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Brown Sauce for Baked Fish

A brown sauce made with butter, flour, onion, ketchup, and port wine, served over baked fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown Sauce for Baked Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and chopped onion (if using) and fry until golden brown.

  3. Slowly stir in the ketchup (or walnut sauce or Odenheimer sauce).

  4. Add the port wine and mix well before serving.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Ketchup + port winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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 butter into a roux that gives the sauce body and helps it coat the fish.
Butter
Provides fat for frying the flour and onion and adds a rich, savory flavor.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness, acidity and a deeper color to the sauce.
Port wine
Adds depth and sweetness, and thins the sauce as it is stirred in.

The step that matters

Fry the flour until golden brown. Cooking the flour in butter until golden brown toasts it and removes raw starch flavor. Stopping too early leaves a pasty taste, while burning gives a bitter one.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, ketchup, port wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, ketchup, port wine. 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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