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Boiled Skate with Black Butter Sauce

A boiled skate served with a sauce of browned butter, parsley, tarragon vinegar, mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, capers, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Skate with Black Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the skate

  1. Crimp the skate if fresh, then plunge it into boiling salted water.

  2. Simmer the skate gently until tender, then let it drain well.

Make the black butter sauce

  1. In a saucepan, frizzle the butter until light brown.

  2. Add parsley, tarragon vinegar, mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, chopped capers, and pepper.

  3. Boil the sauce once, then pour over the skate or serve in a tureen.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tarragon + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together379 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns during frizzling to give the sauce its nutty, rich flavour.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds sharpness that cuts through the richness of the browned butter.
Capers
Contribute briny acidity that balances the fat of the sauce.

The step that matters

Frizzle the butter until light brown. Butter browns quickly once its water has cooked off, so it can go from nutty to burnt in seconds. Watch the colour closely and remove it from heat at the right moment.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, tarragon, vinegar, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, capers):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits less well
  4. Celeryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, tarragon, vinegar, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, capers. 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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