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Fish Fillets, Sauce Tartare

Fish fillets served with a tartare sauce made of parsley, capers, cucumber pickle, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 14,037 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fish Fillets, Sauce Tartare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Rinse and dry the flounder fillets.

  2. Sprinkle with lemon juice, onion juice, salt, and pepper. Let stand for 1 hour.

  3. Dry each fillet with a cloth. If too large, divide them.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each piece in beaten egg, then roll in bread crumbs.

  2. Fry in hot oil until nicely browned.

Make the tartare sauce

  1. For the sauce, pound parsley, capers, and cucumber pickle to a pulp.

  2. Press out the juice and mix with mayonnaise.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Capers + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Flounder fillets
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a flaky, tender texture.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the fish so the coating holds during frying.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot oil.
Mayonnaise
Provides the fat and creamy body of the tartare sauce.
Capers
Adds a sharp, briny acidity that cuts the richness of the mayonnaise.

The step that matters

Dry the fillets before coating. Surface moisture keeps the egg and crumbs from adhering and turns the coating soggy instead of crisp when it fries in hot oil.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, pepper, egg, bread, parsley, capers, cucumber):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Chivebetter flavor fit
  3. Lettucebetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, pepper, egg, bread, parsley, capers, cucumber. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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