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Seer with Mushrooms

A stew of seer fish simmered in brown gravy with onions, carrots, celery, parsley, wine, mushroom ketchup, red currant jelly, lime juice, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Seer with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. In a pot, combine the gravy, onion, carrot, celery, and parsley.

  2. Add the Chablis, mushroom ketchup, red currant jelly, and lime juice.

  3. Gently stew the seer fish in this mixture until cooked.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the fish and thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  2. Add the button mushrooms and heat without boiling.

  3. Serve the fish with the mushroom gravy.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Seer fish
Forms the main dish, cooking gently in the gravy to stay moist and tender.
Butter and flour
Together they make a roux that thickens the gravy to a smooth, coating consistency.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a glossy body that balances the savoury, acidic liquid.
Button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and texture to the finished mushroom gravy.

The step that matters

Heat the mushroom gravy without boiling. Boiling can toughen the mushrooms and can cause a floury roux to break or turn grainy, so the gravy should only be heated gently after the mushrooms are added.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, mushroom, ketchup):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, mushroom, ketchup. 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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