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Foie En Matelotte

A French dish of sliced calf liver cooked in butter and served in a sauce of parsley, shallots, chives, capers, and red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Foie En Matelotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Cut the calf's liver into thick slices.

  2. Shake flour over the slices.

  3. Fry the slices in butter, turning often to brown them.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a stewpan, combine chopped parsley, shallots, chives, capers, red wine, salt, pepper, and a clove.

  2. Let the mixture boil, then add the liver to warm in the sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Shallot + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Shallot + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Chive + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Calf's liver
Main protein; its thick slices give the dish its substance and tender interior.
Flour
Dusted on the slices, it helps them brown and forms a light coating that holds the surface.
Butter
Fat for frying that carries browning flavor and gives the slices a rich, golden surface.
Red wine
Liquid base of the sauce, adding acidity and depth as it heats with the aromatics.
Shallots
Mild aromatic that softens in the sauce, adding gentle sweetness and savory depth.

The step that matters

Adding the liver to the boiling sauce. Liver is delicate and toughens and dries when overcooked. It only needs to warm through in the sauce, so it should be added after the sauce has boiled and then kept gently heated, not left to cook long.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, flour, butter, shallot, chive, capers, red wine):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Garlicfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, flour, butter, shallot, chive, capers, red wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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