Presentation isn’t exactly my strong suit at the dinner table, so I wanted to learn how to serve terrine in a classy way—that’s also easy to do. I figured I’d share what I learned about plating terrine with you in case slaving away in the kitchen isn’t up your alley either.

To serve your terrine beautifully and easily, you can:

• Serve it as a stand-alone appetizer.
• Create a charcuterie plate on a cutting board or platter.
• Bring the terrine dish to the table with a pâté knife and some bread so people can dig in, family style.
• Pair it with a nice wine or non-alcoholic beverage.
• Come full circle by serving a dessert terrine at the end of the meal.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these options for making a terrine feast for the eyes that doesn’t leave you too exhausted to enjoy it.

Defining terrine

By terrine, I mean the forcemeat dish cooked in a terrine, also known as country-style pâté. It could be with or without a crust. A terrine with a crust is generally called pâté en croûte or terrine en croûte.

As chef Antoine Westermann told The Food Republic for their article on the difference between pate and terrine, “A terrine is a terrine because of the pan it is cooked in. Some pâtés are terrines — it depends on the dish the pâté was cooked in. And not all terrines are pâtés. You can also make terrines from many things, even vegetables.”

How to slice a terrine nicely

Most of these serving options mean slicing the terrine first. If you’re like me, you haven’t lived with a truly sharp knife in decades, but you don’t let that stop you from cutting food. While a sharp knife is best for cutting a terrine or terrine en croûte, a sharp-enough knife will probably do.

To get a good slice, you can dip or rinse the knife in hot water and wipe it clean after each slice.

JGraeff, a commenter on Kitchen Knife Forums (The Sharpest Place On Earth) says, “Make sure you do one continual slice and wipe the blade clean before each cut. I work with pate en croûte and terrines almost everyday, so I hope this helps.”

Or, if you’ve decided to go all in on terrine, you can buy a stainless-steel terrine cutter from INTERGASTRO, an online shop for gastronomy products. As I write this, the cost of the terrine cutter was $694.40 in unspecified currency.

Serving terrine as a stand-alone appetizer

Depending on the complexity of your recipe, a terrine can be a labour-intensive cooking event. Especially a terrine en croute. Even if you use a recipe suitable for beginners (like me), you’ll probably still want to show off your creation, and serving it up as an appetizer course is a great way to showcase your forcemeat accomplishment. For maximum showmanship, get everyone’s attention and then wipe your brow dramatically, sigh and say, “Oh this, it was nothing.”

What you’ll need to serve terrine as a stand-alone appetizer:

• Appetizer-sized plates (For example, small salad plates are 7-7.5 inches in diameter and large salad plates are 8-8.5 inches in diameter.)
• Slices of the terrine, half an inch thick.
• Decorative elements, such as a sauce or a small amount of a light salad.
• Sliced bread to complement the terrine. You can put the bread on the plate or have one or more bread baskets around the table.

Options for the decorative element on the appetizer plate

As for the decorative elements on the plate, there’s really no limit to how delicate and fancy you could get. (If you doubt me, just do an image search for terrine appetizers.) But this article is about serving terrine without fussing over perfectly placed dollops of sauce, puréed vegetables and/or sprigs of watercress.

Instead, why not put together a simple salad that only takes a few minutes to make and dress?

Here are a couple of salad options that are easy to make and would look good beside a terrine:

• Sliced Radish and Apple Salad – This recipe is from McKel Hill on the Edible Nashville site.
• Inside-Out Veggie Dip – This recipe is from the Taste of Home team. It’s a veggie dip on sliced cucumbers and hollowed out cherry tomatoes. I’d just do the cucumbers to avoid the work of scooping pulp out of tiny tomatoes.
• Easy Caprese salad skewers with balsamic glaze – This recipe is from the Zesty Olive website. It looks great and only takes 10 minutes to make, no knife required!

If the dressings from your chosen salad recipe clash with your terrine flavours, please adjust as necessary, of course.

Serving terrine as part of a charcuterie board for a group

A charcuterie board or platter is a big and fancy snack plate.

You can create a charcuterie board with these ingredients:

• Sliced meat such as prosciutto, salami, pepperoni, etc.
• Cubed or diced ham.
• Forcemeat and potted meats such as terrine, pâté, rillettes, etc.
• Hard and soft cheeses.
• Pickled vegetables such as gherkins, olives, onions, etc.
• Sliced bread and/or crackers.
• Dried fruit.
• Dips and/or jam.

Fun fact: The French even serve an all pork charcuterie platter. I came across this other day … but darned if I can remember the name of it! If you think of it, please let me know so I can add it here.

Charcuterie board materials and cleaning methods

Charcuterie boards can be made of wood, marble, slate, glass or stone. It’s up to you to decide which material you like the best. You can also use your favourite serving platter for your charcuterie plate.

Before purchasing your charcuterie board, make sure it’s:

• Flat and stable – People will be cutting on the board and a wobbly board can throw things off kilter, especially if your charcuterie board includes hard cheeses that require firm pressure to slice.
• Made with a non-porous hard wood – Soft woods can absorb smells easily so avoid them. Instead go for teak, olive wood, American cherry, beech, hickory, maple, etc.

