No. 2596

Terrine of Ducks' Liver a l'Aquitaine

Terrine de Foies de Canards a l'Aquitaine

Put two and a half pounds of fat ducks' liver in a terrine, after removing the gall, seasoned with foies-gras spices (No. 168) and larded with large fillets of raw truffles. Pound the truffle parings with five ounces of fresh chopped fat pork and six ounces of very white lean veal or pork meat, free from sinews, also chopped up finely, and four ounces of raw lean ham, adding the liver parings, salt and spices. Infuse a piece of cinnamon stick in a little Madeira wine, pass it through a sieve and mix it with the forcemeat, also six spoonfuls of cooked fine herbs (No. 385); season the whole to perfection. Cover the bottom and sides of a medium No. 3 terrine with thin bards of fat pork, lay on a bed of the prepared forcemeat and then range in the livers, pressing them closely together mask over with a thick layer of the forcemeat and cover with a thin bard of fat pork; set on the cover and place the terrine on a small raised-edge baking pan containing a little hot water; push it into the oven to bake for an hour; remove and lay it away to cool with a light weight on top; when thoroughly cold fill it to the edge with lard and butter, melted together. This terrine is to be served either whole, by suppressing the fat, or by unmolding it on a dish without cutting it up and merely removing the fat pork and grease, or else in the terrine itself. Decorate with chopped jelly and croutons (No. 2442).

← No. 2595 Sweetbreads a la Mirabeau Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2597 Terrine of Kernel of Ham →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes a professional garde-manger who already knows his spice mix, his forcemeat and his terrine sizes. The instructions below fill in what the cross-references and shorthand leave out.

The hinge: temperature, not timeAn hour in a water bath means nothing without an oven number; the book gives none. A moderate oven, somewhere around 300F, and go by internal temperature rather than the clock. Fattened duck liver starts to render out somewhere above about 115-120F, and pushed well past that what should be a dense, sliceable terrine becomes a small liver surrounded by a large quantity of rendered fat.
But the forcemeat contains raw porkThe lean pork or veal, fat pork and raw ham in the surrounding forcemeat want a good deal more heat than the liver does. This is the real tension in the recipe: cook to the liver and the pork is undercooked; cook to the pork and the liver renders. One way to resolve it is to keep the forcemeat layers thin and take the whole terrine to 160F at the centre of the meat, the safe finish temperature for chopped pork, accepting some loss of fat from the livers.
"Foies-gras spices" (No. 168)A cross-reference to Ranhofer's own spiced-salt preparation for liver work; the page here does not give its composition. Blends of this kind generally run to pepper with warm spices such as nutmeg, cloves and mace, cut with salt. A commercial quatre epices with fine salt is a reasonable stand-in. Season at roughly 1.5 percent salt by weight of the total liver and forcemeat.
"Cooked fine herbs" (No. 385)Not fresh chopped herbs but a cooked cross-reference, of the duxelles type: shallots and mushrooms with parsley sweated in butter and reduced. Six spoonfuls is around six tablespoons of the finished, well-drained mixture.
Bards of fat porkThin sheets of back fat cut wide enough to line the mould and drape the top. A butcher will slice fatback for you; sheets of caul fat are a common substitute but give a different texture. Sliced streaky bacon is not the same thing, as the cure will read through the terrine.
"A medium No. 3 terrine"A house size in Ranhofer's kitchen with no modern equivalent. For two and a half pounds of liver plus roughly a pound and a quarter of forcemeat, work with a lidded terrine of about two quarts, or two standard loaf-sized moulds.
Larding with truffleThe livers are pierced and studded with batons of raw truffle, in the way a lardoire inserts fat into lean meat. Fresh black truffle in the quantity implied here is a serious expense now; the parings that go into the forcemeat were, in 1894, simply what was left over from trimming.
The seal of lard and butterThis was a preservation measure for a cold larder, and it does not make the terrine shelf-stable. Chill it thoroughly, keep it refrigerated under its fat, and eat within about a week. Sealed potted meats held at room temperature are exactly the conditions that favour Clostridium botulinum.
YieldClose to four pounds of finished terrine. Cut in thin slices with a hot knife, it will serve twenty-five or more as a first course.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a chapter of cold work meant for buffets and late suppers where a terrine was displayed whole rather than plated. The name points to Aquitaine, the south-western corner of France that remains the centre of French duck foie gras production; the pairing with truffle is the Perigord half of the same regional idiom. That a New York restaurant kitchen of the 1890s could count on fat duck livers, raw truffles and a garde-manger with the patience to lard a liver with truffle batons says a good deal about what Delmonico's was, and about the transatlantic luxury trade that supplied it. The technique itself, forcemeat and whole muscle baked together in a lidded earthenware pot in a bain-marie, then weighted and sealed under fat, is much older than the restaurant and was for centuries as much a way of keeping meat as of presenting it.