Marco Pierre White’s sautéed liver — a must-see video

In 1980s Britain, Marco Pierre White (MPW) was the original enfant terrible of young chefs.

He went on to win not only Michelin stars but also start the careers of the youngsters working in his kitchen at Harveys in Wandsworth Common, London.

Gordon Ramsay, Stephen Terry and Phil Howard all worked for MPW at the same time, more about which below.

However, more important is the bad rap that liver gets.

This is because most liver is cut into thin, shoe sole slices and is overcooked.

Whenever someone says to me, ‘Liver? Yuck!’, I tell them they’d love it if they ate it my way: thick with a somewhat crusty exterior and rare on the inside. A butcher will gladly cut liver to order.

A masterclass in cooking liver

Fortunately, Marco Pierre White likes it the same way and demonstrates how to cook liver properly in this video, which is around seven and a half minutes long. The liver recipe at the beginning only takes a couple of minutes to watch:

An Italian responding to the video says that this is (emphases mine below):

Fegato alla veneziana = Venetian liver. The mother of Marco grew up in Venice.

As is true of the most authentic Italian cuisine, this dish has three ingredients. Marco prepares sautéed liver, onions and adds a small amount of vinegar for the sauce.

The video begins with the sautéed onions on a plate with the vinegar added, making a sauce of sorts.

Now on to the liver:

1/ Marco salts the liver by hand from a great height, then grinds pepper on it the same way. This is because seasonings disperse better on food when applied from shoulder height.

2/ Marco dusts the thick slice of liver with flour, then shakes off the excess. He doesn’t say so, but you should season the flour with salt before dredging anything in it, even if you’ve already seasoned the main ingredient. Otherwise, what ever you cook in it will taste of just flour: terrible.

3/ He puts the liver in a preheated pan that has sizzling oil in it, just covering the bottom.

4/ When the liver has ‘caramelised nicely’ on the bottom, flip it over and cook until it is ‘nicely golden brown’. So, one side should be caramelised and the other golden brown.

5/ The finished product should be pink inside. Marco explains that this has to do with the temperature of the pan. If the pan is too hot, the flour on the outside of the liver will be scorched. If the pan is too cool, the liver goes soggy. Once you think it is cooked enough, lightly touch the top of the liver. If it springs back, it’s rare. The more the surface of the liver solidifies, the more well done it is, which is not what one wants.

If you don’t want to touch the liver, Marco says to watch for the blood to come to the top, at which point it is done.

6/ Remove the liver from the pan, let any excess fat drip off of it and put on top of the plated onions and vinegar sauce.

Because the video is old, the cut liver doesn’t look that pink. However, when Marco feeds one of his sous chefs a little bit from the top of a long knife, the sous chef says it’s great:

It’s the business.

Liver is an important protein:

Liver is actually one of the most nutrient dense foods you can eat and therefore one of the healthiest food choices you can make. If you get and buy local or fresh sources you can it eat it raw and it’s even better for you that way. We humans would eat the liver raw right after a kill while hunting. I prefer to process it and bring it home.

Done properly, liver should be pink in the middle:

… yes, the liver should be still pink when plated otherwise the texture will be too tough!

A viewer made Marco’s Venetian liver and enjoyed it:

I have just prepared and eaten MPW’s onion liver. Yummy.

These days, Marco is the face of Knorr’s seasoning cubes:

Check out his section on the Knorr website. Excellent cooking ideas for the home cook to try out. He even managed to improve on my own Spaghetti bolognaise recipe, and I didn’t think that was possible!

The video comes from a late 1980s show on Channel 4, which had just started broadcasting. Channel 4 has always been known for its innovation in programming.

YouTube has more episodes, but there aren’t many, because MPW stopped filming halfway through the series. Another commenter says:

They only managed to film 3 episodes before Marco told them to get the f…k out of his kitchen, apparently it was supposed to be a 6 episode deal with the newly launched Channel 4. Sorry about that.

