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Fish a LA Brunswick

A boiled fish served with a creamy mustard sauce flavored with vinegar, lemon, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fish a LA Brunswick

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Wash the fish and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let it stand for several hours.

  3. Boil the fish whole in water seasoned with onion, celery, parsley, pepper, salt, and vinegar.

  4. Once cooked, remove the fish to a hot platter.

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the hard-boiled eggs and mix with mustard, lemon juice, and cream until smooth.

  2. Add some cooking liquid from the fish, season with paprika and sugar, and mix in the raw egg yolks.

  3. Heat the mixture thoroughly while stirring constantly to prevent curdling.

  4. Chop celery, sweet pickles, and the whites of the hard-boiled eggs, and add to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour half of the sauce over the fish and serve the remainder in a gravy boat.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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 dish, cooked whole in seasoned water.
Raw egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and thicken it as they gently heat.
Hard-boiled eggs
Mashed into the sauce to give it body and a creamy texture.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, mellow texture.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the rich sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity to the cooking water, helping to flavour the fish.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce while stirring constantly. Raw egg yolks thicken when heated, but they can curdle or scramble if the heat is too high or uneven. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, celery, parsley, pepper, vinegar, egg, mustard):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, celery, parsley, pepper, vinegar, egg, mustard. 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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