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Carp Stewed White

A carp stew simmered with white wine, herbs, onions, horseradish, anchovies, and a creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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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 ↓

Carp Stewed White

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the carp

  1. Place the carp in a stewpan with water, white wine, pepper, salt, mace, sweet herbs, onions, and horseradish.

  2. Cover the pan and simmer for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate saucepan, combine white wine, onion, anchovies, butter, lemon peel, cream, and the cooking liquid from the carp. Boil for a few minutes.

  2. Add egg yolks mixed with cream. When it boils, squeeze in lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce hot over the fish. Serve.

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. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Horseradish + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Horseradish + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 stew, providing the fish that the sauce is poured over.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they gently set with heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, and flour coating helps it thicken smoothly.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its flavour.
Anchovies
Add savoury depth to the sauce, blending into the background rather than tasting strongly fishy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but if the sauce boils after they go in, they can curdle and turn grainy. Add them off the heat or at low heat, stirring constantly, and keep the sauce below a boil.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, pepper, onion, horseradish, butter, flour, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, pepper, onion, horseradish, butter, flour, lemon. 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.

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