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Red Mullet

A baked red mullet served with a butter, flour, anchovy essence, and port wine sauce, garnished with crayfish and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 637 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Red Mullet

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the fish

  1. Fold the cleaned red mullet in buttered paper and place it in a baking dish.

  2. Bake gently until cooked through.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the fish liquor, butter, flour, essence of anchovy, and port wine.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil, then remove from heat.

Serve

  1. Serve the fish in the paper cases or on a dish with the sauce poured over it.

  2. Garnish with crayfish and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.

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. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Anchovy + crayfishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + crayfishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Butter + fishtop 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

Red mullet
The fish is the main component, cooked gently in buttered paper.
Fish liquor
Adds savoury fish flavour and liquid to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour in the sauce and the fold.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the fish.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the sauce.
Port wine
Adds sweetness, body and colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the sauce to a boil, then remove from heat. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated enough to swell in the liquid. Boiling briefly sets the sauce, but overheating or continued boiling can make it thin or grainy, so it should be taken off the heat promptly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, fish, flour, anchovy, port wine, crayfish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, fish, flour, anchovy, port wine, crayfish. 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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