Name: Sour Fish
Ingredients: 1 whole fish; salt water; handful of raisins; few whole cloves; few whole allspice; 1 stick cinnamon; vinegar (to taste); 1 tablespoon sugar; flour (for thickening)

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sour Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the whole fish in salt water until tender.
Remove the fish and place it on a platter.
In the salt water, add raisins, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, vinegar, and sugar.
Thicken the mixture with flour until it reaches gravy consistency.
Pour the sauce over the fish and serve cold.

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.

Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,390 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole fish: Forms the main dish, cooked gently in salt water until tender.
Flour: Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy-like sauce.
Vinegar: Adds sourness that gives the dish its character and balances the sugar.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Raisins: Add sweetness and body to the sauce as they soften in the liquid.

“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.