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Boiled White Fish

A boiled white fish served with a butter‑flour sauce flavored with capers, parsley, onion, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled White Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Clean the fish and place it in a large roasting pan filled with warm water, not too hot.

  2. Add salt, onion, cloves, bay leaves, capers, parsley, carrot, peppercorns, and lemon juice.

  3. Gradually add very hot water until it boils, then cook for 20 to 30 minutes.

  4. Carefully remove the fish with two cake turners and take off the dark skin.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a pan, melt the butter, then add flour and stir constantly until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the strained water from boiling the fish to make a sauce as thick as cream.

  3. Add the capers to the sauce and pour it over the fish.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

White fish
Provides the main protein, which turns flaky and tender when gently poached.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour when melted with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and fish liquid.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the poaching liquid.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the hot liquid to the roux. Pouring the fish liquid in gradually while stirring keeps the flour smooth and lump-free, so the sauce thickens evenly into a cream-like consistency.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, clove, capers, parsley, carrot, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, clove, capers, parsley, carrot, 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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