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By Marjorie Leet Ford

April 13, 2000 |  "Coookeeng ees about more than receeps and technique."

These were the opening words of chef Laurent Manrique, speaking at the Tante Marie Cooking School in San Francisco's North Beach. "Coookeeng ees about emotion."

When he announced, "Today I prepare a receep of foie gras" -- voilà! -- two emotions rose up in the classroom. Sighs of pleasure came from the students preparing to be professional chefs, in their starched white chef's coats and black-and-white checkered pants. From a couple of the lay students (Pacific Heights types in fabulous sweaters) came voluble shudders. They apparently hadn't checked the menu. To many, foie gras is cruelty to animals. But professional chefs use their bare hands to drain rabbits' blood for soup. They study the workings of a cow's four stomachs with a view toward biting into tripe. Without a blink of guilt, they drop living, life-loving lobsters to their death in boiling cauldrons. Real cooks have hard hearts.

Squeeze these Moldy Grapes over Your Fatty Liver

To the two women who weren't so sure they could handle foie gras, the chef beamed a smile that seemed to say, "I respect your right to your opinion." All of us, including the two skeptics, laughed.

"Force-feeding is really a wrong word," Manrique, executive chef at the city's acclaimed Campton Place restaurant, said gently. "The geese see the food we offer them and run after us. They say, 'Give me more!'" He didn't go into detail on how the keepers insert wire cage-like gadgets into the goose's throat, to enable it to consume an unnatural quantity of figs, prunes and milk-soaked bread. The important thing to Manrique is that the goose has a heavenly life.

"People think of foie gras as French. But in fact it is Egyptian. A man called Apicius, the chef of Julius Caesar, invented it. He noticed the geese were dying because they were eating too much. He opened the goose to find huge -- here Manrique used his hands to show enormous -- livers.

"There was no refrigeration, of course. So the Egyptians made confit, cooking the liver slowly in fat from duck and keeping it in tight containers all winter," he explained, adding a little more pantomime. "The best foie gras they preserve in confit. The not-so-good? Heat and eat." Over the centuries, a system of grading has developed: A, B and C. C is the smallest. The biggest is the most luxurious.

The French found that the best goose for foie gras came from crossing the Barbary ("Bair-bair-eeee") male with the Peking female. Different countries favor different "races" of geese, and different ways of removing the liver. Some slit open the goose immediately after the kill to nab the liver while it's still hot, and plunge it into ice. That way it will resist temperature changes and won't melt. As we were to find out, the foie gras is so fat it might as well be pure butter.

Manrique showed how pliable a goose liver is by fitting a whole one into a tureen as neatly as you would fit bread dough into a loaf pan. He slid the tureen into the oven for slow cooking. "You don't need seasonings. It tastes good just as it comes from the goose." You pat on some salt and pepper, but either for baking or pan frying, you definitely do not want to use butter: "The fois gras is fat enough." When he overheard a whisper from the classroom -- the word "cholesterol" was just audible -- he chuckled. "In all food, it is fat that brings out the flavor. If you are cooking low-fat, you are cooking in an hospital."

Before moving on to show us his favorite recipe, he said, "The old chefs choked the foie gras in béchamel and béarnaise. But don't do it! And whatever you do, no cream! Simplicity is the best. A great natural ingredient should be enjoyed for itself."

The foie gras he'd chosen for his favorite recipe must have been Grade A, because it was huge. It's almost impossible to believe that a creature only the size of a goose could produce such a gigantic liver. Think of a chicken liver. It doesn't fill a serving spoon. That goose's liver was hefty enough to fill a medium-size cast-iron skillet, a pink mound of plumpness. Manrique smiled affectionately at the pan. "I like a cast-iron skillet." The way he said it conjured love in me for all cast-iron skillets.

Next page | The cholesterol lady licked her lips