Brother Christmas, Pâté de Campagne
Traditions and the Obsessed. It's Christmas, 2024! Recipe Included!
I’m slowly recovering from my knee joint replacement surgery, so I apologize for the dearth of fresh writing here on False Choices. We hope you are all doing well and have accepted with cheerfulness the winter season upon us. If you are new here, please consider subscribing:
Tradition
I’m not against traditions, per se. However I’m also not obsessed with them. One or two is enough for me. Dad would always trade a couple of haircuts for a tree every Christmas from two hardy fellows who drove down from Northern Michigan every year to sell trees in a parking lot near the barber shop. We wanted a big tree, because a big tree was more something, more festive maybe, or more real, than a small tree. The old man always teased us mercilessly about it, “Maybe a little tree would be a good idea this year.” It broke our hearts to hear him say it and we gave the old man a hard time until he relented, as he did every year, eventually showing up with a tree that often left a mark on the ceiling of the front room.
A little tree seemed pitiful and it did break my heart a little to hear Dad tease us about it, but for Jimmy, my older brother by 20 months, well he was ready to dig a deep hole and dive into it if the tree wasn’t big enough. And he’d have done the same not just for the tree, but for hundreds of traditions large, small and minute that each Christmas season required. He kept tabs on them with an accountant’s eye. Each cookie and its quantity, each bulb on the tree, the lights on the front porch, the size of the turkey and and the presence or, God forbid, the absence of each side dish, the color of the gravy, the amount of snow on the lawn, and on and on. When Mom added a new cookie to the already vast menu of culinary delights, she calculated to take one off until Jimmy heard of this heresy and begged to reinstate the poor nixed sweet wafer until she finally threw in with him. This happened several times until Mom had to start baking the day after Thanksgiving and didn’t finish until Christmas Eve.
One year my older sister Karen hosted Christmas dinner for the family at her house and teased Jimmy that we were having Cornish Hens. The poor boy slunk around for weeks on end with his ‘this life is not worth living’ face on. Mom asked, as she often did, “What’s the matter, Jimmy?”
“Nothing.” His go to answer to highlight the inner pain he felt at, in this instance, the absence of turkey. When we arrived at Karen’s house after a wild ride across town in a blizzard, Jimmy brightened up considerably when he saw the turkey parade to the dining table with all the traditional side dishes. Mom however was not amused when she learned of Karen’s little ruse about Cornish Hens.
“Why do you have to tease him, you know how he gets.” Mom, also a traditionalist, worried more about Jimmy and his fixations on tradition than she should have. But they were kindred spirits like that.
The following day, after the storm settled, I put on several layers of clothes and, as Dad had asked at breakfast, before he left for work, got to work shoveling the snow, all ten inches of it. First the driveway from the backyard to the front sidewalk, then then the sidewalk itself, then the driveway from the sidewalk to the street. There was a lot of snow to throw out of the way. I fully expected to have some help but Jimmy never showed up. He was at the front picture window for a while but then disappeared. I hoped that he’d gone to get dressed for outside work but no luck, I finished the job by myself.
When I came back into the house through the back door, Mom was at the top of the landing with hands on hips and a scowl.
“You know how much your brother liked to look at the front lawn with all the beautiful snow and you had to throw shovels full on top of it and make a mess,” she said. And when I got to the top of the stairs the old goat herd gave me a clap on my ice cold ear for my trouble. Jimmy, still in his pajamas, was visibly delighted at this turn of events.
“Why do you care so much about the snow on the lawn, anyway?” I asked.
“I like it when it looks just like a postcard,” was his smug answer.
“Jeez,” was all I could muster back. The record player, for the previous two weeks and for the next two weeks, played all of Jimmy’s favorite Christmas songs, and currently featured a nasally girl belting out “I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus,” for the umpteenth time. In need of some small revenge, I went to change the album but Jimmy and then Mom intervened vehemently and physically bore me away from the stereo system. It was no use. Christmas belonged to Brother Jimmy.
Later when Jimmy and I returned home for Christmas during a college break, Dad’s enthusiasm for the great holiday had waned considerably. So there were no lights on the house and the tree was medium sized and artificial, purchased on sale at ACO Hardware the previous year in the great post Christmas sales ‘event’. Jimmy was appalled and not shy about voicing his displeasure, and after she tried and failed to explain even Mom had to put her foot down: “Look, your father is tired, couldn’t you just take it easy about the tree?” she pleaded. “And you know you could help out too and put up the lights.”
No sooner had Mom mentioned the outside lights than Jimmy sidled up to me, his forefinger in my ribs: “Hey, you haven’t done anything for Christmas, why don’t you put up the lights?”
“Why, what have you done for Christmas, brother?”
“I got the fake tree out of the garage and helped Dad stand it up.” The trump card played, I had no retort. I found the lights in a cardboard box in the basement and grabbed a step ladder, a hammer and some nails from Dad’s workshop.
