Pork and spinach terrine

In the late 1960s pate became trendy on these shores. Prior to then, the delicatessen might have stocked the occasional small tin of pate imported from France, but that was about it.

I suspect increasing commercial chicken production was responsible, in a way. Chicken livers were readily available and so, for out smart dinner parties, we would rustle up a batch of brandied chicken liver pate and serve it with crackers or, if we were truly trendy, with melba toast.

I can remember a lot of mashing, pounding and sieving went into making a nice smooth pate. We all had our little brown pottery bowls to contain the masterpiece. And our wooden pate spreaders.

Having developed an interest in chicken liver pate, I decided to branch out into something a little more rustic and my local butcher obliged with the occasional pork liver so I could experiment. I remember grinding up the liver, lean pork, fatty pork and other goodies and producing some mighty fine terrines for picnic occasions.

At the height of all this I lashed out and bought myself a very classy enamelled cast iron lidded terrine from the Le Creuset line. It was in my single days and money was no object when it came to buying good kitchenware. It was wise spending, as it turns out. My Le Creuset pieces are still serving me faithfully 30 years later. (http://www.lecreuset.com).

All the best books mentioned the need to weight down one's terrine or pate after cooking to ensure a more dense consistency. I was a young newspaper reporter at the time and it was still in the days of hot metal typesetting. The chaps in the composing room had great bars of metal that hung down in their Linotype machines and were melted down to meet production needs. This was also a good source of raw material when they wanted to make sinkers for fishing.

They were a friendly bunch so when I explained my need for a decent weight for my terrine, nothing was too much trouble and they cast me tailor-made weight.

The company's carpenter was also a very obliging chap and he cut and sanded me a piece of wood to hold the meat down during cooking.

That fairly solid weight took quite an effort to carry home, but my colleagues' handiwork did brilliantly.

These days pates and terrine are readily bought. But I had a fit of nostalgia the other day and decided to make a pork terrine for a summer dinner. It's a fairly basic one as I like to keep things reasonably simple in the summer when working in a hot kitchen can be a trial.

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