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Fish Collops

A stew of halibut collops simmered in a broth of fish bones, onions, celery, herbs, seasoned with salt, pepper, mace, fish sauce, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Fish Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Cut the halibut into collops.

  2. Fry the collops in oil until golden.

Make the broth

  1. Boil the fish bones, onions, celery, and sweet herbs in a pot for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the broth.

  3. Thicken the broth.

Stew and season

  1. Add the fried fish to the broth.

  2. Stew for 30 minutes.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, pounded mace, fish sauce, and lemon juice.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Halibut
Forms the main body of the stew, becoming tender as it simmers in the broth.
Fish bones
Release gelatin and flavour into the broth, giving it body and a savoury base.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as they simmer.
Fish sauce
Adds savoury depth, rounding out the seasoning of the stew.

The step that matters

Fry the collops until golden. Browning the fish surface creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Frying also firms the outside so the collops hold their shape during the stew.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, onion, celery, pepper, fish sauce, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, onion, celery, pepper, fish sauce, lemon. 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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