After each use, make sure your charcuterie board is:

• Cleaned properly – Meats and cheeses are greasy and porous boards can absorb strong flavours. Grant Chen, in his article, What is the Best Cheese Board for a Cheese Snob? says this about keeping clean (which equally applies to charcuterie boards), “After using, your cheese boards should be scrubbed with hot soap and water and then wiped immediately dry. Wood boards should be oiled and waxed and marble boards should be sealed each month. If your cheese board even begins to have a whiff of stink, bacteria has begun to take hold, which means you need to disinfect and sanitize your board.”

Charcuterie board serving size

As an appetizer, budget about two ounces of meat and one or two ounces of cheese per person. Depending on how many guests you have, you might need a couple of boards. In that case, you can also split the boards into a meat board and cheese board.

If you’re having a party where the charcuterie board is a snack rather than an appetizer, you’ll need to increase the portion sizes. You can also use lots of bread to make the spread go further. This will probably be popular so don’t be shy about the quantities. The worst that can happen—besides double-dipping—is that you’ll have leftovers at the end of the night.  

Serving terrine as part of a ploughman’s lunch

A ploughman’s lunch is basically a vegetarian charcuterie board for one person. Traditionally, the main ingredients were cheese, bread, apple, pickles, butter and beer. However, since the ploughman’s lunch has evolved to include meat, your terrine would be a welcome addition.

You can create a ploughman’s lunch with these ingredients:

• Cheese.
• Hearty bread.
• Butter.
• Apple slices.
• Slices of your amazing terrine and other meats.
• Pickled onions.
• Pickles.
• Pickled eggs.
• Scotch eggs (which are hard-boiled eggs surrounded by meat and lightly breaded).
• Jam and/or chutney.

You could have an ale too, since it’s part of the tradition, but it’s not mandatory, of course.

Ploughman’s lunch serving size

You’ll need a smaller board but bigger portions because four ounces of meat and cheese is hardly a meal. Add more meat and include a Scotch egg and/or pickled egg (or two) to get a decent amount of protein in your lunch; protein builds your skin, muscles and bones and, when combined with fat, keep you full longer.

And remember that a ploughman’s lunch is fun and great for reducing dishes. You eat it on the cutting board instead of dirtying a dinner plate and the only utensil you need is a knife to cut things up. (But feel free to use a fork, if you like.)

Serving terrine in its dish so guests can dig in, family style

Many terrines are made in a terrine container and removed for serving but not all of them. I’ve also seen terrines, pâtés and rillettes made and served in large oval dishes (this is the way it goes at my local butcher shop.) If you’ve got a big family, making bigger portions in bigger dishes saves time—and you won’t have to worry if you’ll be able to eat it all before it goes bad.

Instead of dirtying another dish, you can bring the terrine dish to the table with a pâté knife and some bread and let people help themselves. While this certainly works with family, if you have dinner guests, they’ll probably appreciate a family style approach because it’s fun. And if your terrine is delicious (as I’m sure it will be), the rallying call of your dinner party may be, “Pass the terrine!”

Have a basket of sliced bread and some butter on the table to go with the terrine. And, whatever else is for dinner, of course. And if you don’t feel like cooking, you can surround the terrine dish with the same ingredients used in the ploughman’s lunch. [If you have a supply of terrine and pickled eggs in the fridge, dinner can always be made in five minutes. Think of how great that is.]

 You don’t need a silver fork to eat good food.

Paul Prudhomme, American chef, who specialized in Creole and Cajun food

Serving vegetarian or vegan terrines

Unlike when I was vegetarian for 11 years, it’s now trendy to be a vegetarian, vegan or plant-based foodie. This means the likelihood of having someone who doesn’t eat meat and/or dairy products at your dinner party is higher than ever. And, they deserve something more interesting than a platter of fart-inducing broccoli florets, don’t they?

That’s where vegetarian or vegan terrines come in. They’re a multi-layered vegetable dish, sliced and served cold. You can serve vegetarian and vegan terrines with the same ingredients you’d include on a charcuterie platter or with a ploughman’s lunch—minus the meat. (And minus the dairy for vegans.)

If you have vegetarian or vegan dinner guests, please create a separate vegetarian or vegan platter instead of mixing the vegetarian terrine in with the meat ingredients. It’s just the nice thing to do.

However, if you’ve made a vegetarian or vegan terrine for the heck of it and none of your guests forego meat and/or all animal products, then it’s okay to include it on your meat-and-cheese charcuterie board.

And if you’re interested in vegetarian and vegan terrines, I link to a few (dairy-free) recipes in my article, Does Terrine Contain Dairy? Yes and No; It’s Up to You!

Wines to serve with terrine

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria.

David Auerbach

Despite the fun quote above, I’ve never been a fan of wine and I can hardly drink a beer without getting a headache, so you won’t find me pairing wine with terrine. But I know lots of people love wine, which is why I want to point you in the right direction when it comes to pairing your terrine with wine.

