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Grilled Bream with Shallot Sauce

A grilled bream served with a sauce of butter, shallot, eggs, Harvey's sauce, lemon juice, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Grilled Bream with Shallot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean the bream by scaling and removing the dorsal and side fins, as well as the end of the tail. Trim and oil the fish.

  2. Grill the bream over moderate heat, basting with oil occasionally.

Make the shallot sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the minced shallot. Cook for 3 minutes.

  2. Stir in the minced hard-boiled eggs, Harvey's sauce, lemon juice, and minced parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve the grilled bream on a hot plate topped with the shallot sauce.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bream
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked by grilling until flaky and opaque.
Butter
Melts to form the rich fat base of the sauce, carrying flavour and giving a smooth texture.
Shallot
Softens with cooking to add a mild, sweet onion aroma to the sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a creamy, slightly firm texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg sauce.

The step that matters

Basting the bream while grilling. Oil brushed on during grilling keeps the fish surface from drying out and sticking to the grate, while moderate heat cooks the flesh through without scorching the skin before the centre is done.

“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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