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Fish Cream

A creamy fish sauce made with fish, butter, flour, milk, parsley, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fish Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale, clean, and wash the fish; wipe well.

  2. Steam the fish for 15 minutes.

  3. Break up the flesh into flakes.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the butter in a pan; add minced onion and flour; blend well.

  2. Add milk, parsley, flaked fish, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  3. Cook for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve on rounds of toast.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

Fish
Provides the main protein and flaked texture of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter before the liquid is added.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and helps form the thickening base with the flour.

The step that matters

Blending the flour into the butter. Stirring the flour into the melted butter and blending it well before adding the milk cooks the starch slightly and spreads it evenly. This helps the sauce thicken smoothly without lumps.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, flour, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, flour, milk. 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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