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Sandwiches, Foie Gras
INGREDIENTS. - Bread - and -butter, either white or brown, foie gras, cayenne.
Make these sandwiches in the same way as anchovy ones, with cayenne to taste, if liked.
Beeton's sandwich entries are written as a chain of cross-references, so this one assumes you have already read the anchovy sandwich: thin bread and butter, the flavouring worked to a smooth paste, spread, closed, trimmed and cut. The whole success of it is in the thinness.
- What "the same way as anchovy ones" meansCut the bread as thin as the loaf will allow, butter it before cutting where you can, spread one side with the foie gras worked smooth with a fork or palette knife, close, trim off the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles. The filling should be a film, not a layer.
- Which foie grasThe book means a potted, cooked preparation of the kind sold as Strasbourg pie or pâté de foie gras, not raw liver. Buy a cooked block, pâté or parfait; a mousse is easiest to spread. Raw foie gras is a different product entirely and is not what is intended here.
- Bring it to room temperatureCold from the refrigerator it will tear the bread. Let it stand 20-30 minutes, or beat in a teaspoon of softened butter or cream to loosen it.
- Cayenne, sparingly"To taste" here means a dusting from the tip of a knife, whisked into the butter or the pate rather than shaken over the surface, where it lands in hot specks.
- White or brown breadA fine-crumbed white sandwich loaf or a light wholemeal both work; anything with a coarse open crumb or seeds will overwhelm the filling. Day-old bread cuts thinner than fresh.
- Yield and holdingThe book gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about 60 g of pate fills four slices, i.e. two sandwiches, which trim and cut to something like eight to twelve fingers depending how narrow you cut them. Make them within an hour or two of serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth or film, refrigerated, or the bread dries and the pate darkens at the cut edge.
- A note on availabilityProduction and sale of foie gras is restricted or banned in some jurisdictions. A good chicken liver parfait behaves identically in this recipe.
Sandwiches occupy several pages of Beeton because by the end of the nineteenth century they had become the backbone of the tea table, the shooting lunch and the ball supper, and each flavouring got its own short entry keyed back to a master method. Potted goose or duck liver reached British households mainly as an import from Alsace, sold in earthenware terrines and commonly called Strasbourg pie or simply "Strasbourg" — the city's association with the fattened-liver trade is generally traced to the eighteenth century, and by Victorian times a tin or pot of it was a standard luxury store-cupboard item, alongside anchovy paste and potted shrimp. That is why the recipe is so short: the cook was not making the foie gras, only spreading it, and the editor saw no reason to repeat instructions already given elsewhere. The cayenne is the period's habitual answer to any rich potted meat, the same seasoning logic that put it on devilled bones and buttered lobster.