Pâté de Pâques berrichon translates as 'Berry Easter Paté' and is a speciality of the area just to the east of us known as the Berry. It is sausage meat and hard boiled eggs wrapped in pastry and appears in all the local boulangeries and butchers for the two weeks surrounding Easter. It is tasty and popular and last year I thought I would tackle it myself for the first time. It turns out to be quite easy to make.
Ingredients
A quantity of flaky pastry
200 g sausage meat
3 hard boiled eggs
Some sprigs of parsley, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Freshly ground pepper (a blend of different peppercorns is nice)
Salt
Freshly ground nutmeg
A beaten egg to glaze
Method
- Heat the oven to 250°C.
- Mix the meat with the parsley, garlic, pepper, salt and nutmeg to taste.
- Roll the pastry into a rectangle 35 cm x 20 cm.
- Form the meat into a sausage shape about 30 cm long and place slightly off center along the length of the pastry.
- Cut the eggs in half and place along the top of the sausage meat.
- Brush the long edge of the pastry nearest to the meat with egg, fold over the pastry and enclose the filling, pressing, pinching or folding to make sure you have a good seal all around.
- Transfer to a silicone lined backing tray.
- Brush the top of the pastry with egg and cut a couple of small air vents in the top.
- Put in the oven, turn the temperature down to 200°C and bake for 30 minutes.
- Feeds 6-8 warm or cold.
In case you are wondering, I doubled the quantities and made two at once.
I had homemade flaky pastry dough in the freezer, but of course, ready rolled from the supermarket is an option too.
Traditionally the sausage meat would be a 50/50 mixture of pork and veal, easily
available here in the Touraine, but you could substitute 100% pork if
veal mince isn't a thing where you live.
I steamed the eggs (which came from the much pampered hens belonging to some friends) rather than boiled them. It makes them easier to peel.
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2 comments:
I recognise the writing on those eggs.... we are conserving ours... poor Blanche is not well... she's had a touch of sourcrop, which hopefully, I have caught in time. She is eating very little that needs "cropwork" but pasta, her own selection of what she finds veg and critter-wise... they are all going down...
and, more importantly, her comb is still a good red colour.
Indeed you do recognise those eggs. Good to hear Blanche is hanging in there.
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