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Calf's Liver, Meuniere
From a pound of very fresh calf's liver, cut out twelve even slices. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Lightly turn in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted fat in a frying pan, add the liver, one slice beside another, and fry for five minutes on each side. Remove, arrange them on a hot dish. Remove the fat from the pan, add one ounce butter, toss well until the butter is a light brown; add a tablespoon good vinegar and half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, lightly toss the whole, then pour over the liver and serve.
A plain beurre-meunière treatment that works well, with one timing figure that needs cutting hard and one seasoning figure that needs cutting a little.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper for a pound of liver. That is aggressive by modern taste; a quarter to half teaspoon is closer to most present-day palates.
- Cut the cooking timeTwelve slices from a pound means pieces of an ounce or so each, thin rather than thick. Five minutes per side turns them grey and grainy. One to two minutes a side over fairly high heat, until just pink at the centre, is what the cut wants.
- The hinge is the butterEverything depends on taking the browned butter to hazelnut colour and no further, then adding the vinegar with the pan off the heat. Butter goes from nutty to burnt in seconds, and burnt butter cannot be rescued.
- "Melted fat"In a kitchen of this period that would most likely have meant lard, beef drippings or clarified butter. Clarified butter or a neutral oil both work; whole butter will scorch at the heat you need for a fast sear.
- Flour lightly, and late"Lightly turn in flour" means a bare dusting shaken off before the pan, done immediately before frying. Floured liver left to stand goes sticky and the coating slides off.
- Don't crowd the panTwelve slices "one beside another" will not fit in one modern skillet without steaming. Work in two batches and wipe the pan between them so no scorched flour ends up in the sauce.
- The vinegarA mild white wine or cider vinegar is right; harsh distilled vinegar overwhelms the butter. Lemon juice is the more usual finish today and is an equally traditional meunière.
- YieldA pound of liver serves three, or four as part of a larger meal. Serve at once on hot plates, as the sauce breaks and dulls as it cools.
Meunière means "miller's wife" and points to the flour: anything cooked à la meunière is dusted, fried in butter, and finished with the browned butter of the pan, parsley and an acid. The style is most associated with fish, above all sole meunière, but it transferred readily to quick-cooking offal, and calf's liver is the classic meat version. The choice of vinegar rather than the more familiar lemon is a common older variant and suits liver's iron-heavy richness. The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book's habit of gathering French, Italian, German and American dishes under national or regional headings reflects the era's confidence that a well-run household kitchen should be able to turn out a restaurant dish of this kind.