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Fish Stock

A clear stock made by simmering inexpensive white fish, onion, mace, bouquet garni, peppercorns, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fish Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine all ingredients in a clean stewpan.

  2. Simmer gently for 1 hour from when the stock begins to cook.

  3. Skim and strain the stock into a basin.

Use the stock

  1. Use immediately for thick soups and sauces, or clarify with egg whites and shells for clear stock.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Mace + thymetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,113 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

White fish
Bones and trimmings release gelatin and flavour, giving the stock body and a clean taste.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock's background flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. Keeping the stock at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps it clear and prevents fat and impurities from emulsifying into the liquid, which would make it cloudy and greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, parsley, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Fennelfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, parsley, thyme. 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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