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To Make a Strong Fish Gravy

A fish gravy made by simmering fish with herbs, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

To Make a Strong Fish Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Skin the fish, scale the fish, gut the fish, and wash the fish.

  2. Cut the fish into small pieces.

Make the gravy

  1. Place the fish in a saucepan and cover the saucepan with water.

  2. Add the toasted bread, mace, whole pepper, sweet herbs, and lemon peel.

  3. Boil until rich and flavorful.

Make the roux and finish

  1. Melt the butter in a separate saucepan.

  2. Add a little flour to the melted butter and stir until brown.

  3. Strain the fish gravy into the butter mixture.

  4. Boil for a few minutes.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

Eels or fish
Provide the main body and flavor of the gravy.
Toasted bread
Thickens the liquid slightly and adds body to the gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and forms the base for browning the flour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and, once browned, adds a nutty color and flavor.

The step that matters

Stir the flour until brown. Flour cooked in melted butter must be stirred constantly so it browns evenly without scorching. Scorched flour turns bitter and dark, and it thickens the gravy poorly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, bread, pepper, lemon, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, bread, pepper, lemon, butter, flour. 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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