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Fish Stewed with Wine

A fish stew simmered with wine, onions, bread, and butter, thickened with flour and butter, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fish Stewed with Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. In a kettle, combine fish, wine, water, sliced onions, toasted bread, salt, pepper, and a lump of butter.

  2. Cover with enough water to cook and stew gently.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a separate saucepan, roll some butter in flour to thicken.

  2. Add ketchup and walnut pickle, stir until smooth, and pour over the fish to heat.

  3. Serve hot, adding an anchovy 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Fish
Forms the main body of the stew and becomes tender as it cooks gently.
Onions
Soften during stewing and add sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour forms a thickener for the stew.
Flour
Combined with butter to thicken the liquid into a smoother sauce.
Wine
Adds acidity and flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening the butter and flour. Flour must be cooked into the butter and whisked smoothly into hot liquid; added raw or in lumps, it stays grainy and fails to thicken evenly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, wine, onion, bread, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, wine, onion, bread, pepper, butter, flour. 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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