Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Plaice

Stewed plaice with onions, butter, mace, cayenne, and lemon, garnished with fried parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Stewed Plaice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the fish into pieces about two inches wide.

  2. Sprinkle the fish pieces generously with coarse sea salt.

Cook

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and add the onions, cooking until soft.

  2. Add the fish pieces, mace, and water to the pan.

  3. Cover and simmer for 20-30 minutes until cooked through.

Serve

  1. Lift the fish out carefully with a fish-slice and place on a dish.

  2. Garnish with fried parsley and lemon.

  3. Serve with anchovy sauce.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Plaice
Forms the main flesh of the dish, cooked gently until it flakes.
Onions
Softened in butter to build a sweet, mellow base for the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when melted with the onions.
Eggs
Not used in any listed step; left out.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the lid on. Fish proteins set quickly and toughen or break apart if boiled hard, so a gentle simmer keeps the pieces moist and intact.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, onion, butter, lemon, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, onion, butter, lemon, parsley. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes