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Fried Lampreys

Fried lampreys served in a butter and white wine sauce with capers and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Lampreys

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bleed the lampreys and save the blood.

  2. Wash them in hot water to remove slime and cut into pieces.

  3. Fry in a little butter until cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour out excess fat and add white wine.

  2. Season with whole pepper, coarse sea salt, sweet herbs, and a bay leaf.

  3. Add capers and a piece of butter rolled in flour along with the saved blood.

  4. Shake the pan often and cover it.

  5. Once cooked, strain the sauce and bring it to a quick boil.

  6. Squeeze in lemon juice and pour over the lampreys.

Serve

  1. Garnish with lemon and serve as desired.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Lampreys
The main ingredient, cooked through by frying and then simmering in the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying, and a butter and flour mixture that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Mixed with butter to form a paste that thickens the sauce as it cooks.
White wine
Adds acidity and liquid to the pan, building the base of the sauce.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity to the sauce and finishes the dish.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty acidity that balances the rich fat and blood in the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the butter and flour with the blood. Adding the flour-butter paste with the blood needs steady shaking and gentle heat. Flour thickens only as it is stirred into hot liquid, so the sauce can lump or thin unevenly if rushed or left unattended, and blood can curdle if it boils hard.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, white wine, pepper, flour, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, white wine, pepper, flour, lemon. 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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