Susy Atkins, a wine correspondent for The Telegraph, says, “The drinks that work best here are ripe and rounded; that even goes for the cider, which should be off-dry, mellow and almost still.”  

Specifically, she suggests serving a dessert wine with a pork and chicken liver terrine and a pinot noir with a duck terrine.

Delipair indicates these wines go well with game terrine:

• A dry and oaked Chardonnay.
• A dry Sauvignon Blanc.
• Amarone (which is a dry red wine).

Fiona Beckett, on her Matching Food and Wine website, suggests Beaujolais is, “The best wine bar none with charcuterie, paté included. I wouldn’t go for the cheapest examples, but they don’t have to be a cru Beaujolais like a Morgon either.”

She has nine other suggestions that you can read in her article called, 10 Good Wine Pairings with Pâté.

And finally, Wine Enthusiast suggests pairing terrine de fois gras (or other especially rich terrines) with “rich, silky” wines such as Sauternes or Barsac. In her Wine Enthusiast article, Pairings: Pâté Today, Michele Anna Jordan advises us to “match the personality of the dish to the personality of the wine.”

If you’re unsure of the personality of your terrine (and that seems normal to me), just go with that mid-range Beaujolais, as Fiona Beckett suggested!  

Non-alcoholic beverages to serve with terrine

There’s a growing movement to cut down on booze—including Dry January—so it’s great to have non-alcoholic beverage options for you and your guests. I couldn’t find any advice about pairing terrines with non-alcoholic beverages so perhaps there are no rules.

But this post is about creating a fab spread with ease, so I want to give you ideas for easy non-alcoholic drinks and also let you know that there are many options for complex mocktails.

Simple non-alcoholic beverages you can serve with terrine:

• Sparkling water with lemon or lime.
• Flavoured and unsweetened sparkling water such as La Croix or Bubly.  
• Unsweetened iced tea (made with caffeinated or herbal tea).
• Espresso.
• Kombucha.

Full confession: I’m strongly against people drinking sugary drinks like juice and pop because drinking sugar is even worse than eating it. However, I know people enjoy these drinks so I suppose you could also add pop or juice to the list above. I won’t but you can.

And speaking of sugary drinks, there’s a whole slew of mocktails you could create. Like a zillion of them.

I won’t add them here, but I’ll list a few articles that can get you started on the mocktail lifestyle.

Four articles that include copious options for mocktail making:

• 10 Non-Alcoholic Drinks to Pair with Your Favorite Meals by Claire Waggoner on The Temper website. And if you’re in recovery, you might like this site as it “exists to show people in all of their power, and as agents of their own recovery.”
• 15 Non-Alcoholic Drinks to Have with a Meal by Emily Han on The Kitchn website. I like this list because they specifically say these drinks aren’t too sweet and they split them up into ones you make yourself and ones you can buy.
• Top 10 non-alcoholic drinks featured on the BBC Good Food website. I chose this list because it has interesting options like mulled apple juice, lassi, water with lemon or cucumber slices and an apple, elderflower and mint sparkle.
• 24 Non-Alcoholic Party Drinks Everyone Will Love from the Tablespoon website. These mocktails are beautiful but may be suited to overachievers only. You’ve got to rim the glasses on some of them! And not just with a bit of salt. The Party Time Hot Cocoa drink is rimmed with sprinkles and chocolate.

Closing dinner with a dessert terrine

I’m not big on making desserts (though I used to be big on eating them). But I love a dinner with a theme so idea of bookending dinner with terrines strikes me as fun. You could start with a terrine appetizer and end with a terrine dessert (though the true end to a dinner party is when you start looking longingly at the clock).

Again, I wanted to find a few recipes for you that would be fairly easy to make as part of your terrine extravaganza. It turns out the easy ones are frozen.

Four recipes for dessert terrines:

• Frozen Chocolate Terrine from the Epicurious website. While this recipe looks a little persnickety for me, I don’t think anyone with baking experience would find it daunting.
• Frozen Peanut Butter and Chocolate Terrine by the team at the Taste of Home website. Okay, this recipe is super easy: Crush some cookies, layer with other ingredients, freeze.
• Mascarpone raspberry trifle terrine from the Olive website. This dessert terrine sure does look pretty and even though it has seven steps, the website rates it as easy.
• Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Terrine by Bree Hester on her food blog, Baked Bree. This one contains booze (Creme De Menthe) but the green ice cream and chocolate chips might bring back pleasant childhood memories. And at the time I’m writing this, the recipe indicates this dessert has zero calories—either a typo or a miracle!

If you need dairy-free dessert terrines (which are harder to find than ones that include dairy), I’ve listed a few in my article, Does Terrine Contain Dairy? Yes and No; It’s Up to You!

Conclusion

Okay, so there you have it: a cornucopia of ideas for serving your terrine whether you’re by yourself, with your family or with dinner or lunch guests. Enjoy!