I'd love to be able to document my entire Christmas "Julbord" preparations this year. However, I'm quickly realizing that I just won't have the chance. Instead, I hope to at least document several of the dishes I'm making.
First off, "Leverpastej". I suppose that this is a just liver pate. Perhaps anyone recognizing the dish can chime in with a proper English name for it.
The ingredients:
About one pound of veal liver (pork works well, too), 4 sheets of gelatin, an onion, some carrot slices and bay leaves for decoration, 3 eggs, a few ounces each of fatty ground pork (I ground some pork shoulder) and leaf lard, 3/4 cup cream, 10 fillets of Swedish-style anchovies, spices (see below), 3 tbls port, one cup of consomme (beef/veal) and a tablespoon of Japanese soy sauce.
The spices:
1/2 tsp ground cloves, 1/4 tsp ground ginger, 1/2 tsp ground white peppar, 2 tsps salt, 1 tsp sugar.
Start by grinding the liver, the meat, the lard, the anchovies and the onions several times.
Add the eggs, the cream and the spices to the meats and mix well.
Pour the batter into buttered baking containers. Anything from a large (2 quart) ceramic dish to these small aluminium dishes work fine.
Most types of leverpastej can be frozen at this point. In fact, it's better to freeze them before baking so that one can thaw and bake a new batch whenever needed. However, I wanted to cover this batch with aspic and wasn't really certain how well that would freeze.
Bake in a waterbath at 350 degrees for 50 minutes until set and slightly browned:
For the aspic, soften the gelatin sheets in cold water before adding them to a little of the warmed consomme:
Add the rest of the consomme, the port and the soy sauce to the mixture and let it cool and thicken slightly before pouring over the baked and decorated pastej:
Let the aspic-coverd pastej cool and set:
This season's first bite of homemade leverpastej (on hardbread with bread-and-butter-style pickles):
This type of preparation tones down the flavor of liver slightly which is why I'd suggested it in
another threadas a suggestion for what to do with liver when one isn't really too wild about its flavor. There's enough flavor left, however, for liver lovers, too!
Last edited by
Bridgestone on December 18th, 2007, 3:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.