Skip to main content
Main

Lamprey, a LA Foley

A lamprey dish stewed in claret with vegetables, finished in a brown sauce with crayfish butter, anchovy essence, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lamprey, a LA Foley

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Form each lamprey into a circular shape and tie with string.

  2. Stew the lampreys in claret with vegetables until cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. Reduce two-thirds of the cooking liquid with an equal amount of brown sauce and essence of mushrooms.

  2. Incorporate crayfish butter, essence of anchovies, nutmeg, lemon juice, and cayenne into the sauce.

  3. Pass the sauce through a fine sieve into a bain‑marie with crayfish tails and button mushrooms.

Serve

  1. Drain the lampreys and place them in a dish, one resting on the other.

  2. Sauce the lampreys with the prepared ragout and garnish with glazed croutons and fried perch fillets.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Sauce + crayfishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together195 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Nutmeg + mushroomtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,988 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lampreys
Form the main body of the dish, giving it a firm, meaty texture when stewed.
Claret
Adds acidity and wine flavour to the cooking liquid that becomes the sauce.
Brown sauce
Builds body and savoury depth in the reduced sauce.
Crayfish butter
Adds fat and a rich, shellfish aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Reducing the cooking liquid into sauce. Reducing concentrates flavour and thickens the liquid by evaporating water. Cooking it too briefly leaves a thin, weak sauce, while boiling too hard can make it salty or cloudy. Adding the butter and acids after reduction helps keep the sauce balanced.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, crayfish, butter, nutmeg, mushroom):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Peachfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, crayfish, butter, nutmeg, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes