Down to earth

Sadly, I think I have come back down to earth. Not that where I've landed is such a bad place, because it's pretty wonderful actually, but you know, it's just a little bit more real down here. As in, deadlines and thirty-six-degree rain and our-dog-ate-your-cake real.

No really, he did.

He has sort of a track record with this kind of behavior, but yesterday's episode was particularly un-amusing, because it was the end of a two day streak which involved, amongst other crimes, fishing the pork butt bones from the trash, demolishing them, giving them back to us in a most unsavory form on our bedroom floor, and finally, stealing my still-hot buttermilk cake, every crumb. Luckily, I hadn't put the lemon-thyme infused pears on top, or he would probably be at the pound right now. At any rate, he wanted me to tell you that he is very sorry about your cake, as am I, and that we promise to make it for you again soon, before all the pears disappear. In the meantime, you will have to settle for pâté de campagne, which, who are we kidding, is not really settling at all.

Pâté de campagne, in case you've never tried it, is one of the very best specialties of the French. It is a country pâté, made from ground pork butt and pork liver and onions and garlic and parsley and spices bound together with a panade and baked in a water bath in a terrine mold. It is a lot more rustic than some of its more famous pâté counterparts, like foie gras or liverwurst, which are smooth and spreadable and a lot more like butter than meat. Instead, pâté de campagne is smooth on the outside but rough hewn in the middle, sort of like a very dense, extra moist meatloaf that you cut into slices and devour on toasted baguette. We had it in Paris, several times, and this weekend, we made it again at home.

As you can see up there, we actually tried to recreate everything from Paris this weekend at home—the baguette with butter and radishes, the spicy arugula bedding, the side of sauteed mushrooms with toast, too. Our three days in Paris, if we're being entirely honest, consisted mostly of eating and walking and stopping to eat again, and we haven't really seen any particular reason to stop just because we're back home.

We have some challenges ahead of us for sure, like recreating the Dover sole with champagne butter and the gnocchi with escargot we had at Au Bon Accueil, a fancy restaurant near the Eiffel Tower where my mom's friend from college sent us, and that Alex claims changed his life. We have our work cut out with the chocolat chaud, too, and the way it's so thick it almost feels like warm chocolate pudding in your mouth. The soupe à l'oignon will be difficult, and I have not met anyone around here just yet baking Paris-status croissants, but we will find a way.

In the meantime, though, I think we will be perfectly content to subsist on pâté.


Pâté de Campagne

adapted from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, by Michael Rhulman and Brian Polcyn

You will need a meat grinder to make this recipe. Having just acquired a KitchenAid from my godmother, we used the meat grinder attachment on that, but you could use any sort, so long as it has large die and small die blades.

Once you've found a meat grinder, the best way to tackle this recipe, I think, is in two phases. In the early afternoon maybe, do all of the prep work—chop the onions and the parsley and the mushrooms and mince the garlic and mix the spices so they're ready to go—throw the bowls and the blades in the freezer, make sure the pork butt and the liver are ready to rock, and get your pots and pans out. Then, take a walk or read a book or lounge around in the tub for a few hours, and while you're getting ready to make dinner, do the meat grinding and the mixing and the baking. That way it doesn't seem like such a daunting task.

Then of course, after the pâté has cooled for a day or two, get it out along with a baguette and a jar of pickles and squeal with delight.

2 pounds pork butt, cut into long thin strips
4 ounces pork liver
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley, coarsely chopped
1 and 1/2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons Kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon pâté spice, made by mixing: (1 teaspoon ground cloves, 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, 1 teaspoon ground coriander, 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1 tablespoon ground white pepper)
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 eggs
2 tablespoons brandy
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup sauteed mushrooms (I used shiitakes sauteed in butter), diced

Put two nesting metal mixing bowls, one medium size mixing bowl, and either a KitchenAid bowl or another large mixing bowl in the freezer along with the meat grinder's blades. (Don't skip this step, as the cold will help the pâté bind together.)

Once everything is frozen, preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Fill the larger of the nesting mixing bowls with several trays of ice cubes and nestle the smaller one on top. Grind the pork butt through the large die of the meat grinder into the smaller bowl.

Put about a third of this ground pork butt into the medium size mixing bowl. Add the liver, onion, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper, and pâté spice and mix. Fit the grinder with the small die blade and grind this mixture into the remaining coarsely ground pork. Put the bowl of meat into the refrigerator.

In a small (room temperature) mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, eggs, brandy, and cream. (This is called a "panade.") Take the ground meat out of the refrigerator and mix this into it for about a minute, until everything is combined and sticky. Fold in the mushrooms.

Line a terrine mold (or, if you don't have one, a loaf pan, which works just as well) with plastic wrap, leaving enough of an over hang on the two long sides to fold over the top. Fill the pan with the pâté mixture and press it down firmly to make sure it doesn't have any air bubbles. Fold the extra plastic over the top and cover the pan tightly with foil.

Place the pâté pan in a slightly bigger casserole dish, and fill the dish with very hot tap water until the liquid reaches halfway up the sides of the pan. Bake the pâté for roughly an hour, probably a little bit longer, until the inside of the pâté is 150 degrees F. Take the pan out of the water bath and put something heavy, like a tin of olive oil or a brick or a few pounds of butter, on top of the pâté while it cools. Once it's room temperature, put it in the refrigerator and leave it to chill for at least twelve hours, and preferably several days, before serving.

