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To Stew Carp White

A stew of carp simmered with wine, onions, horseradish, herbs, spices, and finished with a sauce of anchovies, lemon peel, cream, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Stew Carp White

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the carp

  1. Place the carp in a stew pan with water, white wine, onions, horseradish, sweet herbs, cayenne, black pepper, and salt.

  2. Let the mixture stew slowly for about 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a small saucepan, combine white wine, anchovies, onion, lemon peel, cream, and a spoonful of the carp's cooking liquid.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks to the sauce and stir well.

  3. Serve the carp with the sauce poured over it.

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

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

  2. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Horseradish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 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

Carp
Is the main protein that becomes tender and flaky during slow stewing.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and give it a rich, smooth body as they set gently with heat.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow texture.
Anchovies
Contribute savory depth to the sauce, rounding out its flavor without a fishy taste.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma that mellows during stewing.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the sauce. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Stir well and keep the heat low so the sauce becomes smooth rather than curdled.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, horseradish, pepper, lemon, cream, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, horseradish, pepper, lemon, cream, egg. 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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