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Red Mullet a LA Beguinot

A baked red mullet dish with a sauce made from fish bones, sherry, vegetables, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Red Mullet a LA Beguinot

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the gills and livers from the red mullet and set the livers aside.

  2. Cut the fish in half and remove all bones.

  3. Place the fish halves in a baking tin.

  4. Top the fish with the sliced onion, carrot, and chopped parsley.

  5. Drizzle the fish with salad oil and lemon juice.

  6. Sprinkle the fish with coarse sea salt.

  7. Marinate the fish in the vegetables for 4 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer the bones and head with sherry, chopped onion, carrot, and parsley until flavorful.

  2. Strain the mixture and reduce it to one-third.

  3. Add Sauce Espagnole, Tomato Sauce, chopped mushrooms, and parsley to the reduced mixture.

  4. Boil until the sauce thickens to a half-glaze.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake the fish with the marinate until cooked through.

  2. Strain the cooking liquid into the sauce.

  3. Place the fish in a serving dish and pour the sauce over it.

  4. Incorporate the livers beaten with butter into the sauce just before serving.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Sherry + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Red mullet
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to flaky, tender flesh when baked.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and gives it a smooth, rounded texture when beaten in at the end.
Sauce espagnole
Provides a rich, savoury brown base that adds body and depth to the sauce.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and savoury depth, balancing the richness of the brown sauce.
Sherry
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the fish stock used for the sauce.
Mushrooms
Contribute earthy flavour and body to the reduced sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce to a half-glaze. Reducing concentrates flavour and thickens the sauce through evaporation. Boiling too little leaves it thin and watery, while over-reducing makes it too salty and heavy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, parsley, sherry, sauce, tomato, mushroom):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, parsley, sherry, sauce, tomato, mushroom. 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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