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Sauce

The Melted Butter for Fish

A butter-based sauce for fish flavored with anchovy essence, mushroom ketchup, cayenne pepper, chili vinegar, lemon juice, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

The Melted Butter for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan until it is thick enough to adhere to the fish.

  2. Dilute the melted butter with your choice of Essence of Anchovy, Mushroom Catsup, Cayenne pepper, Chili Vinegar, or Lemon juice.

  3. For an elegant relish, pound the liver of the fish and mix it with parsley, butter, and a little lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce warm over the fish.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted butter forms the rich base that coats the fish and carries the other flavours.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the butter.
Mushroom catsup
Adds savoury, umami flavour to the butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter.

The step that matters

Melting the butter to the right thickness. Butter that is too hot or too long on the heat separates and turns oily, so it will not cling to the fish. Melt it gently until it is just thick enough to coat, then serve it warm.

“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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