In a kitchen brigade, the pastry chef is responsible for all sweet preparations, both hot and cold, ice creams and even savoury pastries for the kitchen.
It is therefore up to the head of this section to prepare the doughs used by the garde-manger, the cook in charge of meat preparations for cooking, cold dishes, cold starters, galantines, meat stuffings and pies.
It is therefore appropriate that, in the section dedicated to hot and cold pastry preparations, we should also describe the moulds used for preparing and cooking pâtés en croûte.
Pâté is a "meatball" that has been elevated to the highest level of culinary preparation.
Originally, the term pâté simply referred to a mixture of meat or fish wrapped in pastry: short pastry, puff pastry or other types of pastry, and then baked in the oven.
It can be as rustic as paté de campagne, so popular in the French provinces, or as delicate and refined as foie gras paté. Wrapped in ham or pork fat or baked in a pastry crust, paté is a main course for breakfast and lunch, or it can be part of a... picnic!
Pâté is a good traveller: wrapped and sealed in its layer of fat, it accompanied crusaders and explorers to the New World. Archaeologists have even found traces of meat mixtures, the predecessors of paté, in the kitchens of the ancient Greeks.
Perhaps the secret of paté's popularity over the centuries lies in the simplicity of its recipe, which consists of well minced meat, mixed with fats, seasoned with spices, salted, cooked to perfection and then cooled. Almost any type of meat can be used, alone or in combination.
An oval casserole dish, preferably made of copper, is all that is needed to make a paté, but more elaborate recipes, such as paté en croûte, require special moulds.
The classic tart mould, still made from tin, consists of three parts held together by elastic steel clips and is almost identical to the moulds that appear in nineteenth-century cookery books. The three inner parts of the mould are buttered and lined with pastry, leaving two centimetres over the edge of the mould to form a kind of ridge on which the lid is later sealed.
Once the filling has been poured in, the opening is closed with another piece of pastry, sealed to the ridge, moistened with water or egg white, pinched between the thumb and forefinger and finally evenly crimped with the special pastry crimper, the same one used to decorate the edge of the cake.
The top is decorated with pastry cut-outs and glazed with egg yolk. It is very important to make a 'chimney hole' in the centre of the pastry lid to allow steam to escape during baking in the oven and to allow the paté to cool completely.
Once it has cooled, it is customary to pour a little warm gelatine or melted butter or lard through the chimney hole to seal any cavities that may form in the filling. If the pâté is to be eaten immediately, the meat, poultry or game jelly must be poured in, depending on the type of pâté. The moulds should not be opened until the butter or jelly has set completely.
As an extension of the name paté, this term also applies to compositions prepared and cooked in special rectangular terracotta or enamelled cast iron containers.
Eugenio Medagliani (Humanist Calderaio)