Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Fish with Vegetables

A boiled fish served in a vegetable stock made with onions, carrot, celery, butter, flour, parsley, peppercorns, cloves, water, and vinegar.

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

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Fish with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Fry onions, carrot and celery (or celery seed) in the butter, then add the flour, parsley, peppercorns and cloves and fry until fragrant.

  2. Add the water and vinegar and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam and boil for 20 minutes.

Cook and serve the fish

  1. Pour the stock over the whole fish in a kettle.

  2. Boil gently until the fish is cooked through.

  3. Serve with egg 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness to the vegetables and carries their flavour into the stock.
Flour
Thickens the butter and vegetable base slightly, giving the stock more body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the stock and balances the fish's mild flavour.
Onions
Build the aromatic base of the stock as they soften and sweeten in the butter.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the fish is cooked through. A hard boil breaks up the delicate flesh and can make it tough or flaky, while gentle simmering cooks it evenly and keeps it moist.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, carrot, celery, butter, flour, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, carrot, celery, butter, flour, parsley. 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

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipes