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Whitb Stewed Fish

A stew of striped bass cooked with onion, ginger, spices, and lemon, finished with a beaten egg and parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Whitb Stewed Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Boil water with onion, ginger, salt, black pepper, and whole red pepper until ready to add fish.

  2. Add the fish steaks and boil until cooked.

  3. Remove the fish, drain, and place in a dish.

Make the egg-lemon sauce

  1. Beat the eggs and add nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and chopped parsley.

  2. Strain the juice of the lemons and mix it with ½ cup of the strained fish cooking liquid.

  3. Gradually add the lemon mixture to the eggs while continuously beating.

  4. Cook the egg mixture over low heat, stirring constantly until it thickens, but do not boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the fish and let it cool.

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. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the sauce as they set when gently heated, giving it a silky, emulsified body.
Lemons
Provide acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the eggs.
Fish steaks
Form the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the poaching liquid.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness to the poaching liquid, flavouring the fish.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg mixture over low heat. Eggs thicken as their proteins set, but if the mixture boils or overheats it curdles and turns grainy. Low heat and constant stirring keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, ginger, pepper, egg, nutmeg, parsley, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, ginger, pepper, egg, nutmeg, parsley, lemon. 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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