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Sauce

Sauce for Freshwater Fish

A mushroom and onion sauce with claret, stock, and optional anchovy essence for freshwater fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sauce for Freshwater Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine minced mushrooms, onions, and garlic in a saucepan.

  2. Pour in enough stock to cover the vegetables and simmer gently until the sauce is flavorful.

  3. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag, pressing with a wooden spoon to extract as much sauce as possible.

  4. Add the claret and bring to a boil once more.

  5. Optionally, add a few drops of anchovy essence and thicken with brown thickening if desired.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide earthy, savory flavor that forms the base of the sauce.
Onions
Add sweetness and depth as they soften and release their flavor into the stock.
Claret
Adds acidity and fruity depth to the finished sauce.
Brown thickening
Thickens the sauce to a more body-rich consistency.

The step that matters

Straining through the jelly bag. Pressing hard forces out more solids, which can cloud the sauce and make it gritty. Gentle pressure keeps the sauce clear while still extracting its flavor.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, onion, garlic, anchovy):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, onion, garlic, anchovy. 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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