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Strong Fish Gravy

A thickened gravy made from eels, water, toasted bread, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Strong Fish Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stewpan, combine the eels and water.

  2. Add the toasted bread, mace, pepper, sweet herbs, lemon rind, salt, and horseradish.

  3. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the liquid and thicken it with butter rolled in flour.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 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

Eels
Provide the main body and savory flavor of the gravy as they simmer.
Butter
Rolled in flour, it enriches the liquid and helps thicken it smoothly.
Flour
Combined with butter, it thickens the strained liquid into a gravy.
Toasted bread
Its browned crust adds toasty flavor and body to the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening with butter rolled in flour. Adding the flour-butter mixture directly to hot liquid can form lumps. Rolling the butter in flour first and whisking it into the strained liquid lets the starch disperse evenly, so the gravy thickens smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, lemon, horseradish, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, lemon, horseradish, butter, flour. 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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