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To Pot Trout, Perch, or Tench

A fish poached in Champagne or wine with herbs, served with lemon and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Champagne and sherry share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 61 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

To Pot Trout, Perch, or Tench

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the fish thoroughly and place it in a stew pan.

  2. Add Champagne, Moselle, or sherry wine, pepper, salt, onion, cloves, parsley, thyme, and the crust of French bread.

Cook and thicken

  1. Set the pan on high heat and cook until the fish is done.

  2. Remove the bread, crush it, and use it to thicken the sauce with flour and butter.

  3. Let the sauce boil until it reaches the desired thickness.

Serve

  1. Place the fish on a serving dish and pour the sauce over it.

  2. Serve with sliced lemon and fried bread.

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. Champagne + sherrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce together with butter as the bread is crushed into it.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and helps the flour thicken it smoothly.
French bread crust
Helps thicken the cooking liquid as it is crushed into the sauce.

The step that matters

Let the sauce boil until it reaches the desired thickness. Thickening depends on the flour and bread starch swelling and gelatinising as the liquid boils. Stopping too early leaves a thin sauce, while boiling too long reduces it further and can make it overly thick.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, champagne, sherry, pepper, clove, parsley, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, champagne, sherry, pepper, clove, parsley, thyme. 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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