Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Carp

A baked carp dish simmered with vegetables, herbs, anchovies, and port wine, finished with a seasoned stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Stewed Carp

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the carp in a baking dish.

  3. Add the carrot, turnip, onion, celery, sweet herbs, bay leaf, mace, cloves, whole pepper, stock, anchovies, and port wine to the dish.

  4. Boil the mixture together, then pour it over the carp while hot.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the dish with buttered paper and bake until the carp is cooked through.

  2. Once done, strain the stock from the fish and thicken it.

  3. Strain the thickened stock through a fine sieve, add more port wine, and season with sugar, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and salt.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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, cooking through gently in the seasoned stock.
Anchovies
Dissolve into the stock, adding savory depth and salty umami without a fishy taste.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity depth, and helps flavor the reduced stock.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Releases sweetness and aromatic flavor into the cooking liquid as it softens.

The step that matters

Covering the dish with buttered paper while baking. The paper traps moisture and gentle heat so the carp cooks through without drying out or toughening. Fish proteins set at fairly low temperatures, so overcooking makes the flesh firm and dry.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, onion, celery, parsley, thyme, clove):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, celery, parsley, thyme, clove. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipes