Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Shad with Egg Sauce

A boiled shad served with a sauce made from raw egg, drawn butter, hard‑boiled egg, parsley, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Shad with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Sew the shad in a piece of thin muslin or mosquito-netting.

  2. Boil water with vinegar added, then cook the shad for 10 minutes per pound.

  3. Clip the threads, unwrap the shad carefully, and place it on a serving dish.

Make the egg sauce

  1. Whip the raw egg into the hot drawn butter to make the sauce.

  2. Stir in the chopped hard-boiled egg, minced parsley, and capers.

  3. Set the sauce over boiling water for 5 minutes, stirring often.

  4. 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. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,453 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Shad
The main fish, cooked whole and wrapped so it holds its shape while boiling.
Raw egg
Whisked into the hot butter, it thickens and emulsifies the sauce into a smooth, body-rich texture.
Drawn butter
Provides the fat base and rich flavour for the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds texture and a mild, savoury body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Setting the sauce over boiling water. Heating the egg-and-butter mixture gently and stirring often lets the raw egg thicken smoothly. Too much heat or too little stirring can scramble the egg and leave the sauce grainy.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersthe original
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

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

You might also like

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