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Another Carp Sauce

A sauce made from carp liver, anchovies, herbs, wine, and vinegar, served with fried oysters, toast, horseradish, lemon, and roe.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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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 sauce

  1. Clean the carp liver, removing the guts.

  2. Chop the liver, anchovies, parsley, thyme, and onion together.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the chopped mixture with Rhenish wine, elder vinegar, and carp blood.

  4. Stew the mixture gently.

Cook the carp and serve

  1. Boil the carp in water with a little coarse sea salt and 1 pint of wine.

  2. Once the carp is cooked, add it to the sauce.

  3. Garnish with fried oysters, fried toast, scraped horseradish, pieces of lemon, and fried roe.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Thyme + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Thyme + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together169 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 liver
Gives the sauce its body and rich, savoury flavour.
Anchovies
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the sauce.
Elder vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances its richness.
Carp blood
Thickens the sauce and adds richness and colour.
Rhenish wine
Provides liquid and acidity that helps blend the sauce flavours.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture gently. Gentle heat lets the liver and blood cook through and thicken smoothly. Strong heat can curdle the blood and scorch the mixture, leaving a grainy, bitter sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

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