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Stewed Caep

A fish stew made with carp, vegetables, herbs, stock, and port wine, finished with a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Stewed Caep

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the carps in a baking dish.

  3. Add the sliced carrot, turnip, onion, celery, sweet herbs, bay leaf, mace, cloves, and peppercorns.

  4. Pour the stock and port wine over the fish and vegetables.

Bake and finish the sauce

  1. Cover with buttered paper and bake in the oven until cooked through.

  2. Once done, strain the stock from the fish and thicken it.

  3. Strain the thickened stock through a fine sieve.

  4. Add a glass more port wine, and season with sugar, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and salt.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Carps
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through gently in the stock.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and colour to the stock and sauce.
Anchovies
Contributes savoury depth to the stock, rounding out the flavour of the sauce.
Second stock
Provides the cooking liquid that poaches the fish and becomes the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Bake until cooked through, then strain and thicken. Fish cooks quickly and can dry out or break apart if overbaked, so checking for doneness is essential. The stock is thickened after the fish is removed, so the sauce is set without overcooking the carp.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, onion, celery, clove, port wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, celery, clove, port wine. 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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