Contemporary Britain is weirdly ambivalent about paté. It is a restaurant staple and a Christmas favourite, yet the subject of this month’s How To Eat has a distinct whiff of naff 1970s dinner parties about it. It is unfashionably rich and heavy, a hangover from a time when we blindly mimicked supposedly sophisticated French cuisine. From ethereally smooth parfaits to horny-handed slabs of minced offal, paté is seen as a complex technical challenge best left to chefs and, somehow, at the same time, a faintly suspect way of using up cheap meat. In 2009, a team of UK scientists published a research paper that naysayers will appreciate: “Can people distinguish paté from dog food?”
This (literally paste in French) is a food that is simultaneously loved and loathed, and one which stopped being cool circa 1983. Never let it be said that How To Eat [HTE] is a slave to the latest trends as we explore, from smoked kipper to chicken liver, how best to eat paté.
Some notes on serving
We have put men on the moon. Boffins can grow you a penis in a lab (kind of). Yet, remarkably, no one has come up with a reliable mathematical formula to ensure that a correct amount of toast and chutney is always served with paté.
In restaurants, despite the accompaniments being the cheap part of the dish, they are often lacking. Presumably, this aesthetic convention – minimal toast and a blob of chutney sat beside a far larger slice of paté – is meant to convey a sense of value-for-money. However, unless you greedily pile huge mounds of paté on to your toast, treating the toast as an irrelevant delivery mechanism (which would be misguided), you invariably have to beg the waiting staff for more. There is no excuse for such parsimony at home. Be generous with your toast.
Temperature
In sloppy professional kitchens, it is commonplace for things such as paté to be served straight from the fridge when they should not be. In the home, meanwhile, a bacterial panic still attaches itself to paté, which means that someone is always fretting if it has been left out of the fridge for more than 10 minutes. In reality – if it is made properly and you are not pregnant – depending on whose advice you follow, you have a window of an hour or two where that paté can be safely left out. Like any fatty food, paté certainly tastes better when allowed to warm at room temperature for a period before serving.
Equipment
HTE is no harrumphing @WeWantPlates bore. But when eating paté – whether it is served in individual portions or shared from a board of meats, cheeses and tracklements – everyone needs a plate. A plate with a discernible raised lip at its edge, for ease of scraping.
Whether you paté-up your toast repetitively before each bite, or patiently coat the whole slice before you begin to eat, it is impossible to achieve the desired thickness without having some excess you will want to wipe off on the side of your plate. Hence the need for a lip and not a flat board or slate, which would leave you awkwardly angling your knife to smear inelegant skid marks of excess paté across that platform.
Etiquette
If a paté is being shared by the table, take a slice or spoonful to your plate and assemble from there. Only a savage would top their toast directly from the central paté, hacking at it until that architecturally pristine terrine resembles reversed-over roadkill.
When?
There are those (paté retailers trying to sell you more paté), who insist you should be eating paté at every meal, stirring it into your breakfast eggs, topping lunch salads with it, slathering it on a baked potato for tea. But in this blog (with due respect to banh mi and beef wellington), we are talking about paté as a meal rather than an ingredient. It is not one you want to wake up to.
Paté is a lunch dish, an evening starter or, possibly, a main component in a classic “picky tea”, that random assortment of meats, cheeses, breads, olives, chutneys, celery etc that, when you are too hungover to cook, is such a feature of the festive period.
Varieties
All sensible people would surely agree that, although recipes exist for mushroom, sweet potato or feta “patés”, a paté is, in fact, a preparation of seasoned, minced meat or fish. There are endless, possibly terrific, vegetarian spreads and dips around (indeed, that smooth dippable consistency is a key point of differentiation), but they are not patés.
Within the realm of bona fide patés, there are certain rules that it is imperative you observe:
- Bacon-wrapping a paté always gives it an unfortunate leathery exterior.
- Dried fruits are never welcome in a savoury dish.
- Stick to traditional French herbs and spices of the garlic and thyme ilk, none of this mulled nutmeg, cloves and ginger nonsense. This is not a Christmas cake.
- Ideally, confine yourself to one boozy ingredient and use it sparingly. That Grand Marnier or port should be a seasoning. This is not a meat-flavoured shot. It should not ignite near a naked flame.
Top three patés
1) Smoked mackerel or kipper. Impossible to dislike.
2) A country-style paté so chunky with real, discernible pieces of pork (or duck or game, if you must, bound in well-seasoned mince), that it starts a fractious, futile debate about whether technically it is a paté or a terrine.
3) Chicken liver judiciously spiked with madeira.
Accompaniments
Accompaniments for meat patés, that is, as fish patés require little more than toast and a few refreshing celery sticks or radish slices. Even the ubiquitous lemon wedge is decorative.
Yes
Toast and unless your paté is a “potted” version sealed under butter, that toast must be buttered. There is nothing that cannot be improved by the addition of butter. A grilled, properly spiky sourdough bread would be the ideal here, but any decent, thick-cut real white or granary bread will do. Brown bread feels too worthy in this context. Likewise, limp, thin-sliced, industrially manufactured bread will not cut it in the regal presence of a paté.
Crusty bread, the go-to default for Francophiles. But HTE prefers the more strident textural contrast of toast.
Vinegar-pickled or fermented vegetables for acidity and crunch (classically cornichon, but sliced pickled onions, cold red cabbage etc). Veggies that can be picked up with your fingers or easily manoeuvred onto your paté with a knife.
Celeriac remoulade. Easy on the mayo, though.
Whole-grain mustard.
Chutneys and savoury marmalades. Although, given how sweet these are (the caramelised onion sphere is particularly dangerous), you must tread carefully.
No
Melba toast. Inexplicably once the classic paté partner. Thin, brittle, irritating.
Toasted pitta. Too doughy.
Crackers. Too dry. It turns paté into a masticating marathon.
Nuts and dried fruits. The former are bizarre way to punctuate paté’s meatiness, the latter an unwelcome, jarringly sweet garnish.
Green leaves (watercress, rocket, and so on). This garnish or the lack of it can cause real anguish. But leaves are both a logistical quandary (what do you do with them, eat them in alternative mouthfuls with a fork?), and, compared to a few zippy pickled vegetables, they are an unconvincing palate-cleanser. Fundamentally, you should be able to eat paté using just a knife and your hands.
So: paté – how do you eat yours?
