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Boiled Carp

A boiled carp served with a sauce of vinegar, port wine, anchovies, and herbs, garnished with fried roe, lemon, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Carp

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale and clean the carp, reserving the liver and roe.

  2. In a pot, combine vinegar (or cider), water, horseradish, onion, salt, and sweet herbs.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and add the carp.

  4. Boil the fish until cooked through.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain some of the cooking liquid into a separate pot.

  2. Add the minced liver, port wine, anchovies, shallots, salt, black pepper, cayenne, and soy sauce to the strained liquid.

  3. Boil and strain the sauce, then thicken it with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the hot carp and garnish with fried roe, lemon slices, and parsley.

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. Horseradish + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  4. Port wine + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Carp
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the seasoned liquid.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and color to the sauce.
Anchovies
Contribute savory depth to the sauce, mostly dissolving into it as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the strained sauce so it coats the fish.
Butter
Enriches the thickened sauce, adding richness and smoothness.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the poaching liquid and cuts the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil and strain the sauce, then thicken it with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked long enough to lose its raw taste and to thicken evenly; adding it to a rapidly boiling liquid without mixing well can cause lumps. Straining first removes solids so the sauce is smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, fish, horseradish, port wine, shallot, pepper, sauce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, fish, horseradish, port wine, shallot, pepper, sauce. 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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