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How to Stew Fish

A stew of cod parts simmered in veal broth with onions, butter, flour, cream, lemon, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

How to Stew Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the cod's sounds and tongues as directed and boil until half done.

Make the stew

  1. In a pot, combine veal broth, boiled onions, butter rolled in flour, cream, and lemon peel.

  2. Add the sounds and tongues to the pot and let them stew gently for 20 minutes.

  3. Season with nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and salt.

Serve

  1. Garnish with sliced lemon 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cod's sounds and tongues
Provide the main body and delicate texture of the stew.
Butter and flour
Form a roux that thickens the broth into a smooth, silky body.
Cream
Adds richness and helps thicken the stew for a smooth texture.
Veal broth
Supplies the savory liquid base that carries the other flavours.

The step that matters

Boiling the sounds and tongues until half done. Cooking them only partly before stewing keeps them from overcooking during the gentle simmer, which would make the delicate fish tough and dry.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, flour, cream, lemon, nutmeg, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, cream, lemon, nutmeg, pepper. 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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