pâté

Pâtes (pasta) and pâté both mean paste in French. A pâté can be any meat, seafood or vegetable minced up, usually with spices—and often put up in jars or baked in a round pan.

If a pâté is cooked in an oval or rectangular earthenware dish, it’s called a terrine after the dish.

pâté en croute: pork, veal, spices etc are minced together and baked with gelatine in pastry in a loaf pan, then served in cold slices.

pâté de merle: ‘Four and twenty black birds baked in a pie’. How can anyone eat such charming songsters? But they do on Corsica, where they make blackbird pâté, flavoured with myrtle. It was a big favourite of Alice B. Toklas.