[Sca-cooks] Pate history - OOP(?)
Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius at verizon.net
Mon Sep 22 09:19:27 PDT 2003
Also sprach Daniel Myers:
>Ok, pate had been mentioned on one of the
>threads on the list and it got me thinking
>(Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!). Here's what
>I've found after a (very) brief search.
>
>At first glance, goose liver pate does not
>appear to be period. This was the only decent
>historic reference I've come across (anyone with
>OED access or the like is invited to chime in
>here):
>
>From http://homecooking.about.com/library/weekly/aa121701a.htm
>"The practice of force-feeding geese to enlarge
>their livers dates back to at least 400 B.C..
>Egyptian hieroglyphics depict slaves
>force-feeding geese to enlarge the livers.
>French chef Jean-Joseph Clause is credited for
>creating and popularizing pâté de foie gras in
>1779. Chef Clause's culinary genius was rewarded
>a gift of twenty pistols by King Louis XVI , and
>he obtained a patent for the dish in 1784. He
>went on to begin his own business specializing
>in supplying pâté to the gentry. By 1827,
>Strasberg was known as the goose-liver capital
>of the world."
>
>With all due respect to french chefs, I'm
>interested in the fact that the practice of
>fattening goose livers goes back so far beyond
>pate. So I did a quick cookbook search of goose
>recipes and found some interesting hints.
>
>From: Forme of Cury
>"Gees In Hoggepot. XXXI. Take Gees and smyte hem
>on pecys. cast hem in a Pot do [th]erto half
>wyne and half water. and do [th]erto a gode
>quantite of Oynouns and erbest. Set it ouere the
>fyre and couere it fast. make a layour of brede
>and blode an lay it [th]erwith. do [th]erto
>powdour fort and serue it fort. "
This is a general hint, and not a liver recipe, I gather, huh?
>
>From: Le Menagier de Paris (Janet Hinson, trans.)
>"Item, in Paris the goose-sellers fatten their
>geese on wheat-flour, not the finest flour nor
>bran, but that which falls between the two,
>namely fine or double-milled: and to this flour
>they add an equal amount of oats, and mix it
>together with a little water, and this holds
>together like a paste, and they put this food in
>a four-legged feeding-trough, and nearby, water
>and litter fresh each day, and in fifteen days
>they are fat. And note that the litter enables
>them to keep their feathers clean."
>
>... and ...
>
>"To Fatten A Goose In Three Days, feed it on
>warm bread crumbs soaked in buttermilk."
Two things to consider are A) that I'm not sure
how long geese destined for foie gras are
fattened (there's fat and then there's _FAT_),
and B) that foie gras has a decidedly different
character from ordinary liver; we're talking so
fat that it actually firms up like butter when
chilled.
>
>There were also a good number of recipes for
>blood pudding that included goose livers.
Hmmm. Now those I haven't seen. Would you care to
post one, or refer us to a source?
>So I interpret this all to mean that there was
>no "official" goose liver pate, but there may or
>may not have been pate-like foods made from
>(among other things) goose liver.
Why am I thinking there may be a liver pie in the Italian corpus?
>Pure speculation: I can imagine making a pie
>out of chopped goose livers in order to preserve
>them for a bit. An inedible crust would keep
>the bacteria out after it was cooked and the fat
>content would also help preserve it. I'll have
>a look through Vivendier, Viandier, and Chiquart
>later tonight if I get the chance.
Maybe whole livers in some kind of substrate,
also. Yes, fat / air exclusion is pretty much the
way to go for all cultures seeking to preserve
livers (traditionally eaten fresh at slaughtering
time) before artificial refrigeration was used.
I wonder if perhaps there's some reason (maybe to
do with poultry husbandry, if such a science is
definable), like, say, the introduction of a
different breed of goose to France that made a
difference. It may simply be that what we would
recognize as foie gras today was not produced in
period in spite of whatever methods were employed
to fatten geese.
I mean, wine was produced in the Champagne
region, and presumably had been for centuries
before the advent of Dom Perignon, and I gather
that certain technological advances of the period
were what made his contribution possible. It may
be a similar deal with foie gras; maybe the
concept of a five-pound goose liver, for all its
fattening, simply didn't exist before the
eighteenth century.
Adamantius
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