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Menu for a Party of Eight

A menu for a party of eight featuring fish fillets with green sauce and pounded fowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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

serves 8

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

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

  2. Melt butter in a saucepan, stir in flour, and gradually add stock while mixing until smooth.

  3. Add pounded fowl until stock is exhausted, bring to a boil, then remove from heat.

  4. Stir in cream (or milk with egg yolk) before serving.

Prepare and bake the fish

  1. Dress fish fillets in a buttered dish, top with tomato slice, parsley, and shallot.

  2. Bake until done, then arrange on a hot dish.

Make the green sauce

  1. For the green sauce, boil spinach, squeeze through muslin, and save the pulp.

  2. Make melted butter with fish stock and vegetables, add wine, parsley, shallot, capers, gherkins, and spinach pulp for color.

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 and adds a rich, smooth flavor.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.
Spinach
Gives the green sauce its color and body once pressed into pulp.
Fish fillets
The main protein, which cooks gently in the buttered dish until done.

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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