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Stewed Carp

A stewed carp simmered with onions, spices, stock, and red wine.

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 ↓

Stewed Carp

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scale and clean the carp; if large, cut into pieces.

  2. Rub a little coarse sea salt on the fish and place it in a stewpan.

Stew

  1. Add enough stock to cover the fish, along with the onions, herbs, and spices.

  2. Stew gently for about 1 hour, or longer if the fish is very large.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Carefully dish up the fish, strain the cooking liquid, and add the port wine, lemon juice, and cayenne.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil, 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Carp
Is the main protein, cooked gently in stock until tender.
Port wine
Adds depth, mild sweetness and acidity to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the port.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Stew gently for about 1 hour. Gentle heat cooks the fish through while keeping its flesh moist and intact. A hard boil toughens the protein and breaks the fish apart, so the liquid should only simmer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, clove, mace, port wine, lemon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, clove, mace, port wine, lemon, 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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