Name: Tanche Aux Fines Herbes
Ingredients: 1 tench; ½ cup sweet oil; 2 tablespoons parsley, finely chopped; 2 green onions, finely chopped; 2 shallots, finely chopped; 1 teaspoon thyme; 2 bay leaves; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ¼ teaspoon black pepper

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Tanche Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the tench as per the previous instructions.
Soak the tench in sweet oil with parsley, green onions, shallots, thyme, bay leaves, salt, and pepper.

Cook and serve

Place the tench between two sheets of paper with the marinade.
Broil the tench in this manner.
Serve without the paper, pouring any sauce of your choice over the fish.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,476 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tench: The main fish, which is cooked whole and carries the flavour of the marinade.
Sweet oil: Carries the herbs and aromatics and keeps the fish moist while it cooks.
Parsley: Adds fresh, green aroma that the oil carries into the fish.
Shallots: Add a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma to the marinade.
Bay leaves: Release a subtle aromatic flavour into the oil during the soak.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, shallot, thyme, pepper):

Parsnipbetter flavor fit
Chivebetter flavor fit
Leekbetter flavor fit
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, shallot, thyme, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.