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Mackerel Sauce, Gooseberry

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and fennel work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 455 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mackerel Sauce, Gooseberry

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick fennel from the stalks and boil it in salted water for 1-2 minutes.

  2. Chop the boiled fennel finely.

  3. In a saucepan, mix 2 teaspoons of baked flour with ½ cup of butter.

  4. Add ½ pint of boiling water and stir until thick.

  5. Stir in the chopped fennel and serve hot in a tureen.

  6. If desired, add bruised mackerel roes and yolk of hard-boiled egg to the 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. Flour + fenneltop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together455 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Roe + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

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

  4. Butter + roetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Swap the fennel

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Fennelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, roe, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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