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Sauce

White Sauce for Fish

A light white sauce made with butter, flour, fish stock or milk, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

White Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Add the fish stock or milk and stir until it boils.

  4. Boil for 2 minutes.

  5. Add the lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  6. If desired, stir in the cream.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and a rounded, buttery flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Its starch thickens the liquid into a smooth, coating sauce as it heats.
Fish stock or milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and sets its flavor and final consistency.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce after adding the liquid. Flour starch only thickens fully once the mixture reaches a boil and is held there briefly. Stopping early leaves the sauce thin and possibly starchy-tasting.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, fish, pepper, cream):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, fish, pepper, cream. 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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