Skip to main content
Main

Another Carp Sauce

A sauce for carp made with wine, vinegar, anchovies, herbs, and carp blood.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Another Carp Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carp

  1. Boil the carp in water with salt and wine until cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. Chop the liver, anchovies, parsley, thyme, and onion finely.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the chopped mixture, Rhenish wine, elder vinegar, and the carp's blood.

  3. Stew the mixture gently.

Serve

  1. Serve the carp hot, topped with the sauce and garnished with fried oysters, toast, horseradish, and lemon pieces.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Anchovies
Dissolve into the sauce to add a deep, savory background flavor.
Elder vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens and balances the rich sauce.
Rhenish wine
Adds liquid and acidity to the sauce, helping it stew into a cohesive base.
Carp's blood
Thickens the sauce as it gently stews, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture gently. Blood-based sauces can curdle or turn grainy if boiled hard. Gentle heat lets the blood thicken smoothly and keeps the sauce uniform.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, vinegar, parsley, thyme, oyster, horseradish, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, vinegar, parsley, thyme, oyster, horseradish, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesHorseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipes