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Filled Fish

Fish balls made from pickerel, onion, egg, and bread, boiled and served with a sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Filled Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Salt the pickerel for several hours, then remove the skin and bones.

  2. Chop the fish meat very fine and mix in the onion, white pepper, egg, and water.

  3. Soak the bread in water, press out excess water, and add it to the fish mixture.

  4. Form the mixture into balls and boil them in enough water to cover.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Add the fish bones, skin, parsley, medium onion, salt, and pepper to the boiling water for flavor.

  2. Once cooked, remove the fish balls with a skimmer and place them on a platter.

  3. Strain the cooking liquid, beat in the egg yolk, and stir over heat until boiling.

  4. Pour the sauce over the fish balls.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Bread + fishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pickerel
Provides the main body and flavor of the fish balls.
Egg
Binds the fish mixture so the balls hold their shape.
Bread
Soaked and added to the mixture to keep the balls moist and tender.
Egg yolk
Thickens the strained cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce over heat until boiling. Egg yolk thickens as it heats but can curdle or scramble if it gets too hot or is added to boiling liquid too quickly, so the sauce should be heated gently and stirred constantly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, egg, bread, pepper, fish, parsley):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, egg, bread, pepper, fish, 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.

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