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Fish Gravy

A gravy made with fat, butter or meat fryings, flour, and milk, served over baked or fried fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fish Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Pour out half of the fat from the pan.

  2. Add meat fryings or butter to the fat.

  3. Stir in flour and mix well.

  4. Gradually add milk while stirring.

  5. Boil for five minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over baked or fried fish.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Meat + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,703 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Meat + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fat
Carries the flavour of the pan and forms the base for the roux.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when cooked with fat and liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid that the flour thickens into a smooth gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually while stirring. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour fully dispersed, so lumps do not form and the gravy thickens smoothly.

“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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