This Foie Gras is Fantastic

The very first dish listed in the Treasury is a pan-seared foie gras recipe

Of course, it’s foie. Of course. In a book full of the most exasperating recipe writing, a book from a time when people smoked at the table, a book that takes 32 pages to find a vegetable dish, of course, the first dish listed is the most problematic ingredient outside of veal: foie gras.

Everything about foie is a pain in the ass. It’s expensive, hard to find, and presents decent people with a divisive ethical landmine. If you eat ducks’ livers, are you abusing ducks?

Where to buy duck liver

If you landed on this page after googling foie gras pronunciation or foie gras near me, then you’re already familiar with the first great problem: how do you say foie gras? Is it foy grass? Foy grah? Foy graz? It is none of those. The phrase is French so proper pronunciation requires you to smoke a cigarette and wear a beret while exhibiting an overt disdain for capitalism and movies that make sense. Only then can you roll your eyes and slowly, as if speaking to a sentient fence post, say: eet ees pronownzt fwah grah.

But wait, what is foie gras?

Duck liver. Technically, also goose liver, but try and buy goose liver foie online and an angry mime will reach out of your phone to punch you in the nose.

The literal foie gras translation is “fatty liver” and there are two kinds: Gras d’Canard is duck liver; d’Oie is goose. Most chefs will tell you d’oie is superior, and if your palette is finely developed enough to distinguish between goose and duck then you’re probably not reading this article. For those of use more likely to work back of the house, we know the difference is so exquisitely subtle as to be nominal. Also, d’oie is ducking expensive. You can get it at Marky’s but be prepared to sell your own liver because their foie gras price is $124 for slightly less than a pound.

Ethical foie gras is the Schroedinger’s cat of culinary ingredients.

The philosophical hurdle here is cruelty. To make this food, a farmer force-feeds a duck. The duck gets fat, but its liver gets very, very fatty, and engorged and grows to 600 times its normal size.

Force-feeding seems particularly cruel. A farmer jams a feeding tube down a duck’s throat then pumps in an entire day’s worth of cornmeal. This sounds horrible. But in an article for Serious Eats, writer J. Kenji López-Alt, took a fully transparent tour of LaBelle Farms, one of the prominent Hudson Valley duck farms, to see how foie is forged. The takeaway was weird and encouraging.

Instead of cruel cages, mistreated birds, and general horror, López-Alt saw healthy birds exhibiting no stress, and accepting their gavage (forced feeding) with just a brief shake of their head before waddling off to live their ducking life. Anthony Bourdain (God rest his soul) had no problem with it.

How to Cook Duck Liver

There are plenty of recipes for d’canard. There’s foie gras terrine. Foie gras torchon. Foie gras pate. But the best duck liver recipe may be the simplest. Just slide that nugget of delicious goodness across a blazing hot griddle and serve it with blackberry jam, a slice of toasted brioche, and a glass of Chave Hermitage 2004.

In the Treasury, the dish is just written by hand on the menu for La Pyramide, presumably by Chef Fernand Point. A couple of years ago, [my attorney] and I dined at the French Laundry. Hanging on the wall in Chef Keller’s tiny office was a handwritten menu from La Pyramide that looked exactly like the one in the Treasury. Gave me goosebumps. Then they served us their recipe of foie and I swooned.

There’s no recipe for the first dish. It just says foie gras brioche. That it’s at the top of the menu suggests it’s an appetizer which means it was probably either a tiny brioche bun filled with liver d’ canard pate or sautéd foie on a brioche crouton. Or it could be cooked anyway I want. It’s my foie to gras.