Meunière is a classic French sauce especially popular with flat fish (often sole). Saint-Pierre meunière is a great example of how the most basic ingredients – in this case flour, butter, a little parsley and lemon juice – can produce the most delicious result. Something cooked à la meunière, literally ‘in the style of the miller’s wife’, is dredged in flour before being fried – because the miller’s wife always had plenty of flour on hand. The flour adds a crisp coating and a lovely golden colour as well as helping prevent the fish or meat sticking to the pan. While John dory (Saint-Pierre in French) is ideal for this recipe, its close cousin mirror dory can be used instead. The trick to making burnt butter (beurre noir in French) is to get it really dark without burning it, so be brave and push it just past the point where you think it’s done, then quickly stop the cooking with a squeeze of lemon juice. If you don’t cook it quite long enough, you’ll still end up with lovely nutty brown butter (beurre noisette). You’ll need to cook the butter in a stainless steel frying pan (rather than a dark non-stick one) so you can see the butter change colour. For a variation that adds a touch more acid to balance the richness, add a few rinsed and dried capers to the butter when cooking it. Frogs legs, scallops and brains are also sometime prepared à la meunière.
Serves 2
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