Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Lampreys

A stew of lampreys cooked with spices, wine, cider, claret, herbs, and finished with a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Stew Lampreys

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and season

  1. Skin and gut the lampreys.

  2. Season them with pepper, coarse sea salt, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and lemon peel.

Stew

  1. Place thin slices of butter in the bottom of a saucepan, then add the lampreys.

  2. Pour in the gravy, white wine, cider, claret, and herbs.

  3. Stew over low heat, turning the lampreys until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the lampreys.

  2. Add one anchovy to the sauce.

  3. Thicken the sauce with the yolk of an egg or butter rolled in flour.

  4. Pour it over the fish and serve.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lampreys
The main fish, which becomes tender through slow stewing in the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the sauce feel smooth and rounded.
Egg yolk or flour-rolled butter
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the fish instead of running off.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth to the sauce without tasting distinctly fishy.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce. Egg yolk can curdle if it boils, and flour-thickened butter can turn lumpy if added to a hot liquid too quickly. Keep the heat gentle and stir steadily so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, clove, nutmeg, lemon, butter, white wine, cider):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, clove, nutmeg, lemon, butter, white wine, cider. 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 recipesHam in CiderHam in Cider10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes