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Scalloped Roe

A baked dish of roe layered with egg yolk, parsley, seasoning, white sauce, breadcrumbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Scalloped Roe

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the roe as for fried roe, then drain and break it up lightly with a fork.

Assemble

  1. In a baking dish, sprinkle a layer of roe, then add half the beaten egg yolk over the top.

  2. Sprinkle lightly with chopped parsley, season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  3. Add a layer of white sauce, then repeat the layers of roe, egg, seasoning, and sauce.

  4. Cover with bread crumbs and bits of butter, then bake until brown.

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. Parsley + peppertop 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. Roe + saucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Roe
Forms the bulk of the dish and provides its main texture and flavour.
Egg yolk
Enriches the layers and helps bind them as it cooks.
White sauce
Adds moisture so the layers stay creamy rather than dry.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping over the baked dish.
Butter
Adds fat that aids browning of the crumb topping and adds richness.

The step that matters

Baking until brown. The top should be browned, not just heated through. Bread crumbs and butter brown through Maillard reactions and caramelisation at oven heat, so watch the colour rather than only the clock, and avoid overbaking, which can dry the layers under the crust.

“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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