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Sandwich (Between slices of lightly)
Between slices of lightly buttered rye bread, place thin slices of salami. Garnish with an olive.
PÂTÉ DE FOIE GRAS is made from the liver of geese, ducks, or turkeys. Put one-half cup goose grease in a fryer on stove; when hot lay in the livers and baste with a spoon until tender; remove the livers from the pan and chop very fine. Add a small onion chopped and boiled brown, season with salt and pepper and mix in some of the grease in which livers were fried. The mixture must resemble paste. Pate de foie gras can be purchased in small cans.
Two things are folded into one entry here: a salami sandwich that needs no explanation, and a rough household pâté that does. The pâté is the part worth attention.
- "Fryer" means skilletIn this period a fryer is a heavy frying pan or spider, not a vessel of deep fat. Half a cup of fat in a 10-inch skillet is enough to keep the livers moving and to bind the paste later.
- Goose greaseRendered goose fat is sold in jars and cans and keeps for months refrigerated. Duck fat behaves identically. Butter works but will brown and darken the finished paste; lard is neutral but flat.
- The liversOrdinary goose, duck or turkey liver is what this recipe means, not the fattened liver of true foie gras. A pound of poultry livers is a reasonable batch for the half cup of fat given.
- Cook them through, but only justThe hinge of the recipe. Poultry liver should reach 165F for safety, at which point it is still faintly pink at the center and creamy; another two minutes past that and it turns grainy and chalky and no amount of fat will smooth it out. Figure four to six minutes total over medium heat, turning once.
- "A small onion chopped and boiled brown"Most likely means onion cooked in fat until browned rather than boiled in water; onion will not brown in water. Sweat it in a spoonful of the goose fat until deeply golden before it goes in, or the raw allium will dominate.
- Chopping versus processing"Chop very fine" gives a coarse country texture. A food processor with the warm fat added in a stream produces the smooth paste the recipe asks for; add the fat gradually or the mixture breaks.
- Keeping and yieldA pound of livers makes roughly two cups, enough for a dozen generous sandwiches. Pack into a jar, cover the surface with a thin layer of melted goose fat, and refrigerate; use within three or four days. It is not a canning recipe and should not be treated as one.
- The salami sandwichThe recipe asks for bread only lightly buttered; the butter is there to keep the bread from going damp. Cut the salami thin enough to be translucent at the edge, and the olive garnish is part of the original.
The entry shows an American cookbook trying to have it both ways with a luxury item. True pâté de foie gras is made from the enlarged liver of force-fed geese, a Strasbourg and Périgord speciality that reached American tables in imported tins during the second half of the nineteenth century and was, throughout this book's era, a byword for expense. The compiler's response is to give a recipe using ordinary poultry livers and rendered goose fat, call it by the fancy name, and then concede in a final line that it can simply be bought in small cans. The technique itself — cooking liver in fat, chopping it fine, and binding it back with the same fat — is much older and much more widespread than the French luxury version, and turns up across European kitchens wherever geese and ducks were kept for their fat. Sandwich books of this kind proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century, alongside tinned delicacies and the lunch counter.