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Hake, Ling, and Conger Eel

A fish stew made by cooking hake, ling, and conger eel in milk with seasonings, then finished with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hake, Ling, and Conger Eel

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the fish like cod or stew in milk with seasonings.

  2. Make a white sauce with the cooking liquid.

  3. Pour the white sauce over the fish when serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the cooking liquid that becomes the base of the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth white sauce by gelatinising its starch.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the white sauce and helps carry flavour.
Hake
Provides the flaky white fish that is cooked gently in the milk.

The step that matters

Make the white sauce with the cooking liquid. Flour must be cooked in fat before liquid is added, and the liquid must be whisked or simmered so the starch swells evenly. Otherwise the sauce turns lumpy or tastes raw.

“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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