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To Boil Fish and Make the Sauce

Fish boiled in salted water and served with a thickened sauce flavoured with vinegar or lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and fish work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 70 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Boil Fish and Make the Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Put a saucepan of water on the fire to boil.

  2. Clean the fish thoroughly in cold water.

  3. When the water is boiling, place the fish in a strainer or plate in the water.

  4. Add enough salt to make the water taste salty.

Poach the fish

  1. Cover the saucepan and simmer gently for 20 minutes to 45 minutes, depending on the size of the fish.

  2. Watch and skim occasionally.

  3. When the skin of the fish starts to crack, it is done.

Make the arrowroot sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, mix the corn-flour or arrow-root with cold water to make a smooth paste.

  2. Add half a pint of the fish boiling water to the paste.

  3. Heat the saucepan and stir until it boils and thickens.

  4. Remove from heat and let it sit on a piece of paper on the table.

  5. Flavor the sauce with vinegar or lemon juice, and season with pepper and salt to taste.

  6. Optionally, color the sauce with half a teaspoon of caramel (burnt sugar).

Serve

  1. Carefully remove the fish from the saucepan and place it on a hot dish.

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. Corn + fishtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together70 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Vinegar + fishtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,036 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  3. Corn + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn-flour or arrow-root
Thickens the sauce into a smooth, glossy consistency when heated with liquid.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the arrowroot paste until it thickens. The starch must be fully mixed into cold water first, then heated to boiling so the granules swell and set the sauce. Stirring prevents lumps and scorching.

“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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