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A Flounder Pie

A flounder pie made with boiled flounder, horseradish, parsley, lemon peel, bread crust, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

A Flounder Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Gut the flounders, wash them clean, and dry them with a cloth.

  2. Boil the flounders briefly.

  3. Remove the meat from the bones.

Assemble the pie

  1. Place the pie crust in a dish.

  2. Add fresh butter at the bottom of the dish and on the fish.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Make the liquid

  1. Boil the bones in the water used for the fish, adding horseradish, parsley, lemon peel, and bread crust.

  2. Boil until there is enough liquid for the pie.

  3. Strain the liquid.

Bake

  1. Pour the strained liquid into the pie.

  2. Cover with the top crust.

  3. Bake.

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. Parsley + lemontop 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. Horseradish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Flounders
Provide the flaked fish that forms the body of the pie.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and keeps the fish moist.
Pie crust
Forms the container and crust that holds the fish and liquid together.
Bread crust
Adds toasted, savoury flavour to the liquid made from the bones.

The step that matters

Boil the flounders briefly. Brief boiling firms the flesh so it separates cleanly from the bones. Overcooking dries the fish and makes it fall apart, leaving it tough and grainy in the pie.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, lemon, bread. 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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