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White Stewed Fish

Stewed fish served with a lemon‑egg 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 ↓

White Stewed Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the fish

  1. Boil enough water to cover the fish steaks.

  2. Add the onion, ginger, salt, black pepper, and whole red pepper.

  3. Once the mixture is boiling, add the fish steaks.

  4. Boil until cooked, then carefully remove and drain the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and chopped parsley.

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

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

  4. In a saucepan, combine the egg mixture and heat gently, stirring constantly until it thickens. Do not boil.

  5. 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

Striped bass steaks
The main protein, cooked gently in the seasoned poaching liquid until flaky.
Eggs
Beaten and heated gently, they thicken the lemon mixture into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that gives the sauce its tang and balances the eggs.
Fish boiling liquid
Thins the lemon juice and carries flavour from the poached fish into the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the egg mixture gently and do not boil it. Egg proteins set and thicken with gentle heat, but high heat makes them curdle and scramble, leaving the sauce grainy. Stirring constantly spreads the heat evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against striped bass, 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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