fourth slice

This is an essay about practice.

On some level, I know how to make pâté-croûte, having made half a dozen of them before embarking on this particular quixotism. At a certain level of abstraction, the process is pretty simple. To illustrate, the prep list I wrote for prototype 1:

The proportions for the crust live in my head (I’ve included a recipe at the end of this issue), and at this point, those for the farce do too. Add some other bits of tacit knowledge, like how the filling should be salted a day before, and how to line a mold with pastry, you basically know how to make a pâté-croûte. This is how a kitchen vocabulary grows – I’ve made sausage and I’ve made pie, pâté-croûte is basically a sausage in a pie, let’s go!

Of course, prototype 1 wasn’t really a prototype, but an experiment – I made it without a vision in mind, to see what would happen. The result was instructive, but not the process.