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| Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Easier than frying an egg
Foie gras is
one of those legendary foods, like truffles, sweetbreads and
plumped
ortolans, which tend to intimidate the home cook. Maybe it’s the cost,
maybe it’s the historical baggage, but I suspect the average chef would rather
tackle cloudberry soufflé for fifteen than prepare a foie gras terrine.
Simply carve some fat slices off a raw duck foie gras (about the width
of your thumb). Season and drop into a smoking-hot frying pan for thirty
seconds until a brown crust forms, flip, repeat (don’t be alarmed if it seems
to be melting away – after it is effectively a slab of slightly livery
duck-butter) and serve on toasted brioche points with a few segments of gently
warmed orange.
The problem
then isn’t difficulty, or even expense (a generous portion of raw foie gas
doesn’t actually cost much more than a good filet mignon).
It’s simply unfamiliarity. Foie gras sits on a pedestal of
unapproachability
because people don’t
know any better.
And there’s
also the image problem. In recent years foie gras has come under increasing
attack for the allegedly “cruelty” involved in its production. Because of their unfamiliarity, people simply swallow
that line that foie gras is “torture in a tin”. It becomes a guilty pleasure,
which people enjoy in spite of themselves.
That’s where
Michael Ginor comes in with his 1999 book
Foie Gras: A
Passion.
Magic
Mike
Michael
Ginor is the Israeli/American co-founder of Hudson Valley, America’s largest
foie gras producer, and the godfather of the US foie gras trade. Softly-spoken
and philosophical, he has been one of the driving forces behind turning foie
gras in America from an unpronounceable French import into a fine-dining staple. More recently he has become the voice of reasonableness defending
his industry against the increasingly vocal anti-foie gras lobby.
More
importantly his book Foie Gras: A
Passion is the single best book on the subject ever written. Although he
clearly has a vested interested in promoting what he calls the “foie gras
gospel” this is so much more than a puff piece. The man is absolutely
passionate about what it does, and it shows.
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| Phaidon would kill to have this line-up |
The
publisher is Wiley; an academic house best known for the CIA (no not
that CIA) textbook
The Professional Chef (which was,
until
Modernist Cuisine, probably the
world’s heaviest cookbook). It’s a shame to pigeonhole them as a textbook-shop
though because they have also published some of the most significant food books
of the past twenty years – not least among them Dornenburg & Page’s ground-breaking
Culinary Artistry,
Grande Finales: The Art of the Plated
Dessert (the ultimate volume
of dessert-food-porn), and
the works of James
Peterson, the greatest teacher-chef since Jacques Pepin.
And Ginor’s Foie Gras is very much in keeping with
this grand tradition. What you get is actually two books in one – the first is
an exhaustive treatise running to nearly a hundred pages on the history,
production and usage of foie gras. The second part – and the heart of the book
- contains over eighty foie gras recipes contributed by the great and the good
of the (1999) culinary firmament.
Let’s take a
look.
Foie Gras – The Potted History
Ancient
history
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The menu from the Yehuda Avazi grill in Tel Aviv. Foie
gras skewers cost 25 shekels (around $6 in 1999 money) |
Ginor starts with his own story. His first taste of foie gras came not in some Parisian
temple but at a humble
outdoor
grill in Tel Aviv where skewers of charred foie gras were served up
alongside fries and freshly-based flatbreads (I guess that would be why they call
it the Promised Land… :-p).
He swiftly
moves on to the history of foie gras, a fascinating exercise in
culinary archaeology. He begins with the tomb reliefs of ancient Egypt, the
first known examples of gavage
(fattening waterfowl by force-feeding), and then follows the thread through the
writings and the raucous banquests of ancient Rome, where
 |
Ancient Egyptian carvings show the first recorded
examples of foie gras production |
The livers were customarily served whole to
display their size and whiteness, then carved at the table. In this way, guests
could watch as the carver’s knife sliced into the soft flesh and the clear,
slightly pink juices ran onto the platter. The flavour and feel of the meat was
well suited to the Roman taste for luxury… the meat’s high percentage of fat
causes it to flow down the throat like warm cream.
From here he
follows the quest into the Dark Ages, unpicking the mystery of how foie gras
production was handed down after the fall of Rome. Although received wisdom is
that crafty French peasants kept the old ways alive, Ginor presents an
alternate theory that Ashkenazi Jews also plays a role, teasing out oblique
references fattening geese from the writings of medieval rabbis to support his thesis. The detective work is commendable.
French
lessons
Once we
reach medieval Europe the story of foie gras also intertwines with another
tale, that of the rise of French cuisine and fine dining. So we see foie gras
described in La Varennes’
Le Cuisinier
Francois, the foundational text of French cookery (including an inevitable
pairing with truffles). As we move into the Renaissance we see recipes for foie
gras ragouts and
tourtes (the
ancestor of the modern
foie gras en
croute), as well as more outre preparations such as a stew of sea duck,
foie gras and chocolate (sounds like something Pierre Gagnaire might whip up today).
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| Careme's humble foie gras stew... :-x |
Come the
Revolution the aristocrats go to the guillotine and their grand
houses are dissolved, which of course opens the way for the modern
restaurant as hundreds of unemployed
country-house chefs rush to earn their keep. Foie gras is, of course, an
essential part of their toolkit and soon we are onto Careme, Escoffier and all
that jazz (e.g. Careme's
ragout a
la financiere employing a small Strasbourg foie gras, half a pound of
truffles, cocks coms, kidneys and lamb sweetbreads :-x).
Foie
gras without the French
However the
great strength of this account is that for Ginor's world doesn’t just revolve
around France. His American/Israeli background gives him a perspective which
most other Francophone (or Francophile) treatments lack. So he also presents a
number of interesting counterpoints to the thus-far French-driven narrative:
One
counterpoint is the British, who stand aloof on the edge of the story. They are
the first to comment on the apparent cruelty of the force-feeding, something
which Ginor theorises prevented them from producing foie gras themselves.
 |
An Alsatian rabbi examines
a fattened goose |
A second
counterpoint is Israel, where Hungarian Holocaust survivors brought the secrets
of foie-gras preparation to the fledgling state in 1948 (which explains how
Ginor came across the delicacy that evening in Tel Aviv).
But the last
and most important counterpoint is the American experience. He provides a
potted history of the evolution for French restaurants in New York. We start
with Delmonico’s in the nineteenth century, serving up imported Strasbourg
pates for railway magnates like “Diamond Jim” Brady, who’s Rabelasian appetites
expanded his stomach to three times that of a normal man. Fast forward through
the Prohibition era and we have The Colony, a faux-Continental establishment
frequented by hard-drinking socialites and celebrities. However it is not until
the 1940s and Henri Soule’s Le Pavillon that haute cuisine really began to
arrive. The foie gras though, as Jacque Pepin discovered when he came to NY in
1959, was still tinned although enterprising French chefs ran a smuggling ring
shipping in the fresh stuff hidden in suitcases or cases of fish.
Then in the
1980s as American chefs started to discover their own cuisine, so they also
discovered domestically produced foie gras pioneered by Hudson Valley on the
East Coast and by Sonoma Foie Gras in California. This brings to story full
circle to Ginor’s day job – the raising of ducks and the production of foie
gras. This is where he speaks with real authority, which is important for the controversies that follow:
The Foie Gras Wars
Battle Stations...
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| Not to be confused with Foie Gras! Source: Ocado |
In the
fifteen years since the publication of this book foie gras – hitherto a rather
rare and obscure delicacy – has become a controversial topic. Most famously,
California and Chicago both banned its sale (although the latter has since been
repealed). In the UK a campaign fronted by Roger Moore has persuaded middle-class
stalwarts Waitrose and Selfridges to stop carrying it (although Waitrose does
sell an endearing ersatz liver pate called Faux Gras; it resembles foie gras in
the same way that a Big Mac resembles a hamburger). France, of course, carries
inflating and slaughtering duck livers with merry abandon.
Three reasons why foie gras critics are wrong
A full
discussion of the rights and wrongs of foie gras is beyond the scope of this
review,
but having
spent a
long time ploughing through
material from both sides I would make the following points:
- Many of
the arguments against foie gras are actually arguments against bad husbandry: The
anti-foie gras lobby tend to use highly emotive pictures of caged and rather
distressed looking birds. However they fail to make clear is why these are
arguments against foie gras. What they are really showing are arguments against bad animal
husbandry. There is nothing about keeping a duck in a cage which is intrinsic to the foie gras process (actually cages are not used in the US and will be phased out in Europe from next year). If you mistreat a duck you will get a sick duck, just as if
you mistreat a cow you will get a sick cow. But a sick cow is not an argument
against foie gras. What it is, is an argument against bad husbandry.
