French Pâté

[ChrisGreaves]

French Pâté.
That circumflex tells you that a letter “s” has been elided, so French Paste”, or if you prefer “meat paste”.
Anglos will recall picnics with ¼ cup jars of fish paste or meat paste spread on the bread and butter on-site – an amazing feat, hah hah!

When you look up recipes on the web or in Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbook you will see all sorts of weights and measures, and precise amounts of bacon, chicken, spices, herbs etc. I ignore that because I can make pâté only with what I have got.

Christmas sees hot dinners dropped off by truck, and I struggle to eat all the turkey, chicken, salt beef, stuffing etc before it goes off or I explode, so …
I grab the leftover meats and stuffing, including the remains of a packet of bacon that didn't fit into my pizza, a pack of spiced meats I bought for Christmas morning but didn’t get around to eating and hand-crank them through my meat grinder.
Then a large onion is diced and passed through the grinder to flush out the remaining bits of meat.
Then a thick slice of bread is diced and passed through the grinder to flush out the remaining bits of onion.
My second ex-wife made pâté when we lived on Rue de Mouzaïa, and she used only a sharp knife, so you don’t need to grind the ingredients.

The ground meat went into a steel bowl with a dessert spoon of ground black pepper and a dessert spoon of oregano and one egg.

Now prior to this I had bought a $3.67 pork hock and boiled it up for soup stock, but the liquid when cooled formed about a quart of jelly, as it will, and that is what made me think of pâté.
I reheated the jellied stock to a liquid phase, poured it into the bowl of ground meat, herbs and spices and egg, and mixed it in well.
Then I poured the lot into a Pyrex bowl and baked it in the oven at 250F for an hour, mainly to let the liquid stock find its way into the crevices.
Turned off the heat and let it continue cooking overnight.

2023_01_20221230_170712.jpg

I confess that this first seat-of-the-pants effort looks unappealing, but this is what the most expensive pâté looks like a few minutes after you swallow it. I can work on the colour next time.

2023_01_20221230_170728.jpg

The view from above.

2023_01_20221230_170731.jpg

The side view.

I am now eating home-baked bread with home-made pâté for lunch every day and will be glad when the Christmas season is over.

Seriously: I don’t know why I haven’t made this before. It is an excellent way of using left-over scraps of meat. If the meat has not been previously cooked I would bake the pâté for an extra hour or two.

Next time I will pack the paste into small glass jars and bake it in the jars instead of making a huge cake of the stuff.

Cheers, Chris

[LineLaline]

Terrific! Good to not let these things go to waste!
About the jelly: I would let some chicken boil for quite a while before going to a 'far away' animal hospital and take the jelly with me on the train. I would feed it to the cats on warm days when they were not allowed to eat but only drink; it was carefully passed through a sieve of course, sometimes even cloth if needed. If it was very warm the tiny cubes would melt in my hand so brining a spoon along was a good idea. And napkins because my fingers would really smell (I sometimes used fish, too) They so loved this. I think if I add some gelatine it might create tasty snacks that keep their shape until they eat it, but this would not be good before surgery of course.