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White Sauce for Fish

A creamy sauce made with flour, butter, fish liquor, cream, parsley, and optional celery salt and pinch of salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

White Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cream the butter and flour together.

  2. Add the fish liquor from boiling the fish.

  3. Stir in the cream and bring to a boil for a few minutes.

Finish and season

  1. Mix in the chopped parsley.

  2. Add celery salt and a pinch of salt if needed for seasoning.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and combines with flour to form a thickening base.
Fish liquor
Provides the main liquid and savoury fish flavour of the sauce.
Cream
Adds body, smoothness and richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the fish liquor to the butter and flour. Adding liquid to a flour and butter mixture can form lumps if it is not blended smoothly. Stirring steadily as the liquid goes in keeps the starch dispersed, so the sauce thickens evenly.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, fish, cream, parsley):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, fish, cream, 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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