Fattened Liver

“Daunting” is not an overstatement when the subject of study is foie gras. I recommend Silvano Serventi’s book La Grande histoire du foie gras (1993), if only for the photo on page 45 showing six ladies sitting around a pile of truffle baskets, each one holding 50 kilos of truffles.

I also recommend Michael Ginor’s book Foie Gras: A Passion (1999), especially for the history of eating foie gras, from Egypt to fourth century B.C Greece and Rome (where they seemed to have bathed in it), and right up to our time, with a particularly interesting stopover with the Ashkenazi Jews at the end of the first millennium. And read about Carême, and Jules Gouffé, and my heroes Urbain Dubois and Escoffier, but whatever you do with foie gras, cook it simply.