Sandwich Pâté Lorrain

Honest disclaimer first: the pâté lorrain is normally eaten on its own, hand-held, the pastry both wrapper and bread, and only travels into a baguette when a Baccarat charcutier has a long bake and the day-old slices are reformatted for the counter trade. The sandwich is a Lorraine workaround rather than a Lorraine staple. A slab of yesterday's pâté, around two centimetres thick and the length of half a baguette, is laid down a split loaf with a stripe of mustard or a cornichon and almost nothing else added. The pastry travels with the meat. The bread is the courier.

The structural problem is that the filling already brings its own crust. Pâté lorrain is a square of puff pastry sealed around pork shoulder and veal cut into small pieces, marinated twelve hours in a Lorraine white wine such as Gris de Toul along with sliced onion, parsley, salt and black pepper, then baked at around 200 degrees until the pastry sets golden and the meat firms inside. Out of the oven it is a small rectangular pie. Cooled and sliced, it gives clean cross-sections of marinated meat held inside a butter-laminated shell. Slid into a baguette, it becomes a sandwich where the eater's teeth pass through, in order, the loaf crust, the pastry crust, the meat, the pastry crust again, and the loaf crust again. Five layers in a single bite.

Three of those layers are starch, so the failure mode of the build is wetness. A pâté slice cut while still warm weeps fat through the pastry into the baguette and the loaf goes soggy by the second bite. One sliced too thin loses the meat-to-pastry ratio and reads as a bread-on-bread bite. A mustard streak applied too thickly fights both the wine marinade in the meat and the laminated butter in the pastry. The right move is a cool pâté cut the morning of service, the pastry intact, a mustard line no thicker than a credit card, and a baguette with a tight crumb that resists fat migration.

The bite is dense and dry and quietly winy. The first thing the eater meets is the double crunch of the loaf and the pastry, the second a yielding cool layer of marinated meat with the wine note hanging behind the pork fat, the third the second pastry crust, the fourth the loaf again. The diced meat keeps its individual identity on the tongue rather than reading as a smooth terrine; small cubes of pork shoulder sit beside smaller cubes of veal, the herbs visible as green flecks, the marinade as a faint sourness that lifts the pork. The pastry is mostly past its first-day shatter and reads soft and butter-rich at the bite, with a brittle outer scale where the bake browned hardest.

This is Baccarat town's reading more than greater Lorraine's. At a Baccarat patisserie the daily slate writes pâté lorrain at the top of the savouries, with en sandwich in smaller chalk beneath; the cook will assemble one to order from a length of baguette and a leftover wedge from the morning bake. At the Mirabelle market in Nancy a pâté lorrain stand sells the pies whole rather than slicing them into bread; an eater who asks for one dans le pain there is recognised as someone from the Saint-Dié or Baccarat side. The pie travels the wine country well: a slice in a baguette at a Bar-le-Duc cave with a glass of Côtes de Toul lays the marinade against the wine it was marinated with.

Variants split between the source pâté and the bread around it. A coarser meat cut gives a slice with visible chunks of pork shoulder; a finer grind reads closer to a smooth terrine in pastry. Some bakers lean harder on the white wine for a brighter bite; others lean on pepper or on bay. A small minority slip a thin layer of jelly between meat and pastry, which the cooled slice carries as a glossy line down the cross-section. The closely related Belgian cousin, the pâté gaumais just over the border in Gaume, swaps Lorraine grey wine for a smokier sweet-and-sour marinade. The sandwich's nearest French sibling is the Sandwich au Pâté, a smooth spread on bare bread, which the pastry-clad Baccarat slice differs from by bringing its own crust along.

A fourteenth-century pasty and a twenty-first-century brotherhood

The earliest dated record of the dish belongs to the Viandier, the late-fourteenth-century French cookbook compiled under the name of Guillaume Tirel called Taillevent, which contains a recipe titled petits pastés de Lorais, small Lorraine pies. The Viandier itself dates the recipe to the manuscript's late-medieval compilation, with the fullest version appearing in the 1392 manuscript edition. That recipe is the ancestor of the modern pâté lorrain, the same idea of marinated chopped meat baked inside a pastry shell.

Baccarat is where the dish stabilised in its modern form. The Meurthe-et-Moselle town, on the Meurthe river south of Lunéville, built the pie into its civic identity through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the local pastry-maker tradition codified the rectangular puff-pastry slab and the white-wine marinade as the village standard. Stanislas Leszczyński, the last Duke of Lorraine and the father-in-law of Louis XV, is reported by local oral tradition to have favoured the dish at his Lunéville court in the mid-eighteenth century, though the Stanislas attribution rests on tradition rather than documentary record.

Modern Baccarat institutionalised the dish in 2019. The Confrérie de l'Authentique Pâté Lorrain de Baccarat was founded by the town's mayor Christian Gex and the festival committee that year, and was formally inducted at the fiftieth annual fête du pâté lorrain on 7 and 8 September 2019 by two older Lorraine brotherhoods, the Confrérie des Gaubregueux Gousteurs de Tête de Veau of Rambervillers and the Confrérie de la Quiche Lorraine of Dombasle-sur-Meurthe. The Baccarat brotherhood's induction by Christian Gex on 7 September 2019 stands as the most recent dated marker the dish carries.