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To Stew Fish White

A stew of white fish, onions, parsley root, leeks, and bread crumbs, finished with a lemon‑egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Stew Fish White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Boil the onions and parsley root in 1 pint of water.

  2. Cut the fish into pieces and remove the bones.

  3. Mix the fish pieces with bread crumbs, ginger, beaten egg, leeks, and parsley.

  4. Form the mixture into small balls.

Cook

  1. Layer the fish and onions in a stewpan, sprinkling with ginger.

  2. Cover the fish with cold water and boil until cooked.

  3. Arrange the cooked fish on a serving dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, mix lemon juice, egg yolk, and flour with ½ pint of the cooking water.

  2. Add the fish balls to the sauce and boil quickly.

  3. Pour the sauce and balls over the fish before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  3. Parsley + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together759 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Leek + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together162 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the main body of the stew and, bound with egg and crumbs, the fish balls.
Egg
Binds the fish mixture and, as yolk, thickens the sauce when heated.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help bind the fish mixture into balls.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the egg yolk.
Onions
Add sweetness and body to the cooking liquid under the fish.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce with the fish balls. Egg yolk in the sauce can curdle or turn grainy if it boils too hard or too long. Boil quickly only as the record directs, just long enough to cook the balls and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, parsley, bread, egg, leek, lemon):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, parsley, bread, egg, leek, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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