While for some reason I managed to avoid adding the traditional kilo or two during this year’s holiday break, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Seriously.
Like many foreign foodies living in Hungary, I regularly enjoy dishes made from the fattened goose and duck livers that are one of this country’s biggest culinary exports, and the rare example of an internationally-renowned luxury food ingredient way cheaper in Hungary than most other countries. But for whatever reason, I’d never cooked the stuff at home. Maybe I just assumed that anything so delicious and innately luxurious couldn’t be easy to prepare. Also, fattened poultry livers are usually sold in Hungary still riddled with various veins and ganglia, a serious ick even for a stout-stomached kitchen rat like myself.
Either way, around a year ago I gently put my toe into the whole business, sticking at first to the packages of goose and duck liver slices sold at some outlets of the French-owned hypermarket Cora. C’est d’une simplicité enfantine! Just dump the things into a hot skillet, slurp off the fat that erupts from them like Vesuvian lava, whip up a quick sauce, and before you can say myocardial infarction you’ve got a dish fit for kings, at middle-class prices. But then I got greedy.
Though like most fatties I’ll take my fatty liver any old way, I’ve always been fondest of the classic terrine de foie gras. Unlike many variations on what the Hungarians call libamájpástétom or kacsamájpástétom (depending on whether it’s goose or liver), the French call pâté de foie gras, and English-speakers call, well, pâté de foie gras, terrine de foie gras usually consists of little more than compacted fattened liver from either goose or duck, some spices, and maybe a few slices of truffle.
In high-end cooking, simple is often devilishly complicated. But in this case, simple is pretty simple. Instead of using a traditional Hungarian recipe for libamájpástétom like this one from our Treasury of Hungarian Recipies, I used this remarkably pithy formula from the recently-deceased American food magazine Gourmet.
All you do is take a few hundred grams of liver (duck or goose, neither of which should cost more than around Ft 6,500/€24 a kilo), season it liberally with salt and white pepper, and cram in into a covered terrine with a splash of cognac, sauternes, or – if you are in Hungary – some sweet Tokaji. You then place the terrine on a folded-up dishtowel in the bottom of a high-sided oven dish filled with hot water (the towel makes sure it doesn’t get overcooked on the bottom) and put it in an oven pre-heated to just under 100ºC. As you might expect, the trick is to make sure the thing is cooked through – cold raw liver is nasty, and a health hazard to boot – without letting it get overdone. Ignore the dial on my instant-read thermometer, which runs both in Fahrenheit and a little hot, and just aim for something between 50ºC and 60ºC.
When it’s done cooking, remove the terrine from the water, remove the water and the towel from the pan the terrine was sitting in and put the terrine back in the pan. Then use a piece of cardboard wrapped in foil or plastic wrap and cut to fit the terrine and find a heavy implement to squeeze and spoon out the molten fat that at this point the liver will be swimming in. Let the weight sit on the liver for maybe a half and hour, remove the cardboard, and spoon enough fat back in to cover the precious by a centimeter or two. Heave it in the fridge for a day or more, then unmold it.
While most recipes will tell you to keep the fat on the terrine after you’ve plated it up, if you use duck livers you may want to scrape most of it off, as it is a rather unpleasant shade of orange (goose fat will be a little more clear). Likewise, don’t bother with the hokey sweet wine aspic I plopped my most recent terrine on (third pic from top) which only distracted from the flavor, and looked stupid. And the flavor? Let’s put it this way – even people who like their meat paste wrapped in hot dog casings go nuts for it.
If there is a moral to this story, it’s that epicureans can easily overlook the exotic ingredients that surround them, in favor of seemingly more glamorous imported items. And for some reason, this seems to be especially the case for expat epicureans here in Hungary. So if this describes you, make it your New Year’s resolution to finally get around to mastering the art of 100% genuine Magyar fattened goose or duck liver. Just don’t eat too much, or your next New Year’s resolution will have to be eating none.
That was really mouth-watering!!!
My wife just told me that she has never made it, because she thought it to expensive …
But we regularly have grilled goose liver in one of our favorite restaurants in the country, that’s also vry nice.
If someone here should ever venture into Zala county, in the village of Zalabér you’ll find the country inn Szent Antál, that has typical Zala food like dödölle (a kind of potato dumplings) with lots of grilled meat, but also some delicacies like chicken, duck or goose liver.
dödölle…. isteni. Yum.
to get it even cheaper venture out into the countryside and find a
goose farm. I bought a whole goose last spring for 6000 Ft (I can’t
remember the exact kilos) but it was big enough to feed 4 adults
one kid and have leftovers for two adults and one kid for about two
days maybe 3. It included a good sized liver. We made a nice soup
from the bones and offal.
It’s not related, but I found this interesting
article
http://www.thestar.com/living/food/article/749837–
feelin-hungary
Thanks, Benny!
Should we go to Niagara again, we’ll make sure to visit Toronto also – didn’t know the Hungarian colony there was so big.
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