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Foie En Matelotte

A French dish of sliced calf liver cooked 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 liver slices.

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

Make the sauce and finish

  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
Forms the main body of the dish, browning on the outside while staying tender inside.
Flour
Coats the slices so they brown more evenly and the surface stays dry for frying.
Butter
Frying fat that carries heat to the slices and adds browning and rich flavour.
Red wine
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds acidity and depth of flavour.
Shallots
Add a mild sweet onion flavour to the sauce as they soften in the wine.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the liver.

The step that matters

Frying the liver. Liver turns dry and tough when overcooked, so the slices should brown quickly over moderate heat and be turned often. Keeping them only lightly cooked preserves tenderness, and the later warming in the sauce should be brief for the same reason.

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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