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Foie Gras, Imitation
Put six ounces of butter into a saucepan; when melted add one pound of raw bacon, one and a half pounds of calf's liver (whole), season with pepper and salt to taste, six cloves, and ten crushed peppercorns. Simmer very slowly for two and a half hours, then let it get cold and pound it in a mortar. Rub all through a sieve, and mix it with the liquor. Press into fancy pots; cover with melted mutton fat, clarified; serve garnished with parsley. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A Victorian potted liver dressed up as pâté de foie gras. The method is sound, but two details in it — the temperature of the simmer and the mutton-fat seal — need translating before you start.
- Keep the simmer barely movingThe liver goes in whole and cooks in butter and bacon fat rather than liquid, so anything above a bare shiver will seize and granulate it. Use the lowest heat that keeps the fat barely trembling (roughly 180-190F if you want a number) and check at 90 minutes: a calf's liver of this size is likely to be done well before two and a half hours, and overcooked liver turns chalky no matter how finely you sieve it.
- "Raw bacon" means uncooked cured baconVictorian bacon was heavily salted and fatty, closer to today's slab bacon or unsmoked streaky than to thin breakfast rashers. Use a fatty piece, rind removed, and cut it into chunks. Season very lightly at the start and correct the salt after pounding, once the bacon has given up what it will.
- The liquor is the seasoningAll the flavour that leaves the meat ends up in the buttery liquid in the pan. Strain it, keep it warm so the fat stays liquid, and beat it back into the pounded liver a spoonful at a time until the paste just holds a soft shape. Discarded liquor gives a dry, dull pot.
- Cloves and peppercornsThe six cloves are whole spice, and they are far too assertive to pound into the mixture. Fish them out along with the crushed peppercorns before pounding, or tie all the spice in muslin at the start.
- Mortar to machineA food processor does in seconds what the mortar took many minutes to do, but it will not replace the sieve. Push the paste through a medium sieve with a plastic scraper to catch the connective tissue and vein fragments that make potted liver gritty.
- The fat seal is decoration, not preservationThe fat seal -- Clarified mutton fat poured over the top excluded air in an unrefrigerated larder, and modern practice does not treat that as safe storage. Clarified butter tastes better and, either way, refrigerate the pots and eat within three or four days. If a seal is broken or the pot has stood warm, throw it out.
- Yield and servingThe 2 1/2 lb of meat and 6 oz of butter make a substantial quantity of paste, enough for a dozen or more as a first course with toast. Bring it out of the fridge 30 minutes ahead; straight from the cold it tastes of nothing.
Cassell's is quite open about what this is: an imitation, standing in for the goose-liver pate of Strasbourg and Perigord that a middle-class British kitchen of the 1870s and 80s could neither source nor afford. Genuine foie gras came in imported tins at a price beyond most household budgets, and cookery books of the period offered domestic substitutes built from cheaper materials - the same trick that produced "mock turtle" from a calf's head. What makes the substitution plausible is the potting technique itself, long established in English kitchens: meat cooked down, pounded smooth, pressed into small pots and sealed under a layer of rendered fat, a standard way of holding cooked meat in a larder before domestic refrigeration. The "fancy pots" and parsley garnish did the rest of the work on the table.