Outside I decided my best bet was to dress up the picture window, I didn’t feel like trying to hang lights all across the front eave of the house. The neighbor across the street had the unusual custom of playing all the worst Christmas music over an outside speaker, so my task was aided by Elvis’s Blue Christmas and of course Jingle Bell Rock. I think their whole repertoire was just one album of the greatest worst hits. Jimmy, on his way to meet old school friends, his spirit buoyed by the festive clanging from across the street, said “Don’t mess it up,” as he closed the car door and backed out.
I wrestled with some ideas about the lights and finally came to an idea I was sure would annoy brother Christmas. I screwed a new socket into the front porch light that was able to handle a bulb and an extension cord. The cord ran along the wall to the picture window and with some effort I was able to affix the lights to portray one of the great symbols and traditions of Western culture, sure to perturb a man who found value in Elvis’s Christmas jingles:
As soon as dusk settled I clicked on the outdoor lights and couldn’t have been happier with the outcome; a beautiful, multi-colored fish appeared on our picture window. Soon Dad came home from work and Mom set the table for dinner. Just as we sat down in burst Jimmy fresh from an afternoon with the haha boys from high school.
“Why in the hell is there a fish on the front window?” he asked, staring at me.
It’s been hard to equal the joy and satisfaction I felt that very moment, over these many years. Finally some small part of Christmas was mine, selfish yes, but mine. “Well, there’s a new tradition for you, Jim!” I rubbed it in every way I could through dinner until the old boy was thoroughly abused and finally left mumbling his displeasure.
I suppose I shouldn’t be proud of my little ruse, but all these years later it still makes me smile. Brother Christmas always gave me a hard time about my lack of dedication to Christmas traditions, even deriding my Italian in-laws about serving ravioli as a side dish, and all I ever had to do was mention the electric fish on the front window to back him down to the pathetic mumbling of yesteryear. I do miss the back and forth with old Dr. James Foydel, MD., 1958 - 2014, rest in peace brother Christmas.
Tradition, too
Every year it falls upon me like the Acme anvil to make pâté, the dense loaf of meat and seasoning that singularly defines French cooking. Why singularly? This one culinary exploit explains not only the penchant of the French kitchen to use every inch of the animal, in one preparation or another, and to add just enough complexity to a preparation to enhance, but never obscure, the experience of eating it; but it also displays in its wide range of executions the entire social system of the country.
At the high end of the range is Foie Gras; from a duck or a goose which, after great expense and effort, the animal fattened with an exorbitant amount of corn, produces a giant liver of pure, delicious fat. The most serious, and richest, connoisseur prefers a pâté of 100% grade A foie gras, or if the stock market has treated him especially well, 95% grade A and 5% fresh black truffle. Either way it’s one month’s salary for the average French worker.
As we move down the social hierarchy the truffle exits immediately and the amount and grade of the foie gras decreases, until it there is no foie gras to be found. At the bottom end, there is the everyday pâté, just a step above cat food, an amalgamation of pork liver, heart, kidneys and backfat put through a rough sledding of grinders until it gives up all vestiges of its former glory and becomes a puree. With the addition of pink salt to give it a better hue when it returns from the oven, and some spices, this is the pâté of everyday lunches and light suppers for working people.
Somewhere in the middle there is pâté de campagne, or country pâté. This is in my view the best example of pâté. Not so expensive that you have to approach it on bended knee, nor so rich that you fall into a coma after consuming it, it’s a dish that visibly raises the excitement of those with whom you share it. Of course Christmas is a time when every Frenchman seeks to raise their pâté game to the next level. For us, as non French but admirers of their culinary culture, this means pâté de campagne.
The following is the recipe that I wrote down this year, just so I could share it with you dear reader - enjoy and let me know if you have any questions:
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To make it we buy a pork butt and rough grind the entire cut including the delicious fat cap, along with a good portion of chicken or turkey livers. We also melt a large amount of minced shallots in butter with thyme and black pepper and kosher salt. Finally, we add a few large handfuls of pistachios, it is Christmas after all, and some spices. Baked slowly in a terrine set inside a water bath and then left to ‘mature’ for several days, it’s a joy to share as a meal with some crusty bread from our friends at the Common Good bakery in Traverse, our own sharp pickles and grainy mustard. At least this is the way it is supposed to be eaten.
My wife Mary has other ideas, of course. She eats her pâté with her own tart cherry jam, eschewing the more traditional accoutrements. It makes me sad to see this annual display of iconoclastic individuality, but I’ve learned to admire her pluck in selecting cherry jam as a go with. Apparently a tart jam, like plum or cherry, is common among the English, which only lowers the habit in my view, but as long as she loves me for the making I’ll keep my mouth shut and my eyes averted.
Merry Christmas to you all!
AND, if you have a fun story about a close relative’s idiosyncratic Christmas habit, please share in the comments below!
A tart jam or jelly goes very well indeed with a terrine or pate.
Given that it is the smallest of culinary steps away from cranberry jelly with turkey (also an acquired taste!) surely it's worth at least trying?!
I hope your recovery goes well.