To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Travel April 13, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/food/feature/2000/04/13/foiegras Your goose is cooked Goose livers the size of breadbaskets: A step-by-step look at expert foie gras preparation. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Marjorie Leet Ford "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. 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. His recipe included a big handful of special white grapes from the Pyrenees, some peeled and some not ("as the skeen of the grape add flavor to the wine, so eet ees wiss zee sauce"), some baby capers ("nonpareil"), two handfuls of chopped, fresh porcini mushrooms, a shallot or two, minced fine, and a big splash of sweet sauterne. "First I cotay reesay." What? My brain went through a snarl of effort, but luckily Tante Marie's proprietor, Mary Risley, saved the day. Without quite making it obvious that she didn't understand "cotay reesay," she asked a few questions. When she figured out what he meant, she didn't translate but said, "Did everybody learn that? When you go to apply for a job, you say we learned to cauterize the meat." Sizzle! Steam! What a reaction when he eased the foie gras into the hot skillet. "You touch it the meeneemum of time. Turn only once." The assistant rushed to hand him some tongs. He looked at those forceps with horror. "The enemy of French cooking." "Why do you say that?" Mary asked from the back of the room. "You know why? Because cooking is feeling. Your hands are your best tools. When you need others, choose them to be an extension of your own hands. When you poke with a fork, you feel, through the instrument, how the skin resists. And then, the degree of firmness or softness inside comes through the fork to your fingers." Since the point of cauterizing was to seal the juices into the meat, he couldn't prick the delicate membrane with a fork. The next-best thing, for feeling, was a spatula. He slid it under for one quick turn. "The meeneemum of handling," he reminded. Tossing in the shallots, grapes, capers and mushrooms, he let them brown a moment in the fat of foie gras. When he splashed sauterne into the skillet to release a hissing cloud, he used a spatula to get at the "jzhoot." "The what?" asked Mary, from the back. "The jzhoot. You know. The brown bits at the bottom of the pan. What is the English word for that?" She thought awhile. "We call that 'the brown bits at the bottom of the pan.'" Slipping the cast-iron skillet into the oven, he said, "No need to baste. Usually basting is the essential action that will make the meat taste good -- but foie gras has so much fat it needs no basting." As the foie gras cooked slowly in the oven, Manrique took questions: How often does he baste meats or chickens? Every five minutes. What nationality are the best chefs? "Not the French! They know everything. Very difficult. Myself, I find the Latin Americans make the best cooks. I think it's because they grow up with someone at home in the house, and always the smell of things cooking. They have deep love for food." The professional cookery students had more urgent questions. "What do you ask a job applicant on an interview?" "I usually ask, 'What did you have for dinner last night?'" That amazed everyone, even Mary. "Why that?" "Because I find that what is most important to find out is a cook's feelings for food. You see, the most vital quality is passion. Because in cuisine there are many tensions. It is hot in the kitchen. If you don't have passion, you burn out." When the skillet came out of the oven, he tipped the handle to show off the juicy brown wonder of it all. "I like to present it just like this, in the skillet." The assistant had a stack of small plates and a sharp knife. She dispensed slices the size of gold coins plus a spoonful of sauce, with a couple of grapes and capers and a chunk or two of porcini on each plate. And oh, those brown bits. Specks of buttery crust from the foie gras membrane blended with the sweetness of the sauterne, with the tang of those grapes cooked in it. The juicy fresh porcini tasted even richer next to the zip of the baby capers. The foie gras itself was so creamy it gave the teeth only a hint of resistance. Each of us got only two little pieces. Each of us could have eaten the whole skilletful. The woman who'd whispered about cholesterol smacked her lips, and Manrique gave her a wicked smile. We were all like those geese, who would die for the pleasure of eating. salon.com | April 13, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Marjorie Leet Ford has produced National Public Radio programs that won the Peabody Award. Her novel, "Diary of an American Au Pair," will be published next spring by St. Martin's Press in New York and Chatto & Windus in London.