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Stewing Fish

A stewed fish dish with a gravy of wine, lemon pickle, and spices, garnished with pickled mushrooms, horseradish, and roe.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 ↓

Stewing Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Clean and gut the fish, then wash thoroughly and dry with a cloth.

  2. Sprinkle flour over the fish and fry in dripping or sweet-rendered suet until light brown.

Stew

  1. Place the fish in a stew pan with water, red wine, lemon pickle, browning sauce, mushroom powder, cayenne pepper, the onion with cloves, and horseradish.

  2. Cover the pan and stew gently over low heat until the gravy reduces to just cover the fish.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the fish and place it on a serving dish.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour, boil briefly, and pour over the fish.

  3. Garnish with pickled mushrooms, scraped horseradish, and roe, some fried and cut into small pieces, the rest boiled.

  4. Just before serving, squeeze lemon juice into the sauce.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Red wine + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Red wine + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together720 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Carp or tench
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently until tender in the gravy.
Flour
Light browning coat on the fish, and thickens the gravy when rolled with butter.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the stewing liquid.
Butter
Enriches the gravy and adds richness and a smooth finish when rolled in flour.
Horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent aroma that mellows during stewing.

The step that matters

Stewing gently until the gravy reduces. Low, covered heat keeps the fish moist and tender while the liquid concentrates. Boiling hard would break up the flesh and make the gravy cloudy or tough.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, red wine, lemon, sauce, mushroom, pepper, clove):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, red wine, lemon, sauce, mushroom, pepper, clove. 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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