 |
Anti foie-gras piece overlaid
with amusing automated mobile
advert-targeting fail :-p |
- Many
arguments against foie gras are driven by misguided anthropomorphism: Sticking
a feeding tube down your throat is cruel. Ergo sticking a feeding tube
down a duck’s throat is cruel right? Well no actually, because of the simple fact that a duck isn’t a human. For example, duck's throats are
lined with a keratinous (horn-like) coating because they are designed to ingest
spiny fish; compared to that a feeding tube is chickenfeed. What's more the tube doesn’t even
choke the duck because ducks breath through a tube in their tongue not through their throats. The underlying fallacy here is a
misguided anthropomorphism which says "if it’s wrong to do something to a person
it’s wrong to do something to a duck". Well, it’s also wrong to kill a human and eat
its flesh, but that’s not going to stop me enjoying my next steak…
- Foie gras
is attacked because it’s an easy target: If animal rights protesters really
cared about eliminating the greatest suffering for the greatest number of
animals then you’d have thought they’d pick another target. For example rather
than going after the US foie gras industry (450k birds a year) they might
think about going after the boiler hen industry (9 BILLION birds a year)
which raises more animals in greater squalor and suffering than the most
wild-eyed gavage-monger. But they
don’t for the simple reason that foie gras is an easy target. The industry is
small, it lacks lobbying clout, it’s perceived as elitist and it has a funny
foreign name (remember many bans were enacted in the febrile post-9/11 era when
France and “Old Europe” refused to back the war in Iraq). In short the
anti-foie gras lobby is acting like a classic playground bully, picking on the
easiest target and trying to create cynical “wedge issue”. Even if their
arguments were coherent, their motives would still be dishonourable.
 |
| You'd be quackers not to read it |
There’s a
lot more to be written on this which I would like to cover in a separate post,
but if you do want to understand what’s really going on then you should do two
things. First order and read Mark Caro’s
The Foie Gras Wars, a thorough and
even-handed piece of reportage from the frontlines of the US debate. Secondly
download and listen to
this
talk from anthropologist and foie gras obsessive Michaela DeSoucey, which
expertly teases out the politics behind the protests.
Michael's Modest Proposal
I said at
the beginning of this post the biggest challenge for foie gras producers isn’t
actually winning the argument, it’s public unfamiliarity with foie gras. For his part Ginor
devotes two pages to the cruelty debate. If the book were written more recently
I suspect they would be more, but in the space allotted he does a good job of addressing
some of the basic misconceptions:
- The anatomy of waterfowl are different from
humans; birds gorge natural before flight and the oesophagus is lined with keratin
so tube-feeding does not cause discomfort.
- Monitoring of corticosterone levels in ducks
show they are not stressed by the force-feeding process.
- Fattened foie gras livers are not “diseased” as
diseases like diabetes and “fatty liver” does not occur in ducks as in mammals
His full comments are shown below (click on the image to zoom). If you can set aside any "well he would say that wouldn't he" cynicism, it is actually a sensible and well-reasoned piece:
First
catch your duck…
The first half
of the book concludes with five pages on the practicalities of choosing,
preparing and cooking foie gras. There is good material on what to look for in
a liver, but this is the one part of the book where I feel he could have done more. In particular the section dealing with the notoriously
tricky business of cleaning a de-veining the raw liver could definitely do with some hands-on pictures. If you want a better hands-on guide I thoroughly recommend
either the section in Thomas Keller’s
French Laundry Cookbook, or the chapter James Peterson’s comprehensive
guide-to-French cuisine-with-knobs-on,
Glorious
French Food.
The Recipes
It is in the
second part that this book really shines as we pile into the eighty-two foie
gras recipes – the largest single selection in any cookbook (the closest I
could find is Alain Ducasse’s
Grand Livre de Cuisine with a mere
fourteen).
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| 82 shades of foie gras - the full list of recipes! |
The recipes
aren’t Ginor’s, rather they come from his cheffy mates. And not just any old
cheffy mates – the contributor list is a Who’s Who of haute cuisine. With the
possible exception of the Adrias (remember El Bulli was a random provincial
three star back then) anyone who was
anyone
in 1999 then gets a look-in.
From Europe
we have Ducasse, Gagnaire and Bocuse. From America the godfathers of 80s
cuisine all feature (Pepin, O’Connell, Palladin) as well as the new generation
who surpassed them (Keller, Nobu, Ripert). Also notable are the presence of
some regional American chefs not normally seen outside of James Beard House
dinners (Alan Wong from Hawaii, Susur Lee from Toronto, Susanna Foo from
Philly).
And the
great thing is these chefs have brought their A-Game. Often compilation
cookbooks are full of recycled off-cuts, culled from a chef’s latest book. Not
so here. Perhaps it’s the magic spell of foie gras, or perhaps it’s just
Ginor’s persuasiveness but this book is chock-full
of eye-popping and drool-worthy recipes.
Truffles
three times a day
Let’s start
with the truffles. This is a foie gras book so of course there are plenty of
truffles. The very first recipe is Marc
Meneau’s famous Cromequis of Foie Gras (p96), crispy breaded shells filled
with a molten truffled foie gras centre. He uses the old Shanghai soup dumpling
trip of setting the filling with gelatine and letting it melt in the final
cooking. Paul Bocuse of course chips
in with his signature Soupe aux Truffes VGE, a beef consommé larded with
truffles and topped with puff-pastry (think of it as a truffle pot-pie without
the pie; p242). Eric Ripert also
plays the tuber melanosporum card by
matching seared foie gras with sautéed scallops, crispy artichokes and black
truffle (p248).
