No. 2547

"pain" of Liver with Salpicon

Pain de Foie au Salpicon

Mince a pound and a quarter of raw calf's liver; fry it quickly in melted fat pork with aromatic herbs, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, truffle and mushroom peelings and chopped blanched shallot; remove as soon as done and leave to cool, then mix in four ounces of foies-gras parings from a terrine. Pound and return it to the mortar and add slowly one pound and a half of chopped raw veal and fat pork, the same as a galantine; pound the whole well together, press once more through a sieve and season properly. Put this preparation into a vessel and stir in a third as much truffles, cooked veal udder and cooked red beef tongue, all cut into small squares. Cover the bottom and sides of a large charlotte mold with thin slices of fat pork; put the preparation in the center and cover over with more pork; place the mold in a saucepan containing hot water to reach a third of its height; let this come to a boil, then remove to a slower fire or a slack oven. Cook the "pain" for an hour and a quarter and leave to cool for four hours; unmold, take off the pork to smooth the surfaces neatly, then glaze and decorate with fanciful cuts of gherkin, red beef tongue and truffles dipped in half-set jelly. Dress on a bread crouton covered with ravigote butter (No. 583) and decorate around with chopped jelly and croutons (No. 2442).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A forcemeat loaf in the classic cold-buffet style: liver and veal pounded to a paste, studded with a diced garnish, cooked in a water bath and served glazed. The hinge is the water bath — the mold must never come to a rolling boil around the sides, or the farce curdles and weeps fat.

Slack ovenRoughly 275-300F. The instruction to boil the water first and then move it to a slower fire means: bring the bath to temperature, then hold it well below the boil for the remaining time.
When it is doneAn hour and a quarter is a guide for a large charlotte mold. Go by an internal temperature of 160F at the center; a farce this rich turns grainy well before it is dry, so pull it as soon as it reaches temperature.
SalpiconThe word means an assortment of ingredients cut into small, even dice and bound or folded into something else. Here it is truffle, veal udder and cooked tongue, added whole rather than pounded so the sliced loaf shows a mosaic.
Veal udderStandard larder stock in a nineteenth-century professional kitchen, poached and pressed, used for its bland white texture. It is effectively unobtainable now; blanched pork fatback or a firm poached sweetbread gives a similar pale dice.
Foie gras paringsThe scraps left from trimming a terrine — Ranhofer assumes a kitchen already making them. Four ounces of plain foie gras, or in its absence an extra four ounces of well-cleaned chicken liver plus a little butter, fills the same role.
Truffle and mushroom peelingsTrimmings kept for aromatics rather than for the plate. Dried mushroom soaked and chopped, or the stems from fresh mushrooms, does the same work in the initial fry.
Mortar and sieveThe pounding and double sieving is a food processor's job now: work the cooled liver mixture smooth, add the veal and fat pork, then pass through a drum sieve or fine mesh to catch sinew. Keep everything cold throughout or the fat breaks.
Fat pork liningThin sheets of fatback (barde). Ask a butcher to slice it, or use very thinly sliced unsmoked streaky bacon, blanched to remove cure flavor.
Cooling and glazingThe recipe gives four hours to cool without saying where; chill it overnight under a light weight instead, both for safety and for a slice that holds together. The glaze is aspic brushed on in thin coats while half-set.
YieldThe raw components come to roughly 4 lb (1¼ lb liver, 4 oz foie gras parings, 1½ lb veal and fat pork, plus a third as much garnish) — twenty or more portions as part of a cold table, which is how it was meant to appear.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a long section of decorated cold pieces built for the buffet rather than the plate. A pain — literally a loaf — is the mold-cooked cousin of the terrine and the galantine, and Ranhofer explicitly points the reader to galantine practice when it comes to the veal-and-fat-pork base. The cross-references to numbered preparations elsewhere in the book, ravigote butter and jelly croutons among them, show what kind of manual this was: not a book for a household cook but a working index for a brigade that already had aspic, truffle trimmings and foie gras parings on hand. Veal udder in the garnish is the clearest marker of the period; it was a routine larder item in grand kitchens of the era and effectively disappeared from Western cooking within a couple of generations.