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Chicken livers with mushrooms and cranberries in port sauce.

Beef, veal, steak & offal

Chicken Livers in Mushroom Port Sauce

By Jacques Pépin

Jacques Pépin turns chicken livers into a full-flavoured supper with mushrooms, port and dried cranberries. A quick sauté gives the livers browned edges, while the sauce balances their richness with fruit, garlic and shallots. A little ketchup adds sweetness and tang, and fresh chives finish the plate. Spoon the livers and their mushroom sauce over plain boiled rice, letting the grains catch the juices without distracting from the dish’s sweet-savoury character.

Prep
Not stated
Cook
Not stated
Total
Not stated
Serves4
Jump to recipe ↓KQED ↗

Ingredients

Livers and sauce

Method

  1. Cut each liver in half, remove and discard the connecting sinews, and pat dry with kitchen paper.
  2. Heat the oil and butter in a 30 cm/12-inch skillet over high heat until hot and foaming. Add the livers in one layer and season with salt and pepper. Cook 1 minute, turn with tongs and cook another minute. Transfer to a plate.
  3. Add mushrooms, shallots, spring onions and garlic to the pan drippings and cook over high heat for about 3 minutes. Add cranberries, port and stock; bring to a boil and boil for about 1½ minutes. Stir in the ketchup. Return the livers and bring the sauce back to a boil.
  4. Serve on hot plates, sprinkled with chives.

Equipment

30cm /12-inch skillet; Tongs

Notes

  • Before frying: remove the sinews joining the liver halves and dry the pieces with kitchen paper.
  • Pan space: arrange the livers in one layer in the hot butter and oil. Lift them out while the mushrooms and sauce cook, returning them only at the final stage.
  • Doneness: Pépin’s stated style has browned outsides and pink centres. The original one-minute-per-side sauté and final return to a boil remain unchanged.
  • Serving: prepare the boiled rice and heat the plates before finishing the sauce. Add the chives as you serve.
  • Measures and timing: the mushrooms are given as two US cups, approximately six ounces; the retained weight comes from that source figure. No full preparation, cooking or elapsed total is supplied.

Photos

1 photo
Chicken livers with mushrooms and cranberries in port sauce.ServingChicken livers with port sauce and rice

Chicken Livers in Mushroom Port Sauce

Recipe photos

About this dish

French cooks have long served chicken livers hot as well as in pâtés and mousses. Escoffier’s 1903 Guide Culinaire includes sautéed chasseur and fine-herb preparations, alongside liver with rice and a mixed liver-and-kidney dish cooked with wine. These quick dishes give the ingredient a place at the centre of a meal.

In Heart & Soul in the Kitchen, Pépin makes the case for chicken livers as an inexpensive, versatile main course. His port sauce has an unexpected trio of sweet ingredients: the wine itself, dried cranberries and ketchup. Mushrooms and alliums keep that sweetness rooted in a savoury pan sauce.

The cooking is deliberately brief. The livers brown in hot butter and oil, then leave the skillet while the mushrooms cook in their drippings. They return only when the sauce is ready. Plain rice and hot plates complete Pépin’s way of serving it.

Recipe and cooking notes adapted from KQED.