P.S. I wanted to try something new today, which I am going to try to do from now on, which is to tell you where (most) of the ingredients I mentioned in the post are from. It's sort of hard to list this on the sidebar I've realized, since where I find things changes all the time, so even though I might not remember all the time, for today here goes:

arugula, baguette, eggs, onions, pears, & radishes:
the last Provincetown farmers' market, which was, very sadly, on Saturday afternoon
garlic:
from a winter braid we bought in Maine at the Common Ground Fair
heavy cream:
Garelick Farms, because we haven't gotten a milk coop pick-up yet since we came home
parsley:
Crow Farm in Sandwich, which is open until Christmas
pork:
from our friends in Truro, George and Janet, who very kindly raised us half a pig
shiitakes:
from Julie Winslow in Orleans, last summer, and then we dried them

From your rooftop

Some recipes make you want to run up, copy in hand, and shout them from your rooftop. Of course I have all of about three neighbors, so this metaphor is a bit of a stretch in this case. It'd probably work better in say, New York City, but you know what I mean. There are some recipes everyone should know about.

That's how I've been feeling lately about chicken liver paté.

I know, I know. Liver. Yech! It's slimy and bloody and nobody wants to deal with it. But friends, trust me when I tell you chicken liver paté is worth pulling out your coping skills for. Believe me, I wouldn't ask if it weren't a matter of absolute necessity, because I know how often they come in handy for other things, like taking out very old compost, or finding hairy pudding in the fridge.

The thing is, if you can get past the livers themselves, the process is really actually delightfully easy. And if you've ever been an absolute mess over say, a good foie gras or paté de campagne or even a spread of liverwurst, you're going to find you spend an awful lot of time admiring this paté. It's a genuine masterpiece.

I may be slightly biased by the fact that for several years of my childhood, I ate a liverwurst sandwich as many days a week as I possibly could. This can develop quite a paté hankering in a kid, one that lasts for life. And while I've chosen to blame this affliction on my grandfather, who did the same thing to my father, only much worse, because he did it to him in France, that doesn't really solve the problem. In fact, I think it makes it much harder to escape, sort of like an inherited disease. You see where I'm going with this.

The good news is that even if I turn out to be terribly biased, I went ahead and tested this recipe on a good deal of friends, all of whom loved it, and none of whom admitted to any upbringing so persuasive as this.

As for the cooking, it's easy really. (Just make sure you have plenty of butter on hand.) You simply sauté an onion in butter, set that aside, and cook up the livers in some more butter. Then you add the onions back in with some thyme, and then some sherry, and call it good. The whole mess goes into the food processor, where it gets whirled to creamy perfection, and then you work in another stick of butter, just for good measure.

The most important thing to remember when you're thinking about serving it is that you should have some good, crusty bread or thin crackers on hand, and definitely some pickled things. Beets and bread n' butter cucumbers both work very well, I think. Cheese, in my opinion, is sort of overkill, but I'll leave that up to you. I can't wait to hear how it goes.

CHICKEN LIVER PATE

adapted from “A New Bistro on the Block” by Jonathan Levitt in Port City Life September 2008

I misread this recipe the first time I made it and used 8 tablespoons of butter rather than 8 ounces (meaning I put in 1 stick rather than 2). The funny thing is, until I went to type it up, I never even realized anything was amiss, and even my father heartily approved. You can add a bit more butter if you’d like, but there’s certainly no need to double the amount. An extra 4 tablespoons, I think, would be more than enough.

3 tablespoons butter
1 onion, finely chopped
1 pound chicken livers*
3 tablespoons dry sherry
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
8 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
salt and black pepper to taste

In a large heavy-bottomed skillet, heat up 1 tablespoon of the butter and sauté the onion until translucent and soft. Remove onion and set aside, then in the same pan heat up 2 tablespoons of the butter and cook the chicken livers. They will take about 10 minutes to brown through, and it’s a good idea to stir or flip them occasionally.

When they’re done, return the onions to the pan and add 1 tablespoon of the sherry and the thyme. Bring everything to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and continue cooking for several minutes. Turn off the heat and add the remaining sherry. Transfer the liver mixture to the bowl of a food processor with a metal blade and process it until it’s smooth.

At this point, spoon the liver mixture out into a medium-size bowl and add the butter and salt and pepper. Work the livers and butter with a spatula until the two substances are well-combined. Pack the paté into several small containers or 1 pint container. (The paté will freeze well so long as it’s tightly covered, so if you divvy it between smaller containers, you can spread out the enjoyment a bit.) Serve as a spread on toast or crackers, preferably with pickles.

*I got 3 pounds of livers from Pat's Pastured, a Rhode Island operation, when I went down to the winter farmers' market last month. If you can't find any near you, next time you buy whole chickens from your farmer, make sure you get the livers set aside. He/she might even be willing to give you more from other birds, so long as you ask. If all else fails, I'd call Northeast Family Farms. They have all sorts of goodies, sourced from farms across New England and hand slaughtered at their meat house.