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Patties
Take a few small patty pans and spread them with short paste, make a savory forcemeat of raw calf's liver, fill the pans with it, put over these covers of thin paste and place them in a slack oven to bake. Remove when done, and when they are cold cut off the covering of paste, take out a little of the inside and put in a little cooked goose's fat liver. Replace that which was removed and put it over the goose's liver, raising the preparation in a dome above the edges of the paste. Set a small jelly crouton on the top. Arrange the patties in a pyramid on a dish and garnish them with more aspic, according to taste.
A cold hors d'oeuvre from the Waldorf's garde-manger, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen that assumed you already had paste, forcemeat and aspic on hand. The whole point is the two-stage assembly: the liver forcemeat is baked, cooled, then hollowed and enriched with foie gras that never sees the oven.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tartlet tins; the recipe gives no size, but period patty pans were generally an inch or two across. Modern mini-muffin or barquette tins work. The lids are separate rounds of paste, cut away once the patties are cold.
- Short pasteA plain lard or butter pastry, unsweetened, rolled thin. Line the tins and chill them firm before filling so the walls hold their shape under the forcemeat.
- Slack ovenThe cool end of a coal range; period sources put this somewhere around 300F, though the term was used loosely. Gentle heat suits a liver forcemeat, which can turn grainy and weep fat if set too fast.
- Savory forcemeatThe recipe specifies only raw calf's liver, seasoned; a period liver forcemeat would typically be trimmed of membrane, pounded or ground fine and worked with fat and seasoning. Because it is a ground raw liver mixture, bake until the centre reaches 160F on a thermometer — at a low oven, likely 25 to 35 minutes depending on tin size.
- Goose's fat liverFoie gras — the fattened goose liver, here already cooked, i.e. a torchon or terrine rather than a raw lobe. Duck foie gras or a good mousse de foie substitutes. Note that its sale is restricted in some jurisdictions.
- Aspic and jelly croutonsThe croutons are not bread but small cut shapes of firm meat jelly. A clarified veal or chicken stock set with gelatin, poured into a shallow pan, chilled hard, then cut into diamonds or rounds. Work with everything cold or the jelly slumps.
- The hingeEverything after baking must be done on a cold pastry case. Hollow the filling, spoon in the foie gras, and dome the reserved forcemeat back over it while the foie gras is still refrigerator-cold, or it will soften and slide.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities, only "a few small patty pans." Served cold as a first course or buffet piece. The pyramid arrangement calls for a footed dish or a shallow mound of chopped aspic to build against.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was compiled in the years when the Waldorf's kitchen worked in the French idiom of the period, and this entry is a straightforward piece of garde-manger work: small cold pastry cases enriched with foie gras and glossed with aspic. The two-liver structure — a cheap calf's liver forcemeat as body, a spoonful of expensive fattened goose liver at the centre — reads as an economy of luxury, a small quantity of a costly delicacy made to carry a larger dish. Building the finished pieces into a pyramid and finishing each with a cut jelly crouton belongs to the tradition of architectural cold buffet display that filled hotel banquet tables well into the twentieth century.