And for something a bit different...
Of course it’s not all foie gras and truffle (#firstworldproblems!). There are plenty of more innovative combinations. Pierre Gagnaire has a typically off-the-wall dish of tea-poached foie gras with watermelon, papaya, pine nuts… and cheese (this is one of the few recipes I’ve seen which poach foie gras – a highly underrated way of cooking it; p146). Strasbourg veteran Marc Haeberlin offers a rustic vision of foie gras with poached and crispy tripe (p164). Thomas Keller deploys a similar textural contrast by stacking a crouton with sautéed foie gras, abalone and a Meyer lemon sauce (p246).
Foie
gras TV dinners
Then there
are also a bunch of dishes which I would call “haute cuisine TV dinners” –
home-style comfort food with an injection of foie gras. “
Happy
Chef”
Michel Richard has a
typically whimsical “FoieReo”, sandwiching foie gras mousse between buttery
foie-gras cookies (p98).
Susanna Foo
does the whole fusion-thing with foie gras & shiitake pot-stockers (p178).
But to me the most evocative dish comes from Ukrainian
ballet-dancer-turned-chef
Dano Hutnik
with his family recipe for peasant-style potted foie gras with Hungarian duck
crackling biscuits (p228).
Let me
repeat that. DUCK. CRACKLING. BISCUITS. :-p
Need I say
more?
New
World tastes
But to me
the most interesting dishes are the ones which come from the generation of
younger US-born chefs who were just making their mark as this book went to
press. Two in particular stand out for me, both from NY chef David Burke. The first is a
caraway-infused corn custard, served steamed in eggshells and topped with
honey-glazed foie gras (p102). Think of it as the bastard half-child of a foie gras chawanmushi and the Arpege egg. A smooth custard with a corny-sweetness, lifted
by a hit of smoky toasted caraway. Crispy melting foie gras. Kernels of crunchy
corn and a scattering of chives. It’s a deceptively simple dish, but one with a
rare sense of balance.
Burke’s
second dish is a complete contrast: Crispy barbecued squab is served on a
layered torte of cornbread, foie gras and the shredded leg. On the side is a
coffee-barbecue sauce and an onion-pistachio marmalade (p292). A much more
aggressive dish but again one which pulls together French luxury and American flavours
(cornbread, barbecue). It is not a foie gras dish per se, rather a modern
American dish which uses foie gras.
Of course
with that many dishes not all of them are perfect. There are a few rather ropey
Tex-Mex-With-Foie dishes which don’t quite work for me. And occasionally
hilarious examples of culinary-overreach – most notably Susur Lee’s condiment
inferno of “Almond-Crusted Croquette of Foie Gras with Truffled Scallop Mousse,
Carrot-Ginger Marmalade, Tomato-Fennel Seed Confit and Crab Bisque” (bear in
mind this is the chef who
produced a
two-part concertina-folding biography-cum-cookbook; p156).
Read this book if you care about your food
To sum up, this
isn’t just the best book every written about foie gras. It is one of the best examples of an ingredient-led cookbook full stop.
Here are
three reasons why:
First Ginor provides new and insightful
content. There is a wealth of content here that you will not find anywhere else. His experience as a practitioner means
he can explain where the ingredient comes from, not just how it is prepared. But
on top of the practical experience his exhaustive history of foie gras is a
work of genuine scholarship.
This is
particularly important in the context of the ongoing “Foie Gras Wars”. As I
said at the beginning the biggest
challenge for foie gras producers isn’t having the right answers, it is
addressing public ignorance and indifference. Ginor’s passion and knowledge
help balance the scales.
Second he has marshaled a treasury of
fantastic recipes. He has not only convinced the greatest chefs in the
world to contribute, but he has made sure they have brought their best to the
party. This man should herd cats for a living, not ducks.
Finally there’s the subject matter itself. It’s
hard to get excited about a cookbook about
duck,
or even say
trout,
no matter how well written they may be. However foie gras is an ingredient of unique luxury and deliciousness. As
Sydney Smith once said, “my idea of heaven is eating pate de foie gras to the
sound of trumpets.”
But foie
gras is more than just an ingredient. The arguments raised in the “Foie Gras Wars”
touch on fundamental debates about animal rights and how industrialisation affects
what we eat.
That is why even fifteen years after it was published, this book remains
as essential as ever. If you care about the food you eat, then you should read
this book.
The dish: Turron is traditionally a rather moreish
French nougat. So what’s it doing at Club Gascon, London’s premier foie-gras eatery?
Infiltrated with duck liver of course! This is effectively a traditional foie
gras terrine, but instead of macerating in port the foie gras is marinated in
Baileys and sugar. Then, instead of being studded with truffles, it’s studded
with chunk of turron and walnut. To
finish it’s dusted with cocoa and served as a dessert with a passion fruit
coulis.
