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Stewed Carp with Sardine Sauce

Stewed carp served with a sauce made from sardines, butter, flour, bread crumbs, wine, and fish juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stewed Carp with Sardine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the carp into pieces and season with coarse sea salt.

  2. Melt ¼ cup of butter in a stewpan, add the fish, cover, and stew.

Make the sauce

  1. In another pan, melt the remaining butter, then mix in the flour and bread crumbs, browning slightly.

  2. Add the fish juice and water to the mixture, stirring well.

  3. Mash the sardines with butter and mix into the sauce, adding wine if desired.

  4. Pour the sauce over the fish and cook thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Before serving, strain the sauce through a fine sieve and pour it over the fish on a serving 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Bread + fishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Carp
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked gently by stewing so it stays moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the sauce brown lightly.
Fine flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter, giving it body.
Bread crumbs
Toasted lightly with the flour, they add browning and a slightly nutty flavour to the sauce.
Sardines
Mashed into the sauce, they add a deep savoury, salty flavour.

The step that matters

Browning the flour and bread crumbs in butter. Cooking the flour and crumbs in fat until lightly browned develops nutty flavour and colour and cooks out raw starch taste. Stopping too early leaves the sauce pale and floury, while going too far makes it bitter.

“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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