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Sauce for Boiled Fish

A creamy sauce made with milk, water, flour, eggs, celery, vinegar, and butter, served over sliced hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sauce for Boiled Fish

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the milk and water and heat until scalding.

  2. In a small bowl, wet the flour with cold water, then stir it into the hot milk mixture.

  3. Add the eggs, salt, pepper, celery, vinegar, and butter, stirring well.

Serve

  1. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and arrange them over the dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the sliced eggs 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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 milk mixture into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Eggs
Add richness and body to the sauce as they set with gentle heat.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder, silkier mouthfeel and flavor.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that balances the richness of milk, butter and eggs.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the hot milk. Flour wetted with cold water and added to hot liquid disperses without clumping; if it is dumped in dry or unevenly mixed, lumps form and the sauce turns grainy. Stirring while adding eggs keeps them from scrambling in the hot mixture.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, egg, pepper, vinegar, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, egg, pepper, vinegar, butter. 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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