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Dressing Fish

A carp dish stewed with truffles, morels, pickled mushrooms, artichoke bottom, and oysters, served with fried roe and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 636 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Dressing Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine chopped truffles, morels, pickled mushrooms, and artichoke bottom in a pan.

  2. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

  3. Stew for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the sauce into a clean pan.

Cook the carp

  1. Add the cleaned carp to the sauce and stew gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Turn the carp and stew for an additional 15 minutes.

  3. Add the cleaned oysters and lemon juice to the sauce.

  4. Stew for 5 more minutes.

  5. Transfer the carp to a serving dish and pour the sauce over it.

Fry the roe and serve

  1. Garnish with fried sippets and the roe.

  2. Mix the roe with egg yolks, flour, lemon peel, pepper, salt, and anchovy liquor.

  3. Fry spoonfuls of the roe mixture in boiling beef dripping until light brown.

  4. Serve the fried roe around the dish with fried oysters and scraped horseradish.

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. Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together636 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Artichoke + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + artichoketop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together447 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

Truffles
Provides the dominant earthy, aromatic flavour of the sauce.
Morels
Adds deep, earthy mushroom flavour and aroma to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Bind the roe mixture and set when fried, giving a richer texture.
Flour
Thickens the roe mixture so the spoonfuls hold together in the hot fat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Frying the roe spoonfuls in boiling beef dripping. The fat must be hot enough to set the egg yolk and flour mixture quickly and brown it. If the fat is too cool, the spoonfuls soak up grease and fall apart; if too hot, the outside burns before the centre sets.

“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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