Pork liver paté

I think I surprised Mme Perez in the butcher’s shop in Roujan when I said I wanted to make paté. You see, her husband makes wonderful patés and no one here would think of making it themselves. But I wanted to try it again, for the first time for several decades. I used to make a lot of patés when I lived in Oxford and then in rural Wales at a time when ‘exotic’ foods weren’t so widely available. A rather nice cast iron dish with a lid that had been my mother-in-law’s reminded me of those times. And the result was very tasty and less fatty than bought patés.

ingredients:

250 grams pork liver

250 grams belly pork, skin and odd bits of gristle and bone removed

4 cloves garlic

a bunch of fennel leaves (I’d just picked some that was growing wild in the garrigue, but you could use other fresh herbs)

a bunch of parsley

salt, pepper

25 ml Armagnac (or white wine)

Mince the pork belly and liver. I used the food processor for this, but still miss my mother’s hand mincer that I used to use and that has got mislaid somewhere during our moves over the past years. Finely chop the garlic and herbs. I did this in the food processor too. Mix the minced meat, garlic, herbs, salt, pepper and Armagnac and put the mix into an oven-proof, cast-iron or earthenware, dish with a lid, greased with olive oil.

Put the dish, covered with its lid, in a bain-marie – a roasting dish with a couple of centimetres of water in it works fine. Put bain-marie and paté dish in the oven and cook for  one and a half hours at 180°C.

Take it out of the oven, remove the lid and allow the paté to cool.

Serve with bread and green salad and a glass of wine – red, rosé or white.

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