Skip to main content
Sauce

Liver Sauce for Fish

A sauce made from boiled fish liver, flour, broth, butter, parsley, cayenne pepper, anchovy essence, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Liver Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the liver of the fish.

  2. Pound it in a mortar with a little flour.

  3. Stir it into some broth, the liquor the fish was boiled in, or melted butter.

  4. Add parsley, cayenne pepper, and essence of anchovy (or soy sauce or ketchup).

  5. Bring to a boil and rub through a sieve.

  6. Optionally, add lemon juice or diced lemon.

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. Parsley + peppertop 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. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Liver of the fish
Provides the main body and rich flavour that thickens the sauce when pounded and sieved.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and gives it body when pounded with the liver.
Broth or fish liquor
Supplies liquid to loosen the mixture into a pourable sauce.
Melted butter
Adds fat for smoothness and a rich, silky mouthfeel.
Essence of anchovy
Adds savoury, salty depth that rounds out the fish flavour.

The step that matters

Rub through a sieve after boiling. Pounding the liver with flour and then rubbing the sauce through a sieve removes lumps and fibres, so the sauce turns smooth rather than grainy. Bringing it to a boil thickens the flour starch so the sauce holds 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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes