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John Dory — Continued

A buttery sauce with capers served over boiled John Dory fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

John Dory — Continued

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caper sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour until well mixed and browned.

  2. Gradually add the stock, seasoning with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce, and bring to a boil.

  3. Stir in the capers.

Cook the fish

  1. Clean the John Dory.

  2. Boil it in hot water with a lump of salt until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat the cream until just about to boil.

  2. Mix in the butter until melted.

  3. Squeeze in the lemon juice, discarding the seeds.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Carefully drain the fish.

  6. Place it on a hot dish.

  7. Pour over the caper sauce.

  8. Serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Thick cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the rich cream and butter.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny flavour that contrasts with the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the cream until just about to boil. Boiling cream can cause it to separate or reduce unevenly, so it should be heated gently and stopped just before boiling to keep the sauce smooth.

“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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