Name: Char, a LA Genoise
Ingredients: 1 char fish; coarse sea salt; Genoise sauce (No. 30); small quenelles of whiting; crawfish tails

Why it works: Sauce and whiting match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 236 recipes mention both. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: fish, shellfish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Cook the char

Boil the char in salted water until cooked.
Remove the skin and glaze the fish.

Serve

Place the char on a serving dish.
Sauce with Genoise sauce.
Garnish with small quenelles of whiting and crawfish tails.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Sauce + whitingtop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together236 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Fish + whitingtop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together313 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Fish + saucetop 10% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together1,389 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Char: Is the main protein, cooked by poaching in salted water and glazed for presentation.
Genoise sauce: Coats the fish, adding moisture and flavour to the finished plate.

“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.