Do you think it's all right to eat foie gras? That would be an easy question if foie gras were not one of the most delectable foods on Earth. If they passed a law banning broccoli, nobody would utter a peep, except for farmers whose livelihood depends on broccoli. Plus a few peeps from people whose inexplicable yearning for broccoli cannot be satisfied by brussels sprouts.
Foie means "liver"; gras means "fat." It's French. Foie gras is the fattened liver of a force-fed duck or goose. These days 80 percent of the world's foie gras comes from ducks. Their livers expand by eight to ten times during the final month of feeding. Animal-rights advocates, notably PETA and Farm Sanctuary, argue that force-feeding ducks is cruel and causes unacceptable suffering. The practice is illegal in Argentina, two-thirds of Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel (until recently a large producer of foie gras), Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, most of which never produced foie gras in the first place. I've heard that Israeli farmers are thinking of moving their operations to the West Bank; most of their current workers now are Palestinians.
Foie gras is the new fur. Except that you can't eat fur. Foie gras is an incomparably delicious food, and there's no substitute, no such thing as faux gras. What does it taste like? Most writers use the word buttery, but if that were all, you could save lots of money and grief by eating butter. I'd like to take a stab at it, but I'd first have to eat lots more foie gras, and I can't do that until I decide whether it's ethically right. Maybe now is the time to decide. We can't put it off forever.
I had my first taste long ago, when I was 20 and on a trip to Europe with two old friends. We had saved up for a three-Michelin-star meal in Paris, at the restaurant Laserre. (In those days you could hold the bill to $15 if you were careful ordering wine.) My first course was a generous round of foie gras baked into a buttery brioche pastry encircled by a very light and savory version of sauce Périgueux — meat juices reduced with Madeira and flavored with finely minced black truffles. I ate more and more slowly so that it would never disappear. It taught me that there were gastronomic worlds I had never even imagined.
A whole, raw foie gras is naturally pink-beige and shiny and weighs about a pound and a half. It can be eaten hot — in crisp, dark-brown sautéed slices with creamy insides, the most popular form in restaurants these days; or braised until evenly tender throughout, then dramatically served whole at the table; or poached in its own fat or turned into a luxurious sausage, or pureed into a soup with chestnuts, or wrapped into dumplings or turnovers, or confected into an eggy custard, which is among my favorites. Then it is best accompanied by something acidic and fruity. When foie gras is served cold, it is often in a terrine — mildly flavored with cognac or liqueur and pinches of spice and salt, or not flavored at all, then pressed into a loaf pan and baked until the insides are barely hot (unless you follow USDA warnings), and finally cooled and allowed to develop its flavor for a day or two. (You can see a hundred ways of cooking foie gras in an excellent book, Foie Gras: A Passion, by Michael Ginor with Mitchell Davis and others.) People who don't know anything much about foie gras promiscuously call it pāté. Pāté de foie gras is something distinct, a mixture of ground foie gras and pork or veal or duck, baked en terrine and cooled. In France, pāté de foie gras must contain at least 50 percent foie gras, but it doesn't compare to pure, unalloyed foie gras, the genuine article.
