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Pate-De-Foie-Gras Sandwich
The mock pate de foie gras, which is difficult to distinguish from the real thing, is made by running boiled calf's liver through the meat chopper, reducing to a smooth paste and adding finely chopped mushrooms or truffles. Of course, genuine pate de foie gras can be used.
A sandwich filling rather than a true pâté: boiled liver ground smooth and stretched with mushrooms or truffles. The original assumes you know how to season and bind it, so that is where most of the work sits.
- Meat chopperThe hand-cranked grinder of the period. A food processor gets you to a smoother paste faster; grind the liver warm, then work in the fat while it is still soft.
- It needs fat and saltThe recipe omits both, and boiled liver alone is dry, grainy and flat. Reckon on 3-4 tablespoons of soft butter to every cup of ground liver, plus salt, pepper and a spoonful of cream or brandy to loosen it.
- Cook the liver throughCalf's liver for a spreadable paste should be simmered until no pink remains at the centre, not left rosy as it would be for a pan-fried slice. Liver that is to be mashed and held cold in a sandwich gets no further heat.
- Truffles versus mushroomsTruffles in a book of this period would most likely have been tinned black truffle or truffle peelings; the recipe treats mushrooms and truffles as straight alternatives rather than naming either as the cheaper option. Finely chopped mushrooms sauteed dry until they give up their water will keep the paste from going watery, as raw mushrooms would.
- Calf's liverOrder it from a butcher; supermarkets stock beef or chicken liver more often. Chicken liver gives a milder, richer paste, though it is a substitution rather than what the recipe asks for.
- Bread and butterTea sandwiches of this period were conventionally made on thin-cut white bread with the crusts trimmed and buttered to the edges so the filling does not soak in. Cut in fingers or triangles for a tea plate.
- Yield and keepingA pound of liver makes roughly two cups of paste, enough for about two dozen small tea sandwiches. Cover the surface closely and use within two days; liver paste sours quickly and greys on contact with air.
Genuine pâté de foie gras is the fattened goose or duck liver preparation generally traced to Strasbourg and Alsace, and by the early twentieth century it reached Canadian and American kitchens chiefly as an imported tinned delicacy, expensive enough that it was likely unfamiliar to many households. Mock versions built on ordinary calf's or chicken liver were a standard cookbook courtesy of the era, and the confident claim that the imitation is "difficult to distinguish from the real thing" may say as much about how few readers had tasted the original as about the recipe. Its place among the sandwich recipes is equally of its moment: the Five Roses Cook Book was compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and the fashion for afternoon tea meant a hostess was expected to produce several kinds of thin, crustless sandwich, at least one of them sounding French.