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Salt Whitefish with Cream Sauce

Salted whitefish simmered in a cream and milk sauce with butter and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Salt Whitefish with Cream Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the salt whitefish overnight in cold water.

  2. Drain and place in a skillet.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Pour the cream and milk over the fish.

  2. Add the butter and pepper, then bring to a boil.

  3. Let it thicken and serve hot.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Whitefish + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Salt whitefish
Provides the main flesh, and soaking in cold water draws out excess salt before cooking.
Cream
Adds richness and body, thickening the sauce as it reduces.
Milk
Thins the cream slightly and adds a mild sweetness to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Bringing the sauce to a boil and letting it thicken. Cream and milk can scorch on the pan bottom or separate if boiled too hard or too long. Gentle heat lets the liquid reduce slowly, so the sauce thickens smoothly while the milk proteins stay intact.

“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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