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Foie En Matelotte

A French dish of sliced calf liver fried in butter and served with a parsley, shallot, chive, caper, and red wine sauce.

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. Dust the calf's liver slices with flour.

  2. Fry the liver in butter, turning often to brown evenly.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a separate saucepan, combine parsley, shallots, chives, capers, red wine, salt, pepper, and the clove. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  2. Add the liver to the sauce and warm it through.

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; flour dusting and quick frying brown its surface while the centre stays tender.
Butter
Fat for frying that carries heat and browns the flour-dusted liver evenly.
Red wine
Liquid base of the sauce that adds acidity and depth as it reduces.
Shallots
Aromatic base that adds mild sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Turning the liver while frying. Turning often helps the flour-dusted surface brown evenly without over-cooking one side. Liver overcooks quickly and turns firm and grainy, so frequent turning and a short fry keep it tender.

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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