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Boiled Trout or Muscallonge

A boiled fish served with a creamy butter and egg yolk sauce, garnished with parsley or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Trout or Muscallonge

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Wash the fish and wrap it in a clean cloth.

  2. Place the wrapped fish in boiling water with dissolved salt and boil hard for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the fish and return it to boiling water, cooking gently until tender.

  4. Remove the skin and bones, keeping the shape of the fish intact.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, stir the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the egg yolks, boiling water, cayenne pepper, and salt; cook until thickened.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the fish and garnish with chopped parsley or lemon slices.

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Large fish (trout or muscallonge)
Forms the main body of the dish; firm flesh holds its shape during gentle poaching.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they cook, giving it a smooth, coating body.

The step that matters

Cooking the sauce until thickened. Egg yolks set when heated, but if they get too hot they scramble and curdle. Cook gently and stir so the sauce thickens smoothly.

“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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