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Dressing Fish

A carp dish stewed with truffles, morels, pickled mushrooms, artichoke, oysters, and a sauce of egg yolks, flour, lemon peel, and anchovy liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 636 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Dressing Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Season the chopped truffles, morels, pickled mushrooms, and artichoke bottom with pepper, salt, and cayenne.

  2. Stew the mixture for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture into a pan.

Cook the carp

  1. Add the cleaned carp to the sauce.

  2. Stew gently for 30 minutes, turning the fish halfway through.

  3. Add the oysters and lemon juice.

  4. Stew for an additional 5 minutes.

Make the roe and serve

  1. Prepare the roe by mixing it with egg yolks, flour, lemon peel, pepper, salt, and anchovy liquor.

  2. Fry the roe in boiling beef dripping until light brown.

  3. Transfer the carp to a serving dish.

  4. Pour the sauce over it.

  5. Garnish with fried sippets.

  6. Arrange the roe around the dish with fried oysters and scraped horseradish.

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. Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together636 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Artichoke + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + artichoketop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together447 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Truffles
Provide the dish's main earthy, aromatic flavour in the dressing.
Morels
Add a meaty texture and deep, savoury earthy aroma to the sauce.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the sauce while they gently cook.
Egg yolks
Bind the roe mixture and enrich it, helping it hold together when fried.
Flour
Thickens the roe mixture so it holds its shape and browns when fried.
Carp
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the sauce so it stays moist.

The step that matters

Frying the roe in beef dripping. The roe is fragile and can break apart or burn if the fat is not hot enough or the pieces are overcrowded; the egg and flour coating needs to set and brown evenly to hold together.

“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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