Chicken Liver Pâté | Guest Recipes | Nigella's Recipes (2024)

Mum was — and still is — a serial entertainer. She always did things well, with proper structure. Nibbles and olives with drinks, a fish starter, a meat course, cheese — in the French way, before dessert — and a choice of three puddings, which always seemed to include grape brulée and a chocolate roulade, referred to in our house as “elephant’s turd”.

Summer lunches in the garden were populated with good things from the barbecue — grilled prawns, sausages, steaks and lamb chops — with the starters laid out on the table. There would be whole smoked mackerel with sweet mustard sauce, smoked salmon, homemade taramasalata, salami and prosciutto, and Mum’s chicken liver pâté, served in its terrine with a knife plunged into it. It was a lovely, old-fashioned pâté, with plenty of garlic and a texture that could be squashed onto toast.

Dad would grill bread on the barbecue to go with it. In the 1960s, he had worked in the computer business, but at one of our summer lunches, he announced that he thought he could make better sausages than the ones he had just cooked. He found a butcher in Yorkshire who taught him how, then opened a sausage shop in Hove. That grew into a deli and wine shop, on the back of which he opened a restaurant in Brighton, called LeGrandgousier. It was unashamedly Gallic and the chicken liver pâté appeared on the menu every day for all of its 17 years.

I had thought when I was younger that I would be a barrister. But as I watched the restaurant grow, my thoughts of law turned to cooking. And so it was that, years later, when I opened my own restaurant, Racine, the chicken liver pâté made the same daily appearance.

As featured in

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  These Delicious Things

• 1 kilogram trimmed chicken liver
• 500 grams Toulouse sausage meat (broken up)
• 5 tablespoons panko breadcrumbs
• 2 cloves garlic (crushed)
• 1 tablespoon herbs de provence
• 7 - 8 generous turns of a peppermill
• ½ tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon green peppercorns
• 125 millilitres port
• 125 millilitres white wine
• 5 - 6 rashers green streaky bacon

1. Preheat the oven to 150C/130C Fan/Gas 2.
2. Finely chop or coarsely mince the chicken livers, then add to a bowl with all the other ingredients, except the streaky bacon, and mix together until thoroughly combined.
3. Press the mixture into a terrine (about 1.5 litre), and press the streaky bacon rashers onto the top. Cover with tin foil.
4. Place the terrine in a deep roasting tin and pour boiling water around the outside until it comes about halfway up the side of the terrine. Place in the oven and cook for about 45 minutes-1 hour; the core temperature should be 67C. (Take care not to get a false probe reading from too close to the bottom of the terrine.)
5. Remove from the oven and the bain marie and leave to stand for 30 minutes. Cut a piece of wood or plastic to fit the top, wrap in parchment paper, then lay on top of the terrine. Weigh it down with full tins of tomatoes and place in the fridge until cold.
6. Serve with good bread and cornichons.