Welcome back Pâté en Croûte.
Making a move back into the limelight.
Pâté en Croûte
Soon on a menu near you!
As a young cook we sought out inspiration from cookbooks popular in our era for example, Pelleprats and Larousse Gastronomique.
I remember I once told a young chef to read Larousse Gastronomique three times to get a good background in cooking, now days these bibles only represent an epoch we passed through or time capsule from our past, my copies still stand proud in my bookcase slowly gathering dust. These dated works represent today only a slice of the information that today’s young chefs are drawing knowledge from, the internet in all it's splendour: At the end of every shift the lucky old cookbooks are finding their way into antique stores the rest into local dumpsters. Even the essential bookcases are disappearing.
We gathered ideas and inspiration from these mastodon works and devoured and pawed over the photos. One underlining common factor in all these encyclopedias were the photos of the Pâtés and pâté en croûte, these dishes represented the pinnacle of technical skills in the traditional garde mange “cold larder” section in the old kitchen brigade. Sadly, these skills are disappearing faster than the cookbooks and bookcases they were kept in.
Before the camera or telephone hand written recipes were the norm in the kitchen. Now the telephone is the cooks main piece of equipment, we can cook anything as long as we can find it on the internet.
The two following recipes are over 40 years old, written back when I was working in a classic 5 star hotel kitchen in London.
At the time we had a garde mange brigade with 10-12 cooks there we had the time and a budget to create and make Pâté en Croûte and of course it was served from the silver hors d´oeuvres trolley, with a gueridon waiter to carve it. We didn't have cameras in the kitchen and of course there were no telephones to snap pictures, it was back to the basics, colouring in pencils.