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Boiled Smelts

A simple dish of smelt fish boiled in wine and water, served with a warm sauce of wine, butter, flour, lemon, garlic, parsley, and chives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and garlic are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,665 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Boiled Smelts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the smelts

  1. Clean, scale, wash, and dry the smelts.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the smelts in equal parts white wine and water with olive oil, salt, pepper, and sliced lemon.

  2. Once cooked, place the smelts on a serving dish.

  3. In a saucepan, combine white wine, butter, flour, lemon juice, garlic, parsley, and chives; warm it up.

  4. Pour the sauce over the smelts and serve.

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. Olive + garlictop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  5. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Smelts
The fish is the main component, cooked gently in the poaching liquid until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, giving it a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the warm sauce slightly so it clings to the fish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter.
Garlic
Contributes pungent aroma that mellows during blanching and infuses the sauce.

The step that matters

Warm the sauce gently. Flour thickens a sauce only when heated slowly and stirred, otherwise it clumps and stays pasty. Keeping the butter and wine from boiling hard helps the sauce stay smooth and cohesive.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (smelt, white wine, olive, pepper, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against smelt, white wine, olive, pepper, lemon, butter, flour. 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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