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Chicken Liver Paste or Liver Cheese
1 1/2 pounds of poultry livers. 12 ounces of fat ham or salt pork. 4 ounces of lean cooked ham. 1 small cup of sherry. 1 bayleaf, pepper, little spice and salt. 12 ounces of bread panada (French rolls soaked in milk and then squeezed dry in a cloth.) 4 raw eggs. 8 hard-boiled yolks. 1 cooked corned tongue. Some chopped mushrooms. Aspic jelly to garnish with.
Steep the poultry livers-any kind-in cold water to whiten them. Set all the ingredients of the first part to simmer in a saucepan with the lid on at the back part of the range, and let remain till a convenient time, or two or three hours. Then mash to a paste. The livers, etc., should be nearly dry in the saucepan but not at all fried or browned.
Mix the raw eggs with the panada and these with the pounded liver. Press through a seive. Cut up the red tongue, the hard boiled yolks and mushrooms if you have them and mix these in the paste. Bake about an hour with thin slices of fat pork first laid in the bottom of the pan or mould, and also on top of the liver cake and a buttered paper over that, and the mould set in a shallow pan of water in the oven.
The paste as made above can be taken from the pan or mould, freed from fat and decorated like boned fowls.
For individual dishes form it in egg shapes in this way: Chop some aspic jelly and have it ready. Make two tablespoons hot in a saucepan of water and scoop out spoonfuls of the liver paste, using the spoons alternately. While the egg shapes are still moist on the outside sprinkle them over with the jelly, or roll them in it. "He who can afford every day a dinner sufficient for a hundred persons, is often satisfied by eating the thigh of a chicken." --Savarin. "I have always heard how cheap poultry is in Italy. I should think a fowl is worth about twelve sous at Rome." --Monte Christo. "Hence the necessity for the many devices of art to reanimate that ghost of an appetite by dishes which maintain it without injury and caress without stifling it." --Savarin. "We have a fixed price for all our provisions. It signifies nothing whether you eat much or little-whether you have ten dishes or one-it is always the same price." --Monte Christo. "Only ignorance can excuse those who serve up the quail otherwise than roasted or en papillotes, because its flavor is so easily lost that if the animal is plunged in any liquid it evaporates and disappears."
This is a hotel-scale liver terrine, written for a cook who already knows what a panada and a bain-marie are. The instructions are compressed and the ingredient list runs ahead of the method, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The hinge: never let the livers brownThe first-stage simmer is meant to set the livers gently in their own fat and moisture at the coolest corner of the range "the back part" of a coal range was the low-heat zone. If they fry or take colour, the finished paste turns grey and grainy. A heavy pan over the lowest burner, lid on, is the equivalent; two to three hours is far longer than needed on a modern hob, and 30-45 minutes will get you there.
- Bread panadaTwelve ounces of French rolls soaked in milk and wrung out in a cloth. Any lean white bread with the crust off will do. Weigh it after squeezing, not before, or the paste will be stodgy.
- Corned tongueA whole brine-cured, cooked beef tongue, peeled and diced it supplies the red flecks through the terrine. Cured tongue is still sold at good butchers and in Jewish and Latin American markets; a piece of cooked corned beef or a good pastrami gives a similar colour and salt note.
- Fat ham and salt porkRinse the salt pork, and hold back on the added salt until you have fried and tasted a spoonful of the finished mixture. The thin slices laid in the mould are barding fat; unsmoked back fat or thinly sliced fatty pancetta is the closest substitute.
- Oven and donenessSet the water bath in a moderate oven, 325-350F. An hour suits a shallow mould; a deep terrine of this size will want longer. Cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- The sievePressing the liver, panada and raw egg through a sieve is what makes the texture. A food processor followed by a tamis or a fine sieve does it faster and is worth the trouble the tongue, yolks and mushrooms are cut up and folded in afterwards rather than sieved.
- Aspic jellySet meat jelly, chopped fine, used as a garnish and a glaze. Powdered gelatine bloomed in strong, clarified chicken stock gives the same thing. The "egg shapes" are quenelles formed between two spoons dipped in hot water, then rolled in the chopped jelly.
- QuantityThe full recipe is a very large one: the livers, cured meats, panada, eggs and a whole tongue together make far more than a household batch, enough for a buffet platter. Halving or quartering it works without adjustment beyond a shorter bake.
- KeepingSealed under its fat and refrigerated, a terrine of this kind holds about a week. Once cut and cleaned of fat for decoration, treat it as you would any cooked forcemeat and eat it within two or three days.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men who ran American hotel and restaurant kitchens in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and this dish shows the trade's debt to French charcuterie: it is a pâté de foies de volaille, a baked liver forcemeat bound with panada and egg, dressed with aspic and served cold on a buffet the way a boned fowl would be. Liver "cheese" seems to have been used in English and German-American kitchens for a pressed meat paste firm enough to slice, and it sits loosely alongside the leberkäse of butchers in the Midwest — though leberkäse conventionally contains no liver at all. The quotations tacked to the end are Whitehead's habit rather than part of the method: Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du goût of 1825 and Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo were both standard furniture in the professional cook's reading, and they appear here to lend the working recipe a little of the authority of the table.