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To Dress Fish with Brown Sauce

A fish fillet coated in flour and spices, simmered in a brown sauce of butter, onions, wine, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

To Dress Fish with Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Preheat a pan over low heat.

  2. Lay the cleaned fish in the pan.

  3. Flour the fish well and season with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, parsley, and sweet marjoram to taste.

Make the brown sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter and fry the onions until nicely browned.

  2. Add the wine, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce to the onions and stir well.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the fish and cook until the fish is done.

  2. Serve hot.

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 + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Clove + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  4. Pepper + marjoramtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Coats the fish, helping it brown and giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour when the onions fry.
Bermuda onions
Caramelise when fried, adding sweetness and depth to the sauce.
Port or white wine
Adds acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the onions.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness, acidity and colour to the sauce.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury, tangy depth that rounds out the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the onions until nicely browned. Browning the onions develops deep, sweet flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Pale onions leave the sauce tasting flat and raw, so the colour should be built slowly over moderate heat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, flour, pepper, clove, parsley, marjoram, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, flour, pepper, clove, parsley, marjoram, butter. 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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