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To Boil Sturgeon

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 Boil Sturgeon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Clean the sturgeon and prepare the boiling liquid with water, vinegar, horseradish, lemon peel, whole pepper, bay leaf, and salt.

  2. Boil the sturgeon in this liquid until cooked through.

  3. In a separate pan, melt the butter and dissolve the anchovy in it.

  4. Add mace, the bruised crab body, shrimps, catchup, and lemon juice to the butter; bring to a boil.

  5. Drain the sturgeon well and place it in a dish.

  6. Garnish with fried oysters, sliced lemon, and scraped horseradish; serve the sauce in boats or basins.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Anchovy + crabtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, horseradish, lemon, pepper, butter, anchovy, crab):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, horseradish, lemon, pepper, butter, anchovy, crab. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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