion that pâté and pickles would be perfect fare for a Saturday party at my place the evening before his wedding to the divine Phoebe Nobles, set everything into motion. My obsessions with my subject, that is. Jacques Pepin had pointedly announced how much more economical it is to prepare your own pâté. And, of course, I agreed. Michael must not purchase pâté. I would make it. I had done it before and the earlier runs through made me feel certain that I was ready for the next level. And, yes, it is absurd to pay five times the cost of ingredients for less than a complete expression of the dish, homemade.
Jacques Pepin spoke to his favorite pâté’s qualities: it is a country pâté, aggressively seasoned with allspice, clove, thyme, finely minced shallot, a little garlic and salt and black pepper. The butchers at Sheridan ground the meats to order. I purchased food grade saltpeter to insure the lovely pink hue of the finished product and added a generous helping of green peppercorns for the three day marination in white wine and cognac.
On the morning of the fourth day, Saucyman’s brother, Carl, biked over and helped me line ovenproof vessels with thin slices of lightly smoked bacon. We built each pâté (seven of them) by hand and laid a core of cognac flavored chicken livers through the center of each. After the final cure of 24 hours, I baked them off in two batches. After each had cooled under the weight of bricks and pots and pans, it was back into the refrigerator, to rest overnight once again.
*****
When I cook, I like to be immersed. At the end of each step as I assembled my creation, I retreated to my books and sought out the entry for pâté in each index. PATES & TERRINES by Friedrich W. Ehlert, Edouard Lonque, Michael Raffael and Frank Wesel (Hearst Books, 1984) was at my right hand all the while. I have read it cover-to-cover twice over the last weeks, each time with greater admiration. This work offers a bold thesis founded on what we know about meat pies (“pâté” is French, in its culinary sense, for pie) starting with the Roman Apicius and his debt to the Greeks in his famous cook book.
Ehlert and company speculate that the flour crusts containing the pies created by the ancients would have been so hard as to be inedible. And, of course, one can imagine the ancient habit of meats encased in clay. The point is that dishes could be prepared to be portable and to last more than a few days. If modern pâtés are party fare, the ultimate “fix ahead” menu item, they are also classic picnic fare and travelling food. One gets the sense that in the long articulation of methods of preparing meats from their freshest state, through aging, applying smoke in various degrees to salting or air drying for periods of time even longer than a year, pates represent highly innovative ways of keeping meats for periods of seven to ten days. The understanding that the introduction of fat into flour creates a tender and edible pastry crust seems a medieval innovation as does lining a terrine with caul fat or fatback. Creating galantines- chicken or other fowl- boned out and filled with forcemeat delighted early modern cooks as did stuffing a goose’s neck or a pig’s foot. Timbales offered yet another vehicle for enclosing meat or seafood. Aspics of every delicate, shimmering hue and nuanced flavor might liven a platter with its play of light.
It is the nature of pâtés to be in greater or lesser ways a bit showy. This is one of the more profound revelations of the authors of PATES & TERRINES. The French word for forcemeat is farce. A farce is also an entertainment, a comic interlude meant to delight and surprise. Imagine “the reveal”- that moment when an artful pattern of liver, boiled ham, veal or truffle is exposed by a sharp knife slipping through a pretty crust or a bird that simply looked like a bird.
Ah, life is but a stage and the actors are sharing their amusement as they agonize over the morality of consuming the pretty slices of aromatic pâté plated with pickles and slices of French bread. Art and Life! As I read through PATES & TERRINES the night before Michael and Phoebe’s party, I came to the sentence that read that pate with radish roses is matrimonial fare. I dashed down to Whole Foods and bought a great clump of radishes that I cut and placed in water over night that they might “bloom.” The next morning, I unmolded four of the seven pâtés, one sliced entire and arranged around the second presented whole on a bed of Italian parsley and decorated with radish roses in a house surrounded by roses in the City of Roses. Everything had come ‘round.
Charles Seluzicki
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