Pavé de Foie Gras Lucullus

Pavé de Foie Gras Lucullus (a square foie-gras timbale) teaches the discipline of cold layering. The one true thing is simple: every layer must become firm enough to carry the next without shifting. Rush that setting and the truffle wanders, the collops float, and the pavé loses the clean lines that make it itself.

The original assumed the cold-kitchen equivalent of a saucier on staff: a garde-manger with finished aspic beside a stockpot never off the fire, brigade quantities of foie gras, a square timbale, and someone willing to carve a block of ice into a flagstone. At home, clear chicken stock reinforced with measured gelatin makes the honest aspic, a one-quart square mold replaces the timbale, and a chilled platter nested over crushed ice does the work of that carved block. The sculpted ice was service scaffolding and can go. The measured layers, the foie-gras purée loosened with melted jelly, and the patient setting between them are the dish and must stay.

This is rich, cold, and splendidly direct: pale foie gras held inside amber-clear jelly, black truffle marking every slice. One cook, one stove, one evening, with the refrigerator doing the brigade's waiting. Before you begin, clear a perfectly level shelf and accept the pace of the dish. Do not add the next layer until the last can bear it without moving.