Foie Gras
This foie gras is much in demand for sandwiches, and a bit of it brings out the flavor of a salad finely. Place the livers in a stew pan with half pound of salt pork cut small, use very fat pork, add a sliced onion, one bay leaf, three whole cloves, a few sprays of parsley, a teaspoonful of salt, and a small, red pepper pod. Cover with a pint of stock, and simmer very slowly for two hours. When cold chop fine and pound to a paste, pouring over it the liquor in which is was cooked, add a tablespoonful of butter; mix well, pass through a sieve and pour into small pots, cover with melted suet and then with paper.
A potted liver paste in the English manner, given a French name. The recipe assumes you know how much liver you are starting with, so read the notes on quantity before shopping.
- The missing quantityNo weight of liver is given anywhere in the recipe. The other amounts — half a pound of fat pork, a pint of stock, one onion — suit roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of livers; chicken livers are the practical choice, since true fattened goose liver would be wasted on a two-hour simmer.
- What "foie gras" means hereNot the fattened goose or duck liver of Strasbourg. American books of the period often used the term loosely for a smooth potted liver, and this one gets its richness from salt pork rather than from the liver itself.
- Very fat salt porkAsk for fatback or the fattest end of salt pork belly; lean modern salt pork will not render enough fat to carry the paste. Blanching it briefly first keeps the finished pots from being aggressively salty, which matters because a teaspoonful of salt is also added.
- A pint of stockTwo cups. It should barely cover, and the pan should be kept at a bare tremble — "simmer very slowly" is the instruction that decides the texture.
- The two-hour simmerFar longer than anyone would cook livers today, and it does make them grainy. The pounding, the added butter and the forcing through a sieve exist to undo that; skip the sieve and you get a coarse, chalky spread.
- Pounding and sievingA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the result through a fine sieve or tamis with a rubber spatula for the silky texture the recipe is after. Add the cooking liquor a little at a time so the paste does not slacken past spreading consistency.
- The red pepper podOne small dried chile. The recipe does not say to remove it, though passing the paste through a sieve would catch it. It is there for warmth, not heat; a scant pinch of cayenne is a reasonable substitute.
- The suet seal is not preservationA layer of fat and a paper cap kept potted meats a few days in a cold larder, not weeks at room temperature. Refrigerate the pots and treat the contents as you would any fresh liver pâté — three or four days once broken into. Cooked meat held anaerobically under fat at room temperature is exactly the wrong condition.
- YieldAssuming about a pound of livers, roughly two cups, enough to fill four small ramekins; ample for a sandwich party of the kind the headnote has in mind.
Foie gras means simply "fat liver," and in France it refers to the enlarged liver of a force-fed goose or duck, a delicacy generally traced to Alsace and to Roman precedent before that. In American and English cookbooks the phrase drifted to cover almost any smooth liver paste sold or made for sandwiches, which is why this recipe calls unspecified "livers" by that grand name. The method itself is older and thoroughly English: cook meat down with fat and spice, pound it to a paste, pack it into small pots and seal the surface with a layer of clarified fat or suet under a paper cover. Potting of that sort was the ordinary way to keep cooked meat before mechanical refrigeration reached the domestic kitchen, and the fashion for dainty sandwich fillings at teas and receptions kept the technique alive well after the need for it had passed.