Cooking, Recipes, Wine............ and Ethical Foie Gras - At Last!

What happens when a powercut leaves ten million homes in Europe without electricity? If you're lucky, your Belgian neighbour turns up the next day with a box of thawing, unprepared foie gras that need immediate attention. And whatever your ethical objections*, you end up making foie gras. This is how it's done:

Firstly you need good livers - fresh, quite firm, with consistent texture and colour. If a liver smells even slightly suspect, reject it. The livers should have very few veins and you should prise out the larger remaining ones carefully with a small paring knife. You're going to need the special preserving pots designed for the purpose. These pots are in glass and have a two part lid - they are reusable except for the inner part of the lid. Clean and sterilise the pots in boiling water, then arrange a saucepan to hold all of your pots and fill with water just below the level of the threads on the preserving jars. You will want to place a teatowel or two between the pots to prevent damage and stop them rattling.

And now the tricky bit........ actually it's easy really, it just needs careful measurement. You really need to be accurate here so if you don't have scales that measure down to the nearest half gramme (or quarter gramme if you're making small quantities), go and visit a friend who does. Actually that's a bad idea - visiting friends with accurate scales usually takes half the day so just invite Dim around with the promise of some foie-gras.

For each Kg of liver, measure out: 14g salt 3g ground black pepper (And just in case you didn't know, 7 grammes = One Janet (Street Porter), so you can measure that very precisely using a 2p piece. And a 1p piece weighs in at exactly one Henry, and if you really need it (and if can still find one hanging around in your purse) a 1/2p gives you precisely one Louis. So now you know - thankyou very much to all at the Royal Mint, we now know what you do while you're watching all that cash being printed.)

Rub the salt and pepper evenly over the liver. Now you're ready to pop it into the jar but before you do, add: Half a teaspoon of Armagnac or Cognac and then gently squeeze the livers so that they're a nice snug fit into the preserving jar. Place the inner lid on top of the jar (it just sits there) and then screw the outer lid so that it's not fully tight. The idea is that the outer lid acts as a spring, holding the inner lid very gently in place. When you heat the jars in the water, the inner lid allows air out but not back in. And that's what you do next - arrange the jars in the water and boil gently. 1hr 15mins, or 1hr 30 if your preserving pots hold more than 500g. Now leave in the water to gently cool.

Once the pots have completely cooled down, remove the outer lids and wipe the pots and lids dry, check that the inner lids are now firmly sealed onto the jar and then replace the outer lid, screwing down fully this time. Once the fat has cooled, it will solidify and you should keep your foie gras in a cool dark place. It will keep for around a year or more.

Slice thinly (don't spread it) and serve on thin but dense little toasts, the best ones are slightly sweet. Serve with a chilled sweet wine - whites such as Sauternes, Muscat de Rivesaltes, white Banyuls, Montbazillac. Or if you really want you can serve with reds such as Banyuls or Maury but I don't think it does quite the same thing to really bring out the texture of the foie gras. Please add some wine suggestions in the comments.

*Ethical objections: To make foie gras, the goose or duck has to be really stuffed. There are probably three ways of doing this. 1. Force feeding, 2. Genetically modifying the animal so that it's hungry ALL the time, 3. using schoolgirl psychology to give the bird an eating disorder. I believe that only the first of these methods is in common use although it can't be long until genetic modification becomes a possibility and opens up another can of moral worms. Just how cruel or morally objectionable force feeding might be is questionable though. Compared to veganism, it's pretty cruel. But compared to battery production of eggs, hens, cows, pigs or anything that could eventually become packaged up for the supermarket shelf or, worse still, fried by the colonel, it's just not that bad. Real foie gras, produced in france has more to do with animal husbandry than mass production. The animals are all free-range with little to complain about other than the weather in the Gers. A couple of times a day, they have a lubricated funnel shoved carefully down their beaks and their stomach is filled with grain. And they really don't seem to mind. There is probably some hideous production chain in eastern Europe that does this but no matter what you're buying that's what you get if you don't buy the real thing - and no, it doesn't taste as good. Even in France they import eastern European foie gras because there's not enough of the real thing from the Gers to go around. Cruel? That's for your inner carnivore to decide. By eating genuine foie gras, you are supporting real farmers following centuries of animal rearing tradition. American indians believe that if you kill, you must use every bit of the animal in order for you not to have wasted its life. The chinese used to beat animals with sticks before killing them as this tenderises the meat. They knew it was cruel but believed that since all experience is comparitive, it was essential to administer cruelty in order to better feel the extremes of kindness.