When did a crusty old classic get so trendy?
In the raucous basement bar below a hip Mayfair restaurant, revellers wedge themselves in, clamouring for soft cheese and Beaujolais. Waiters scurry and squeeze, and a barrel-chested man doles out oysters as quick as he can shuck. In one corner, grand chefs regale hangers-on, while a woman opposite distributes pig-shaped balloons. In a glassfronted side room, judges cast their expert eyes over the evening’s quarry: slices of pâté en croûte, made variously by the city’s leading cooks. For it is the third Thursday of November, the occasion of Maison François’s annual “Croûte Off”.
Pâté en croûte — which translates as “pâté in crust” — is characterised by its loaf-shaped pastry shell containing cured meats, preserved fruit and nuts, meat pâté and jelly. It is not dissimilar to a classic pork pie but, being ancient and French, much more complex, grand and boozy. And though it has been around in various forms since the 13th century, it is having a moment in the sun.
Croûte has been popping up on menus at trendy wine bars and Michelin-starred brasseries alike. “I think there’s a new-found expression of love for the classics,” says chef Richard Corrigan. He entered the competition but didn’t place, and believes that his superior filling — known as the “farce” — was undone by his disregard for decoration. “They might look great,” he says, of thicker-sided croûtes, that go heavy on adornment but lighter on pâté, “but if you need an axe to cut it up... And lumps of layered cold meat? Eurgh, not for me!”
Courtesy of Maison François
Layered cold meat, however, is the name of the game. Self-taught charcutier George Jephson — co-founder of Cadet wine bar, who competed for the UK in the Pâté-Croûte World Championships in Lyon in December — uses pork (shoulder, belly, jowl and leg), chicken and duck (legs confited and skin roasted), and various boozes, fruits and nuts, all encased within a crenellated pâte brisée pastry. It’s a four-day process. “Lots can go wrong,” he says (sadly, he lost out in the championships to France’s Frédéric Le Guen-Geffroy). “If you get it right one time, you may not get it right next time.”
Corrigan suggests that croûte’s recent ascent is perhaps down to the cyclical popularity of French food in general. “I’m sure it will fly by like a passing comet, and we’ll see it again i
