Chicken Liver Pâté

Mum was — and still is — a serial entertainer. She always did things well, with proper structure. Nibbles and olives with drinks, a fish starter, a meat course, cheese — in the French way, before dessert — and a choice of three puddings, which always seemed to include grape brulée and a chocolate roulade, referred to in our house as “elephant’s turd”.

Summer lunches in the garden were populated with good things from the barbecue — grilled prawns, sausages, steaks and lamb chops — with the starters laid out on the table. There would be whole smoked mackerel with sweet mustard sauce, smoked salmon, homemade taramasalata, salami and prosciutto, and Mum’s chicken liver pâté, served in its terrine with a knife plunged into it. It was a lovely, old-fashioned pâté, with plenty of garlic and a texture that could be squashed onto toast.

Dad would grill bread on the barbecue to go with it. In the 1960s, he had worked in the computer business, but at one of our summer lunches, he announced that he thought he could make better sausages than the ones he had just cooked. He found a butcher in Yorkshire who taught him how, then opened a sausage shop in Hove. That grew into a deli and wine shop, on the back of which he opened a restaurant in Brighton, called Le Grandgousier. It was unashamedly Gallic and the chicken liver pâté appeared on the menu every day for all of its 17 years.

I had thought when I was younger that I would be a barrister. But as I watched the restaurant grow, my thoughts of law turned to cooking. And so it was that, years later, when I opened my own restaurant, Racine, the chicken liver pâté made the same daily appearance.