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Dressing Fish

A turbot fillet served with a sauce of parsley, anchovy, lemon, butter, and sour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Dressing Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Gut and wash the turbot.

  2. Boil the turbot in salt water, vinegar, horseradish, and sweet herbs.

  3. Drain the fish.

Make the sauce

  1. Blanch the parsley, squeeze it, and mince it.

  2. In a stew-pan, combine minced parsley, anchovy, diced lemon, salt, pepper, butter, sour, and water.

  3. Thicken the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish hot with the sauce over it.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Turbot + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

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

  5. Horse + radishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together529 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the herb sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the herb sauce and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce. Butter and herbs can separate or turn greasy if overheated. Gentle heat and constant stirring keep the emulsion smooth and the sauce cohesive.

“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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