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Sardine Sauce

A sauce made with sardines, stock, butter, flour, lemon rind, shallot, bay leaf, nutmeg, salt, and pepper, served with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Sardine Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sardines

  1. Remove the bones from the sardines and preserve them.

  2. Chop the sardines coarsely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir to cook gently for a few minutes.

  3. Add the stock to the butter and flour mixture and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the fish bones, lemon rind, shallot, bay leaf, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

  5. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  6. Strain the sauce over the chopped sardines.

Serve

  1. Serve as an accompaniment to fish.

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. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavor, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce once cooked briefly in the butter.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it its main savory flavor.
Sardines
Provide the fish flavor that the sauce is built around.
Fish bones (in the method)
Add depth and savory flavor to the stock during simmering.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Stirring the flour into melted butter and cooking it gently for a few minutes cooks off the raw starch taste and lets the flour thicken the stock evenly. Skipping this or rushing it can leave a pasty, floury flavor and lumps when the liquid is added.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, shallot, nutmeg, 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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