Skip to main content
Main

Fish Stewed Brown

A fish stew cooked in a brown sauce of onion, oil, water, mushroom ketchup, spices, lemon juice, flour, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Stewed Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the fish until light brown.

  2. In a separate pan, brown the onion in oil.

Make the stew

  1. Add water, mushroom ketchup, cayenne pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon juice to the onion.

  2. Place the fish in a stew pan with the mixture and simmer gently until cooked.

Finish the gravy

  1. Remove the fish and thicken the gravy with browned flour.

  2. Stir in port wine and add truffles or mushrooms if desired.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Forms the body of the stew and flakes into the gravy as it cooks.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the fish rather than running thin.
Oil
Carries the browning of the onion and adds richness to the base.
Onion
Browns to build savoury depth and sweetness in the base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the gravy and balances the richness.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity depth to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Simmering the fish gently. Fish proteins toughen and break apart when boiled hard. A gentle simmer cooks the fish through while keeping its flakes intact in the gravy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, flour, port wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg, lemon, flour, port wine. 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 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesScalloped CodScalloped Cod69 recipes