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Menu for a Party of Eight

Fish fillets served with a sauce of stock, butter, wine, capers, gherkins, and spinach pulp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce base

  1. Strain stock from bones and let it cool, removing fat from the surface.

  2. Melt butter in a saucepan. Stir in flour.

  3. Gradually add stock while stirring to form a paste.

  4. Add pounded fowl until supply is exhausted. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Remove from heat. Stir in cream (or milk with egg yolk) before serving in a tureen.

Bake the fish

  1. Dress fish fillets in a buttered dish.

  2. Top each fillet with a slice of tomato, parsley, and shallot. Bake until done.

  3. Arrange the fillets on a hot dish.

Make the wine butter sauce

  1. Boil spinach. Squeeze spinach through muslin. Save the spinach pulp for coloring.

  2. Make melted butter with fish stock and vegetables. Add Chablis or Sauterne.

  3. Add parsley, shallot, capers, and gherkins. Color the sauce with spinach pulp.

  4. Serve the sauce with 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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Shallot + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together198 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tomato + spinachtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,350 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a paste that gives the sauce body.
Pounded fowl
Adds protein and body to the sauce base as it heats.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the finished sauce.
Chablis or sauterne
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the cream or egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk can scramble and curdle if it is exposed to high heat, so the mixture should be removed from heat before the cream or yolk is stirred in.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, coffee, fish, parsley, shallot, spinach):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, coffee, fish, parsley, shallot, spinach. 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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