Skip to main content
Main

Sprats, Stewed

Stewed sprats seasoned with salt, peppercorns, allspice, and vinegar, simmered gently for one hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,548 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyl acetate, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Sprats, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and wipe the sprats, cut off the heads, and remove the guts.

Stew

  1. Layer the fish in a moderate-sized saucepan, adding a pinch of salt, three peppercorns, and three allspice berries between each layer.

  2. Barely cover the fish with vinegar.

  3. Simmer gently without boiling for one hour until done.

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. Allspice + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Sprats
The fish is the main ingredient, cooked tender in the vinegar.
Vinegar
Acidity that cooks the fish and softens its bones while sharpening the flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. A rolling boil breaks up the delicate sprats and makes them tough and ragged, so the liquid should only tremble at a gentle simmer over the full hour.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes