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meuniere butter

meuniere butter

8.8
Butter browned and flavored with lemon and parsley served over fish or vegetables
  • noun
  • /məˈnjɛr ˈbʌtər/
  • Specialized
translation icon : mantequilla meunière
  • The chef poured a generous amount of meuniere butter over the pan-fried sole.

Examples

  • Her recipe calls for finishing the vegetables with meuniere butter and a sprinkle of fresh parsley.

  • He expertly browned the meuniere butter before drizzling it atop the cooked asparagus.

  • The chef prepared meuniere butter for the fish dish.

  • Have you ever tried meuniere butter on vegetables?

  • The chef poured a generous amount of meuniere butter over the pan-fried sole.

  • He expertly browned the meuniere butter before drizzling it atop the cooked asparagus.

  • Her recipe calls for finishing the vegetables with meuniere butter and a sprinkle of fresh parsley.

Synonyms

drawn butter
vsmeuniere butter
  • US
1 6.3

Melted butter with the solid parts of milk removed that is used as a sauce for seafood

is browned and seasoned with lemon and parsley rather than plain clarified fat
lemon butter
vsmeuniere butter
1 2.9

A sauce of browned butter with lemon juice and parsley for fish or vegetables

has the identical preparation and use as a sauce for fish or vegetables

How Browned

brown butter
2 2.9
meuniere butter
  • Specialized
8.8

Surface Forms

Morphology

meuniere + butter

The first element 'meuniere' is a borrowed French culinary label with no transparent meaning for an average B1 learner (dictionary entry not found here), so knowing 'butter' alone does not allow a learner to infer the specific preparation (clarified, browned and seasoned with lemon and parsley). The phrase names a particular cooking method/style rather than a compositional combination of familiar English words, so its meaning is unpredictable from its parts.

Etymology

Meuniere butter comes from the French 'à la meunière', which means 'of the miller's wife'. Cooks would dust fish with flour from the mill, fry it, and then pour browned butter with lemon and parsley over the fish, so the name came to mean this lemony browned butter sauce.