If pâté en croute doesn’t trip off your tongue, try the good, old, plodding English “meat pie.” I’ve always thought of pâté, sealed in a pastry crust, as one of the most elegant presentations for charcuterie – and one of the most intimidating! But, hell, making pie is supposed easy as, well, pie, so I plunged in and made a couple pâtés for Tuesday’s party as well as this pheasant pie, which my family gobbled up beforehand.

The pheasant was a big hit Tuesday night, so here’s the recipe. The preparation is a little involved, with diced pheasant meat and mushrooms laid in a turkey forcemeat (think turkey bologna), but you can easily double or triple the recipe for the forcemeat and make several at the same time. My Killer Cutting Robot handled a triple recipe with ease.

I started with recipes in Fritz Sonnenschmidt’s Charcuterie book, but his versions came out too bland for my taste, so I’ve jazzed them up:

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OK, all you Nduja lurkers out there, hitting on this site just to get your pork fat and chili fix: here’s a recipe to rewind your minds and rethread your heads.

Nduja pâté. Yes, that’s Nduja – the crude and rude, rough and tumble, Calabrian salami that meatheads everywhere are plugging in to fire up their search engines – and pâté – the suave and elegant embodiment of classical French cuisine – together for the first time. A marriage made in heaven or al inferno?

What inspired such a culinary creation – besides the obvious explanation that I’m “crazier than a shithouse rat,” as Scott so succintly put it? It all has to do with texture. The Calabrian Nduja I had a chance to sample in London has a smooth, creamy texture, exactly like what you get from the Liver Terrine a la Parisienne in Frentz and Poulain’s Charcuterie book. Not surprisingly, the mix of meats is about the same, a 2:1 ratio of pork belly to liver. The final reason for nduja-izing pâté is pure greed. Pâté I can eat the same day, instead of waiting for it to ferment, smoke, and then slowly dry for weeks or months.

Here are the main ingredients for the meat mix:

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I can’t remember now what steered me toward it, but I recently acquired a copy of Charcuterie Specialties, by Jean-Claude Frentz and Michel Poulain, and this recipe comes from their book. I had to try it, because it sounded crazy. This recipe completely turns what I thought I knew about making a pâté on its head.

Pâtés can be “country-style” or coarse-textured, but this one is a smooth-textured, emulsion-type. As Elton David Aberle et al. explain in The Principles of Meat Science, “An emulsion is defined as a mixture of two immiscible liquids, one of which is dispersed in the form of small droplets or globules in the other liquid. [Think of the oil and vinegar in salad dressing.] . . . In sausage emulsions, soluble proteins dissolved in the aqueous phase act as emulsifying agents coating all surfaces of the dispersed fat particles” (128-130). The point of a meat emulsion is to break the fat up into minute particles, because they separate the meat fibers from each other and lubricate the tissue, with the result that the texture seems delicate, light, and creamy. [Think of the tenderness of a well-marbled steak.] Finely-dispersed fat particles also do a better job of slowing down the progress of flavor-bearing molecules over our tongue and thus of “bringing out” the flavor of the meat and other ingredients. In fact, studies have shown that if you remove every speck of fat from meat, tasters can no longer tell if they are eating chicken or pork or beef or lamb.

Now everything I had previously read told me that the secret to a stable emulsion and a good pâté is to keep the meat–and everything that comes in contact with the meat!–as cold as freakin’ possible. In the chapter on pâtés in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book, they write,

In order to combine the meat and fat perfectly, they must be very cold. If they become warm, the fat can soften or melt, and ultimately you can wind up with a broken forcemeat, just as you can wind up with a broken hollandaise. Until your pâté goes in the oven, you must do all that you can to keep the meat cold. Don’t let your ingredients and tools get warm. You don’t have to be fanatical about it–moving your KitcheAid out on the back deck in February snow–but do be slightly paranoid about it. Chill your grinder attachment in the freezer for an hour or more before grinding. When not working with any of the ingredients, keep them refrigerated. Set the bowl that will catch the ground meat in a larger bowl of ice. . . . If, you need to stop after grinding for whatever reason, return the meat to the refrigerator or freezer until you’re ready to proceed.” (206)

And they are not alone in this fanaticism or paranoia. In Modern Garde Manger, Robert Garlough and Angus Campbell write, “both the meat and grinding heads must be well chilled to prevent fat separation” (532). The CIA’s Garde Manger book also says, “Temperature control is the key to achieving the best results” (301). And finally, in Fritz Sonnenshmidt’s Charcuterie he insists, “Keep ingredients cold. Keep equipment cold. This is important to the success of pâtés and terrines” (209).

In Frentz and Poulain’s recipe for this liver terrine, all this fanaticism for freezing temperatures, all this paranoia about cold-processing, is tossed out the window.

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