The video is so nostalgic. There’s smoking indoors! We even see the little square in the upper right hand corner of the screen, signalling that a commercial break was coming up:

Ahhhh the box with the diagonal lines in the right hand corner of the screen that told you the adverts were coming up took me back.

After Marco gives the sous chef a taste of the liver, they discuss their mentor, Albert Roux:

Albert Roux mentored Marco plus many of his crew at La Gavroche in the 80’s.

Apparently Marco worked at a butchers shop and a couple other little enterprises Albert ran as well.

This was the dialogue:

Chef: Albert Roux is my mentor.

Marco: OUR MENTOR.

In the 1980s, Marco Pierre White was known for his pre-Raphaelite looks, especially his hair. He looked like an angel but ran his kitchen like a demon:

Marco is a frightening man in the kitchen. Honestly doesn’t even compare to how Gordon treats his staff, this guy was just plain scary.

Gordon Ramsay wrote about his time with Marco:

Oh, believe me, Marco yelled at everyone in that kitchen from the chefs to the waiters, read one of Gordon’s books and he’ll tell you no one was safe.

Today, somewhat grizzled, MPW owns several branded restaurant enterprises that are franchise operations.

Harveys

Harveys opened in 1987. It was a small restaurant in South London. MPW co-owned it with another restaurateur, Nigel Platts-Martin.

It attracted celebrities and, despite its size, was a bit of a status symbol. No doubt the French maître d’ and French waiters helped.

MPW hired young male sous chefs and commis who, somehow, managed to dance around each other in a demanding kitchen environment:

I can’t believe there are not more fights … Look how they are all crammed in there running around so close and for 12 hours a day.

In the video, he tells the interviewer what he wants from his staff:

Interviewer: “What it is it you want out of them?”

Marco: “I want loyalty, I want finesse out of the them.”

There was only ever one woman in MPW’s brigade, and she did not appear until the late 1980s or early 1990s:

Chef Gigi Mon Ami worked with Gordon Ramsay when he was Sous Chef at Marco Pierre White’s Michelin rated “Harvey’s” restaurant in Wandsworth Common, U.K. Gigi wrote about it in Moon On A Platter, but she also taught Culinary Fine Dining @ JobCorps- and said Gordon actually was very nice to her; kind of looked after her in Marco’s kitchen cuz he had hired her as a joke; she was the only girl in the kitchen, late 80’s. Ever since then, kind of a soft spot for Ramsay – that’s the way European kitchens were in the 80’s and into the 90’s before everything was PC.

Chef Gigi Mon Ami from San Francisco even wrote a book about it, Moon On A Platter. She travelled the world and was often the only woman in the kitchens in which she cooked.

The restaurant closed in 1993 with two Michelin stars awarded to MPW, who said that he wanted a third star and that, in order to win it, he would have to work in larger premises.

The young men, Marco included, did not cover their longish hair. All of them look like budding pop stars, including Gordon Ramsay:

Ramsay has looked exactly the same since 1987…except he doesn’t still have that Flock of Seagulls haircut.

One commenter on the video above wondered how Marco could have earned his Michelin stars with all those uncovered heads:

I mean the amount of hair the customers must have found in the food …

Marco had a penchant for giving his staff and customers a taste of his food. AA Gill, referred to below, was one of our great — and young — food critics at the time:

I love it when he feeds his cook the liver [and] onions with the knife… apparently this was something he loved to do. I remember reading AA Gill; he wrote that Marco hand fed something to the girl who was his guest at the time. Kinda cute, considering how much of a culinary behemoth he is. For me it says that he really, really does care about food and feeding people and creating gastronomic happiness at the highest level. Awesome.

Gordon Ramsay

Many of the comments on the video concern Gordon Ramsay who graces our television screens around the world, moreso than his mentor Marco.

Marco Pierre White is the only chef who ever made Gordon Ramsay cry. Unfortunately, this is not on video, but, allegedly, a spokesperson for Ramsay says that it’s true.

Commenters argued over who is the better chef.

Some say that Gordon merely copied Marco:

Ramsay copied so much from him, from his plates, recipes (scallops with curry powder, tagliatelles, etc) and embellishes so much. Marco is so much more authentic.

Several people pointed out that Gordon also copied Marco’s gestures but that Marco’s delivery of criticism was more constructive:

Notice, Marco says “come here” with a gesture only and then teaches the person something when they get there, whereas Gordon screams “come here” to the person, then insults them when they get there. Marco attacks the mistake, Gordon attacks the person. I know who’s the scarier of the two. And the better chef.

Someone else agreed:

At around 7:20 you can see Gordon blink his eyes like he is crying, there was another video at the end of which Marco says to Gordon, “You know, you cry every night”. In a Boiling Point episode, Gordon tells a young cook that he is nothing but a big baby cause Gordon caught him crying. Hell, when Gordon was his age he was crying his eyes out every night.

Another says that Marco is better:

Marco is the only chef in history to get 3 stars AND 5 spoons and forks in the Michelin Guide for his restaurant The Oak Room. That is total excellence. The great thing about it, is that he was doing a lot of the cooking when he achieved that honor. Gordon has 12 stars, most of which are not because of his cooking, but the cooking of others. Those stars belong to those chefs that work under his brand, not to him.

Anyone expecting the young Ramsay to speak will be disappointed:

Thumbs up if that’s the quietest you’ve ever seen Ramsay in the kitchen, haha.

And is it true that when he left he stole the Harveys reservations book?

Ramsey recently confesses he was so jealous of Marco that he went in Harvey’s and stole the booking book.

Stephen Terry

I didn’t even recognise Stephen Terry in the video. He returned to Wales to open his own restaurant:

Wow, look how young Stephen Terry is…….. He has the Hardwick Restaurant in Raglan near me 🙂

On a break, the interviewer asks him how he feels when Marco bawls him out. Terry shrugs and says:

It’s for a reason. It’s never not for a reason, the reason being that you’ve done something wrong or you’ve done something you shouldn’t have done … You’re learning all the time.

Back in the kitchen, Marco criticises Terry for the presentation of one the plates:

“You wanna do things like that, go to a florist!”

The love for a professional kitchen

Although a professional kitchen looks like a living hell, young men in particular still aspire to becoming professional chefs:

Yo, for real, passion is the only thing that drives you working in a kitchen, you face long hours, so much stress, burns, cuts and running, it’s physically and mentally draining for any person, but I love it. The people you work with, it’s like a family and it’s full of weird people hahaha but we’re always for each other and we always do our best. Sometimes Chefs can be tough, but even the tougher [ones] reward the staff and congratulate them for everything. It’s actually a beautiful job, but it’s tough, really tough.

Another commenter agreed on passion being an essential ingredient to a successful cooking career:

I love food. I love to eat it, i love to touch it, I love to change it, the way it sounds in the pan, the happiness it gives when it’s served, to improve my techniques and to magnify the ingredients. It’s all about passion really. And it should be, otherwise no one could do it.

Anthony Bourdain put it best when he wrote about the importance of cameraderie in the professional kitchen, a dangerous place:

The ability to ‘work well with others’ is a must. If you’re a sauté man, your grill man is your dance partner, and chances are, you’re spending the majority of your time working in a hot, uncomfortably confined, submarine-like space with him. You’re both working around open flame, boiling liquids with plenty of blunt objects at close hand-and you both carry knives, lots of knives. So you had better get along. It will not do to have two heavily armed cooks duking it out behind the line over some perceived insult when there are vats of boiling grease and razor-sharp cutlery all around.

I will post at least one more Marco Pierre White video.

For now, though, I hope that you try his Venetian liver recipe. It’s a keeper.