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Menu for a Party of Eight

Pomfret fillets served with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 21 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fillets

  1. Divide the pomfret into 8 fillets.

  2. Brush one side of the fillets with beaten egg.

  3. Dust fillets with parsley, cooked onion, lime peel, and white pepper.

  4. Roll the fillets and secure with skewers.

Poach the fillets

  1. Put bones and trimmings in water with herbs, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, and salt; boil.

  2. Strain the broth from the bones.

  3. Add wine to the broth.

  4. Simmer the fillets for 12-14 minutes.

  5. Remove fillets and take out skewers.

  6. Place the fillets on a hot dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan, stir in flour, salt, and sugar.

  2. Moisten with fish broth to make a white sauce.

  3. Off the heat, add egg yolk, tarragon vinegar, parsley, marjoram, and garden cress to the sauce.

  4. Pour sauce over fillets and serve.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together547 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Celery + limetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Pomfret
Forms the delicate fish fillets that are rolled and gently poached.
Flour
Thickens the butter and broth into a white sauce by gelatinising with heat.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and thickens it gently when added off the heat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, carrying flavour and smoothness.
Beaten egg
Coats one side of the fillets so the dusting adheres.

The step that matters

Add the egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat and can scramble or curdle if the sauce is boiling, so it should be stirred in after removing the pan from the heat.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, celery, parsley, egg, lime, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, celery, parsley, egg, lime, butter. 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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