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Fish with Parsley Sauce

Fish boiled with onions, peppercorns, and bay leaf, served with a parsley butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fish with Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Soak the cleaned fish in salt for several hours.

  2. Wash the fish and place it in boiling water with onions, peppercorns, and bay leaf.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes.

Make the parsley sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour.

  2. Add enough water from boiling the fish to create a thick gravy.

  3. Season with salt, vinegar, and minced parsley.

  4. Bring the sauce to a boil, then pour it over the fish.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled potatoes.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while the flour thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the butter and fish water into a smooth, gravy-like sauce.
Parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour must be cooked briefly in melted butter before liquid is added, so it dissolves smoothly instead of clumping. Bringing the sauce to a boil then fully thickens the starch, giving a glossy, stable gravy.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, butter, flour, vinegar, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, butter, flour, vinegar, parsley. 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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