The Escoffier Series continues with meat pies, pâtès, and terrines
We continue Chapter 11 with some of the best parts of the cold kitchen, the pâtè items. My favorite to make and to eat. There’s a lot of room for innovation and imagination.
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Text from the show
The Escoffier series continues in cold preparations.
In the last episode of chapter 11, we discussed galantines. One detail Escoffier mentions that seemed new to me was pressing the galantine. I checked with my friend Chef Todd and he’s never done that, either. That tells me at least that it’s out of favor.
The galantine was a forcemeat of the thing, chicken or duck most likely today, with garnishes, put back into the skin of the thing, rolled, tied, poached, and cooled.
The next part of Chapter 11 is meat and fish pies.
The pies are a bit like you might be thinking. Round with crust on the top and bottom. That’s mostly right. Ovals or oblong dishes were preferred by Escoffier.
For a fish pie, make a forcemeat of the fish, pike or sole or salmon. Spread the forcemeat on the bottom of the pie on the crust, add alternating layers of fish and garnish and forcemeat, seal the pie with more dough, which he called short paste, egg wash, and bake. When cool, fill the pie with the appropriate fish aspic.
Simple, right?
I don’t expect you to make a fish pie. It’s doable and would make one heck of a Valentine’s presentation.
Meat pies are similar. Pork forcemeat is the main vehicle for meat pies with garnish being the featured meat. Ham or veal are two specific pies he mentions.
Not to be left out there are birds. Here Escoffier gets a bit tedious, particularly with the game birds. In some cases, woodcock and thrush are two examples, he writes to bone out the birds, leaving the meat on the skin, add pork forcemeat, reshape the birds, place them in a forcemeat lined oval pie dish, add foie gras and more forcemeat to cover the birds. Cover the pie, eggwash, and bake. When cooled, add woodcock aspic jelly.
I can visualize all of that and I still struggle with it.
Escoffier calls these pates. That’s a term you probably have heard me use and might have seen or heard on TV food shows or at a restaurant.
A look through the book’s index does nothing to get clarification on the term. Pâtè is followed by the name of the principle ingredient.
Now, to make this easy. Pate is basically a sausage just not in a casing. Something we make at home is similar, even though the fat-to-meat ratios are off, is meatloaf.
The pies, by name, are pâtè de jambon or pâtè de veau et jambon.
The pates seen in restaurants or Dean and Deluca catalogs are pâtè en terrine. The terrine is the cooking vessel. Often it’s an enameled dish, but it doesn’t have to be. Country pâtè can be and has been, made in bread pans.
The basics are the same for the pies and galantines. A forcemeat is basically a sausage by ratios. One part principle meat, one part pork meat, one part pork fat. Escoffier adds eggs to his; we almost never did. Then add the garnish, usually some of the meat of the animal seared, dried fruit or nuts, and seasonings.
For the pâtè en terrine we made, we ground the meat through a fine plate. The smaller the grind the better the texture and large pieces of meat show up as garnish better.
Let’s invent a pâtè.
Sanitation is key so everything has to be cold, including the grinder attachments if you are working in the summer or your house is set to sauna. The key thing with the forcemeat is that we are emulsifying the meat and the fat. To achieve that, we’ll use the mixer. I’ll get to that.
For our pâtè, let’s use venison. You can use any meat, but generally, beef is avoided. It’s very powerful and will only ever taste like meatloaf. Venison is also potent but tastes like venison. In any forcemeat, the fatty, sinewy cuts are preferred.
I’m going to sound like I’m not following the rules. This venison pâtè recipe works and it doesn’t follow the rules.
2 # venison
½ # pork
1 # bacon
½ # foie gras (chicken livers can be used and add ¼ # pork fat)
¼ onion
6 juniper berries
2 eggs
1 oz red wine
1 oz brandy
4 ounces heavy cream
2.5 ounces AP flour
Salt and pepper as needed.
Toast the juniper berries over low heat till you smell the aroma.
Grind the meats, the fats, the juniper berries, and the onion through a small plate.
Place the mixture in a mixing bowl and paddle to combine. Add the eggs, the wine, the brandy, the heavy cream, and the flour.
Now, the emulsion part. Paddle at a brisk speed to make sure the meat and fat combine into a homogenous mixture. Taste test the pâtè by cooking a small portion in a saute pan on the stove. Add seasoning as needed.
While you are taste-testing, store the bowl of pâtè in the cooler.
Garnishes can be nearly anything that goes with venison. Pistachio nuts are pretty. Diced pieces of ham. Chives taste good. Dried cranberries or cooked diced carrots or parsnips. You can paddle your preferred garnish into the pâtè.
Line a bread pan with slices of bacon. The bacon will, or should, overlap the pan. That’s good. Carefully place the pâtè into the pan. You’ll probably need two tools, one to scoop from the bowl, and one to scrape the mixture off the spoon. The pâtè will stick to the bacon and lift it from the pan. That’s maddening.
When the pâtè is in the pan, fold over the bacon. Add more bacon lengthwise in the pan to cover the space missed.
The tricky part of baking pates is the need for a water bath. Usually, a roasting pan will work. You need something big enough to hold the bread pan and some water to come about halfway up the bread pan. If you have an oven-proof instant-read thermometer, place that in the middle center of the pâtè and plan to leave it there till the pâtè is cool.
Bake at 350 in a water bath until the temperature reads 145° F. It is not done. The pâtè will easily carry up 20 more degrees. If the pâtè is overcooked, the emulsion might break and the texture of the pâtè will be grainy. It isn’t poison, but it’s not all it could have been. A bit more mustard and shots of bourbon will help.
Escoffier recommends pressing terrines. It does make a difference. For our country pâtè, we’ll forego that detail. It’s messy if you aren’t prepared for it and it takes some space.
Let the pâtè cool completely before taking it out of the pan and slicing it.
Let warm water run on the outside of the pan to help loosen the fat then tip it out onto a sheet pan to catch all that comes out of the pan.
Slice it about a quarter of an inch thick, serve with excellent whole grain mustard and cornichons, and good toast points or crackers. And beer. Or bourbon
The timeline is short, but it is also excellent game day nosh.
Now, the king daddy of terrines is the pâtè en croute. That’s a cross between the pâtè en terrine and the pie. There’s both skill and art to a pâtè en terrine. It takes the pâtè skills and pastry skills and saucier skills—there’s consomme involved—and makes it all amazing. Beyond amazing when done well and less so when done wrong.
When Todd and I were at the Governors’ Club, Chef Shoop required a pâtè service of 5 different terrines and one had to be pâtè en croute.
Next up in Chapter 11 is salads, salad dressings, and composed salads. I’ll bet you didn’t know Salade Waldorf is a Classical French salad.