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To Boil Skate

A whole skate wing is boiled in butter and served with optional egg sauce, mashed potatoes, or parsnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and parsnip work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 353 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

To Boil Skate

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the skate

  1. Remove the bones from the skate.

  2. Rub the flesh with your hands until it appears woolly.

Cook

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until it becomes oil.

  2. Add the skate to the melted butter and stir for 15 minutes until heated through.

Serve

  1. Serve with egg-sauce, mashed potatoes, or parsnips.

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. Potato + parsniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sauce + parsniptop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together156 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to an oil that gently heats the skate and carries flavour and richness.
Skate
Provides the main flesh; rubbing it by hand changes its texture as the recipe describes.

The step that matters

Stirring the skate in the melted butter. Fish proteins set and toughen with prolonged heat, so the skate should be heated through gently and only until opaque and flaky; overcooking dries it out.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sauce, parsnip):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sauce, parsnip. 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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