Pièce de Résistance

This dish is the epitome of the phrase “pièce de résistance,” not as in the definition of being the highlight of a meal but as a literal translation of the dish that resists!

I am not an accomplished gourmet cook…I would define myself as an intermediate level cook. I’m willing to try complicated recipes but don’t always understand what I’m supposed to do if the instructions aren’t detailed. It’s probably why I love Thomas Kellar cookbooks because his instructions are detailed on a micro level. For everyday cooking, I don’t need details but for complex recipes, I need all the help I can get!

Paté de Canard en Croute (Boned Stuffed Duck Baked in Pastry Crust) á la Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol II, was the dish I chose to make for our cookbook dinner. To be honest, I made it just to see if I could do it. I know how to debone a chicken so I figured I could debone a duck. I had the butcher grind the veal and pork for me but if I ever make this recipe again, I’d do it myself on my mother’s ancient hand meat grinder. Do you remember the device that clamps on to your kitchen table, made out of pot metal, that cranks by hand and magically pushes out ground meat?

I separated this recipe, that takes up 8 pages of her cookbook, into two days.

Day 1:
Mixed the ground veal and pork with the port, cognac, herbs and seasonings and refrigerated it while I worked on the duck. This was probably the easiest part of the whole dish. It will take more time if grind the meat myself but still, pretty easy peasy.
I then tackled deboning the duck. You can see the bones on the left and skin and meat on the right side. Julia left the last wing joint and the leg joint connected to the skin but I decided to remove those bones so what you see is a totally boneless duck. It’s time consuming but if you have a very sharp boning knife, it’s pretty easy. Kind of gross image but that's how it is.

I spent about 40 minutes removing all the pin feathers that are left on the skins of supposedly dressed ducks. I used a tweezer to do this.

I then removed the meat as she instructs and you can see from the photo how much duck meat is removed at the top of the photo and the now bare skin of the duck.

Once done, I rolled up the skin and wrapped it tightly with plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator.

I cubed the duck meat into pretty small pieces and added them to the veal/pork mixture and returned the bowl into the refrigerator.

The part took me about 3 hours to complete from start to finish.

Day 2:
I made the pastry dough. Her method of mixing the flour with the butter and Crisco and eggs and water is not how I would do it in the future but decided to follow her instructions. She used the traditional French method of using your fingers to initially mix the dry ingredients with the butter/Crisco together. Then after adding the egg/water mixture she has you take 2 tablespoons of the mixture and blend them, two tablespoons at a time and then knead the dough until you have a smooth ball. And then refrigerate for two hours.
There is a flaw in her recipe because she calls for 2 eggs in the list of ingredients but nowhere in her instructions does she tell me what to do with the eggs. I looked online to see how other people dealt with this flaw and most people didn’t even mention this error. One woman said she combined the eggs and water and said that it worked. She also said that the dough doesn’t turn out well without the eggs. You’d think Knopf ‘s editors would have discovered this mistake in later editions and corrected it….

While the dough was refrigerated I brought out the duck skin and while Julie didn’t say to do this, I sewed up the hole left by the butchers. It’s the entrance to the cavity where the neck, giblets, liver are placed inside the duck. I couldn’t figure how to stuff the duck with that gaping tear in the skin. I also decided the sew up the skin by the wings and legs since there were holes at the ends of the limbs. I used thicker button thread to do the sewing and a curved needle to make it easier on me.

I then shaped the veal/pork/duck meat into a loaf on top of the duck skin and wrapped the skin around the loaf. Then, more sewing to totally encase the loaf in duck skin. And then the whole loaf is trussed with white string. Note how puffy the duck looks in between the trussing strings? It will magically disappear as the duck cooks.

I then browned the duck in my largest skillet and you can see that the skin is still puffed out around the trussing strings.

Now the hardest part for me. Roll out the pastry dough into two ovals with which to encase the duck. I got it done after a fashion and so far my duck looks pretty much like Julia’s step-by-step drawings, as you can see. I brushed on the egg/water glaze and popped it into the oven for 2 hours, cool it and chill it.
The interesting part about this process, is other than making sure the loaf reaches the temperature of 180º, I have no idea what has gone on inside the crust. I did use a basting bulb and removed as much of the fat that seeped out of the crust onto the pan.

This day I spent 4 hours before I put the duck in the refrigerator to cool.

I cut open the crust as Julia instructs and lifted off the cover and the duck skin had shrunk to fit tightly over the pate…like magic! I removed all the trussing strings and the stitching. I tasted the crust because after all, it had butter, eggs in it but it was very hard and tough…in a word, inedible*. But the duck wrapped paté was very savory and other than the fact that I would grind the meat myself in order to get it to finer ground, I was very happy with the results. I served the slices with cornichons, a dab of mustard and slices of baguette.

Is all this effort worth it in order to serve the Pièce de Résistance? Yes! Will I do it again? Maybe…and then again, maybe not.

To see the dish in all of it's glory and a photograph taken by a professional photographer, you'll have to see it in it's role in our Mastering the Art of French Cooking Cookbook Dinner. I'll write that post as soon as I get the photos from Willie, who is enrolled in a photo class and is improving his skills as a food photographer! We are so fortunate to have Willie in our club because I for sure would not take the effort he takes to make our dinners look as delicious as they taste.

* NOTE: I tried the crust the next day and it was softer and actually tasted pretty good so I think we tried to eat it before it had thoroughly chilled last night. I ran out of time to chill it as long as it should have so it's something to remember if you ever try this dish.