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Sauce

Fennel Sauce for Mackerel

A butter-based sauce flavored with fennel, simmered briefly and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and fennel work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 647 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Fennel Sauce for Mackerel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the melted butter according to your preferred method.

  2. Chop the fennel finely, ensuring it is clean and free of grit.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the chopped fennel to the butter just before it starts to boil.

  2. Simmer for 1-2 minutes and serve in a tureen.

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. Butter + fenneltop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides richness and a smooth, flowing body to the sauce.
Fennel
Adds a light anise-like aroma and flavour to the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the fennel just before the butter boils. Butter that boils turns foamy and its milk solids can brown and turn bitter. Adding the fennel before boiling keeps the sauce smooth and fresh-tasting, and a short simmer of 1-2 minutes is enough to release the fennel's flavour.

“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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