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Boiled Shad

A boiled shad served with butter, pepper, egg yolk mixture, and garnished with egg whites and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Shad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean, wash, and wipe the shad.

  2. Set aside the roes for another dish.

  3. Sew the fish in a thin cloth fitted to its shape.

Boil and serve

  1. Cover the fish with boiling salted water and cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on its size.

  2. Unwrap the fish, then butter and pepper it on a hot dish.

  3. Mix the chopped yolks of the boiled eggs, parsley, and lemon juice with drawn butter, then pour over the fish.

  4. Garnish with rings of the boiled egg whites and a sprig of parsley in each.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Roe + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together243 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Roe + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Shad
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently whole in its cloth.
Boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed into the sauce for richness; whites are used as a garnish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, both to the fish and to the drawn butter sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking time in the boiling water. Cooking time depends on the fish's size, and fish that is overcooked becomes dry and flaky. Checking it early in the stated range helps keep the flesh moist and tender.

“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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