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Fish Cake

A fried fish patty made from minced fish meat, bread crumbs, herbs, and spices, served in fish gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fish Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Remove the meat from the fish bones and place the bones, head, and fins in a pot with 1 pint of water, onion, herbs, pepper, and salt. Simmer to make gravy.

Make and cook the cake

  1. Mince the fish meat and mix it with some bread crumbs, minced onion, parsley, pepper, salt, and a pinch of mace.

  2. Combine the mixture with egg white and melted butter to form a cake. Coat it with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the cake in a pan until pale brown, keeping a plate on top while cooking.

  4. Transfer the cake to a stewpan with the fish gravy and simmer gently for 30 minutes, turning carefully to avoid breaking it. Cover while stewing.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Meat + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish meat
Forms the main body of the cake and gives it its savoury flavour.
Egg white
Binds the mixture so the cake holds its shape during frying and stewing.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the cake brown in the pan.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help bind the cake, and form a crisp coating.

The step that matters

Transfer the cake to the stewpan gently. The cake is fragile after frying and the egg white binder is only partly set, so rough turning can break it apart. Simmering gently rather than boiling keeps it intact while it absorbs flavour from the gravy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, fish, onion, pepper, bread, parsley, egg):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, fish, onion, pepper, bread, parsley, egg. 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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