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Mock White Fish

A dish of sliced salsify cooked in a lemon butter sauce and served with bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Mock White Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salsify

  1. Scrape the salsify.

  2. Cut into 1-inch lengths.

  3. Cover with lemon juice or white vinegar and water.

  4. Let sit for 1 hour.

  5. Drain well.

  6. Cover with boiling salted water.

  7. Cook gently until tender.

  8. Strain the cooked salsify.

  9. Reserve the cooking liquid.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine equal parts of reserved liquid and milk.

  2. Heat the butter in a saucepan.

  3. Add the flour.

  4. Stir for a few minutes without browning.

  5. Add the mixed liquid and milk.

  6. Stir until boiling.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Salsify
Provides the main vegetable body and a mild, delicate flavor.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that gives the sauce its body and smoothness.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor into the roux base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a roux.

The step that matters

Stir the roux without browning. Flour cooked with butter must be stirred gently for a few minutes so it thickens without browning. Browning changes the flavor and color of the pale sauce, and undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, bread, pepper. 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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